
Ask HN: How do you prevent users from certain countries from using your web app? - sloka
I am trying to open a US company from India using Stripe Atlas. They keep stonewalling me with this question ...<p><i>How will you screen for and prevent people in comprehensively sanctioned jurisdictions, namely Cuba, North Korea, Syria, the Crimea region of Ukraine, or Iran from using your app?</i><p>My typical answer is ...<p><i>Our app is only available to people who have a Gmail or Facebook or Github or Twitter account. We believe Gmail&#x2F;Facebook&#x2F;Github&#x2F;Twitter accounts are not available in the above countries. So we cannot have customers from these countries.</i><p>Their reply goes ...<p><i>Thank you. We will update you in a few business days, or possibly up to a week due to a surge in interest.</i><p>And then it&#x27;s back to the same question ... how will you prevent people from certain countries from using your app? This has been going on for two months now.<p>How do you prevent users from certain countries from using your web app?
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LinuxBender
Most Linux distributions have a "GeoIP" package you can leverage. Another
option is to pull down the country data from firehol's ip-sets [1] and use
that in your application. I would suggest asking the people if either of those
options is appropriate and get that in writing.

[1] - [https://github.com/firehol/blocklist-
ipsets](https://github.com/firehol/blocklist-ipsets)

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derrick_jensen
Blocking Tor and IP ranges might be sufficient. CloudFlare might offer this as
a service, but I'm not sure. I'd imagine using a third party would legally put
you in the clear, but again IANAL

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gradschool
I can vouch for Cloudflare blocking Tor.

