Over the past few months, I’ve received a few emails from honest-to-goodness people blocked because they are connecting form China. I’ve always gotten emails from people whos IPs were — through no fault of their own– listed in “StopForumSpams” spammers list. I’ve generally given people advice, and when necessary tweaked the bot-blocking software to create single case exceptions. However, there are enough single-IP exception that I decided I need a broader “workaround”. I have currently devised the following workaround which works to get around a few specific ‘rules’ in the blocking software. The work around is this:
Spoof your user agent to read “Lucia Special user agent for The Blackboard”. It must read exactly that but you need only spoof when visiting The Blackboard. Use of this user agent will:
- Permit those Cloudflare identifies as being from China but who Cloudflare does not yet block to pass through ZBBlock.
- Permit IPs that make it through Cloudflare but who are are listed at Stop Forum Spam to comment without getting banned.
The description of what it does may sound convoluted. The path is you->Cloudflare->ZBblock->the joy of reading The Blackboard.
The special user agent will only help at ZBblock which has a rule to bounce you if you come from “CN”. These people are presented a message telling people to contact me if they wish to be whitelisted. I have about a dozen Chinese IP ranges whitelisted). The difficulty for people in China is that many Chinese IPs have been permanently banned owing to the numerous hack, spam or scrape attempts form Chinese ranges. So, if you happen to know someone who mentions they were banned, then possibly they can learn about the issue and contact me. A similar difficulty happens with IP’s listed on Stop Forum Spam. For example: a fairly frequent visitor signed on to a new ISP service, obtained a static IP and found himself blocked. The difficulty is that quite likely a spammer previously used that IP. While this can probably be sorted out, in the meantime, he would like to comment. So, spoofing the user agent trick will work.
How can you spoof
If you use Firefox it is very easy to spoof agents. Visit useragent switcher, install and start switching. For reasons of privacy and functionality of other web sites, you will probably want to adjust the setting to switch only when you are at “http://rankexploits.com” and turn off user agent switching otherwise. Turning the spoofing switch on and off is a bit of a pain in the neck, but it’s somewhat more convenient than getting banned, writing me, having me code a workaround for your IP and then visiting again. So if your IP is listed on StopForumSpam or you are in China, this should be a convenience.
You can test the effectiveness of your switching by testing the switch for “http://whatsmyuseragent.com/” and afterwards seeing if that worked.
Owing to the possibility that bots operated by actual humans might wish to spam my comments, the special useragent may change from time to time. For now this should work like a (somewhat cumbersome) charm.
I know there is much information in what you have written, alas, I haven’t a clue what it all means. I stopped understanding computers about the mid-90’s.
Doc–
If you haven’t been blocked, you don’t need to understand.
If you recall 6 months ago I had a problem. You had me download a header thingy, and now I have a liitle Red/Orange/Green screen on my browser that needs to be on green for me to post here.
Moving from Algeria to Scotland has stopped myself being blocked.
But, I can always complain of the snow and the cold, now.
Life is a trade off.
Algeria isn’t blocked for being Algeria. But many of Algerian IP addresses are dirty. The same holds for Brazil. China… well… it’s china.
This attempt via a (hidemyass) china proxy:
Your connection details:
Record #: 37702
Reason you were blocked: You are forwarding through (or from) [CN] numForwards= 4 . : end 1 :
.
And, a second attempt:
Your connection details:
Record #: 37705
Reason you were blocked: Suspicious user agent. [d 0, c 1] :
Duke C.
Thanks. I hadn’t thought about people not in China using electing to forward *through* china. (I often try to locate Hide My Ass IPs and block them because they are proxies. But… yeah. I need the China work around in there too.)
I also forgot all about tripping people up if their cookie showed their old user agent. (I have had bots come though loading the same page over and over doing nothign but change IPs! But forgot how that would interact.
I *think* I coded around that now…. Thanks.
DukeC– Passing through 4 proxies? Amazing though. One of the more hilarious things about that is some people think they are getting better privacy by passing through 4 nodes each of which can leak info. Sure *I* might not know who the are, but the 4 proxies might sniff!
OK-
The special user agent string works w/ this connection (Sprint wireless).
.
Tried the quadruple china proxy stack with the special ua (and some chocolate sprinkles) through my home ISP, no go. I think it’s due to the China proxies being undependable (connection resets, server not found etc.), not your code.
If you see the Cloudflare block… that IP is already blocked. Many Chinese proxies are. Of course, there seem to be an infinite number. If you get the “scary page”, that’s ZBblock. If you get neither…well.. could be the undependable Chinese proxies.
ZBblock hasn’t blocked anything with the “special” proxy since 37705 @: Sun, 24 Mar 2013 08:58:40 -0700 Running: 0.4.10a1
test.
And why do you block a much-published climate author such as myself? Try debating my latest article after reading my February 2013 paper. If you have counter arguments, submit them officially to PSI, rather than just blocking reference to my work which is ground-breaking and correct science.
Doug–
You aren’t blocked. You arrived at this page which loaded: That is your IP was not blocked. You then entered a comment– which was submitted to my syste. That is: Your IP was not blocked. You are using a brandnew email address which makes your comment appear like a “first comment” to wordpress. All first comments are moderated.
As for why I might moderate you (which is different from blocking) it is because you often post off-topic comments intended for mere self promotion. I’m not going to read your latest “article”, nor debate it nor anything else. I’m going to ignore it. Few people have time or interest in most of the nonesense posted at PSI. If you want to write it and post it– fine. But I’m not required to read it.
Lucia, I have been searching for the definitive Hansen 1988 A, B and C scenario’s B in text form.
Is there an agreeded digitization?
If not could I have yours?
Response by Marcott et al. is up at RealClimate.
Revkin also has a post.
Their FAQ does not seem to provide any real answers to the hard questions.
No acknowledgment of how misleading their graph and re-dating are for recent temperatures, just repeating the ‘not robust’ statement.