Hey, you, Asian singing sensation: call off your bleeding attack dogs!
Does anyone know how to block server traffic from a specific geographic location? Like Taiwan?
Someone—or some group—from the little island that drives China wild is so fanatically dedicated to Matthew Lien that they return time after time to our 2008 Strategic Resolutions Poll in order to diabolically skew the results away from what would otherwise be the clear popular choice: “Make fun of Matthew Lien.”
The fact that these hacker-types attempt to achieve their goal by always voting for Smells Like Yukon to “just give up” in the coming year only underscores that they’re too lazy to raise their game. If it was us, we’d redouble—or maybe retriple or even requadruple—our efforts to jack up the vote count for EVERYTHING except for “Make fun of Matthew Lien.” This might make it easier for other voters to help ourcause.
But, really, what are you Asian fanatics so worried about? We haven’t decided if we even want to make fun of Matthew Lien yet, or how we’d go about it if we did. So our advice to you is to relax—or we may be forced to add “Join Matthew Lien’s squad of Taiwanese online attack dogs” to the list of options in our “Every Dog Has Its Day Poll.”
Which reminds us: We’d like to tell prospective contestants that the winner of Caption Contest #13 will receive, in the mail via Canada Post, a unique signed first edition print of the sentence that was too crude for publication in the aforementioned poll.
Now there’s an incentive that’s hard to ignore.
February 15th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
Who’s it going to be signed by?
February 15th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
Sorry, we thought that was obvious: Scooby-Doo, of course….
February 16th, 2008 at 6:28 pm
There’s not a direct relationship between IP address and geographic location, but if you’re hell-bent on blocking Taiwan, http://www.hakusan.tsg.ne.jp/tjkawa/lib/krfilter/index-e.jsp page lists some iptables rules for various Asian countries. The list for Taiwan is a depressing 225 lines long though.
It might be easier to block the .tw top-level domain, but that’d be hard to do through a firewall or Apache config and, in any case, most visits will come from .com/.net/.org names anyway.
Then again, there are an awful lot of Chinese people over yonder. Better they blow off steam on a faraway poll than devise new missiles to lob across the Straight.
February 17th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
Thanks for the tips, Dave. Fortunately, we think we’ve come to an amicable settlement with Matthew. Smells Like Yukon has agreed that it will no longer make reference to Matthew on this site and, in turn, Matthew says he will call off his Taiwanese supporters. We are, however, still permitted to use the term “Bleeding Wolves” as much as we want.