Interesting thing happened today –
I use a vultr fusionhub to bond my ISP connections for performance and redundancy so that if one goes down my IP doesn’t change for many services which I have which are locked to static IP.
Today, I got a notice from facebook that my account has been suspended and is not usable and may be deleted permanently because I accessed facebook through the vultr IP address. I’ve had this vultr IP for approximately 10 months and done no activity that would be suspicious in any way. I’ve posted a few of my own photos on facebook and clicked like on some posts, and that is it. I’ve also messaged friends through facebook messenger who I’ve had for years. My facebook account is 15+ years old and I have a couple hundred friends, so it’s a bit eye opening that facebook may delete everything permanently simply because I accessed facebook over a vultr vpn IP. (I’ve accessed facebook over a vpn IP since I started bonding dsl lines over 5 years ago without issue.)
I did notice that the usps (postal service) is blocking tracking info for the vultr IP address, and also that I couldn’t buy USPS postage over the vultr IP, so someone must have run some kind of bot in the same vultr subnet - or I’m not sure how large a range would be given a bad reputation. It’s not blocking my IP itself I’m sure since I’ve run nothing at all automated and not done anything that could be construed at all suspcisious on it over the last 10 months, so it must be guilt by network reputation Interesting times we are living it. I’m not sure it is getting better or easier some days.
Really strongly disliking all these scraper bots running now that make it difficult for us actual people to use basic networking that worked great for years now to simply stay connected!
It’s too bad we don’t have some system for the average to slightly techy-person to whitelist an IP (or get IPs in clean ranges) that can be used in cloud instances to bond that you’re not a bot… honestly I think the big cloud providers are being too loose now and should probably require a deposit of $250 to issue IPs over a few that is not refundable if people complain about bots that cause disruption or don’t follow standards to keep the ip space clean for the rest of us.