Ask HN: Would there be a way to limit a website to geographically local traffic? - Mz
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simon_acca
This is seldom a good idea in my opinion, because the underlying problem is
rarely a technology one; moreover you can never be absolutely sure that you
are indeed blocking all traffic, stopping users that use VPNs for example is
tough.

In case you have a legitimate application however, the fundamental way to do
this would be to consult a database that maps ip ranges to ASs or country
codes directly like this one: [https://iptoasn.com/](https://iptoasn.com/)

Once you have the affected ip ranges you can block them either at level 3 in a
router or at the application level.

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brudgers
Building a network outward from a local web server rather than trying to hold
back the ocean is a _logically possible_ option. It's practical possibility
depends on the degree of locality, the use case, and budget.

In the case of a well established local community, creating accounts based on
real world identity verification may be a viable alternative to handling the
problem of the internet at the network level.

Essentially, if holding back the internet matters the adversaries are well
funded, automated, technically sophisticated, and legion. The best defense is
probably social or network partitioning if the budget is not huge.

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jusssi
Putting some spin on those propeller hats:
[http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html](http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html)

TL;DR Measure the latency to the client, reject if too high. Of course, this
also prevents connections from people who have high latency internet
connectivity, such as most radio toys.

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throwaway4816
Use a CDN then block every other country. CF has a country code variable in
the session data. Other CDNs have something similar.

~~~
mtmail
CF = cloudflare.com

------
Mz
I was under the weather yesterday, so barely spent any time online. I am
surprised to see replies here.

The use case:

TLDR:

I am stopping the San Diego Homeless Survival Guide. I am definitely going to
be doing something else intended to be generally useful for homeless
Americans. I am debating also separately curating a list of local homeless
resources, but I have reservations about putting it out there for the whole
world to see as I fear that may serve as an attractive nuisance. Due to the
intended target audience, it seems to me that sign ups and a network likely
won't work. So I wonder if there are ways to mostly limit it to locals from my
end, even if the walls are leaky and imperfect.

Longer:

While homeless, I started a blog to keep track of information for me that I
needed because the state of the art was paper handouts, often filled with
inaccurate information.

I went with a blog because: Papers make me sick. If you get rained on, they
stop being readable. And when you are homeless, you have to carry everything
you own all the time everywhere, so every piece of paper was one more thing to
carry.

Most websites for homeless services are donor facing. In other words, the main
thrust of the website is to tell you "We do good work. Please give us money,
donate goods and/or volunteer." So even if the agency has a website, it is
incredibly challenging for an actual homeless person to go online and find out
what services are available locally. Thus, my site attracted organic traffic
even at a time when I had abandoned it and there were zero updates and zero
attempts to promote the site because it was client facing: it listed
information useful to actual homeless people looking for resources.

I am not going to be updating the site further. I am leaving it up for now,
but I don't want to promote it further.

The longer the site went on, the more I tried to write generally useful
information rather than location specific information. However, the name of
the location is in the name of the site. This causes two problems: 1) People
outside of the area see it as not relevant to their needs and 2) alternately,
homeless people take the existence of the site as a suggestion to move there.

I am again in an area with a fairly large homeless population. Locals here
have voiced the opinion that the homeless are attracted to the area because
there are services here. That may be a factor, but I think a more likely root
cause is that it has relatively temperate weather for the state of Washington.
January average lows are around 34 degrees. In Spokane and other parts of the
state, average January lows are in the low to mid twenties.

Most homeless services, like soup kitchens, are useful for helping people
survive a crisis. But they tend to do a poor job of helping people solve their
problems in order to establish a stable middle class life. To be fair, the
kinds of problems that lead to homelessness are not easily resolved. But this
situation means that accessing homeless services comes with a danger that you
just get good at being a freeloader. This can actively undermine the pursuit
of self sufficiency.

When I was going to homeless services, it exposed me to germs and cigarette
smoke and other health hazards, which undermined my efforts to get well enough
to work and support myself. Most "practical" conversation amongst the homeless
was about things like where to get another free meal or other charity, not
about things like how to make money while homeless.

It can take two hours of standing in line to get a free meal. If you do that
three times a day, you have spent six hours just on staying fed. That is six
hours you can't job hunt or otherwise try to solve your problems.

The more talented you get at accessing homeless services, the more stuck you
can become, in part because of how they are structured. They figure your time
as a poor person isn't worth anything, so you should be okay with taking two
hours to get a meal. Worse, many of them assume you are an alcoholic or
addict, so they may subconsciously figure that the more of your time they
waste, the less time you will spend getting high.

While homeless, I figured out what kinds of things were genuinely helpful to
me, things that helped me survive in the here and now while also helping me
move towards my goals of self sufficiency rather than helping to keep me
stuck. I want to keep writing about those things.

But I have very mixed feelings about once again curating a list of local
services. On the one hand, I think there is need for this information. On the
other hand, I worry that broadcasting it worldwide may do more harm than good.

Since all locations in the US seem to do an equally poor job of putting out
client facing websites for serving the poor, it seems to me that simply
creating a site with good client facing information potentially creates an
attractive nuisance. If you are homeless and trying to find what you need
locally is a constant uphill battle, but you can go online and find a curated
list of resources in some other city, even if it is quite far away, it may be
vastly easier to just hop a bus or hitchhike to that city than to keep
knocking on doors and getting paper handouts locally and trying to
painstakingly piece together information and solutions.

So, I am wondering if making it hard to find a list of resources if you are
outside the region would be a means to get information into the hands of
locals without potentially attracting freeloaders from far flung corners of
the US.

