For a particular (suicide related) site I know that it was 'made known' to resi-ISPs here and as far as I know everyone with existing capability to do so blocked it (though for some smaller ISPs just at the DNS level, so essentially superficially). Though that was just on the honour/good will system, I don't think any had to be forced.
I think that essentially this is probably the best way to do it, IF we must go down this route (and I think in some cases we probably have to).
At first blush, you might think a suicide discussion forum would cause people to commit suicide, and thus banning them would prevent suicide, and thus be a reasonable thing for a state to do.
However, some random clicks on sasu found people who had been forum members for over a decade. Possibly not entirely mentally healthy - to be fair - but evidently still very much alive.
If the primary effect of participation was to increase the rate of suicide among its users, the forum would act as a sieve. While it might attract new members, the retention of long-term members (as observed) would be statistically improbable. The fact that a stable, long-term user base exists is evidence that for many, the forum serves a different function—likely as an outlet to manage and process ideation, not just to escalate it.
The state banning this outlet could, perversely, remove a coping mechanism and inadvertently have the opposite of the intended effect.
Maybe this is very european of me but 250KM is outrageously far. Dublin to Belfast is like 130KM. If it says they're in Seville (in Spain) within <200KM they could also be in Portugal, Morocco, or Gibraltar. If it says you're in Brussels within <200KM you could also be in France, England, Germany, Netherlands, Lux. If you're in Vienna (Austria), you could also be in Germany, CZ, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia or Croatia. Maybe you're in Vilnius? You could also be in Latvia, Poland, Russia or Belarus.
It's short by Australian standards. I was born 1000km away. It's a 12 hour drive. I've done it numerous times. It was a regular thing when I was young.
Uni students have been know to drive for a drink at the pub at the next Uni north (at the time) over the weekend for a lark. That's 2000km, one way.
A serious undertaking by Australian standards is a drive to Perth. That's 5000km in a straight line, but of course you can't drive in a straight line to Perth.
I met a guy once who was the last leg of circumnavigating Australia on his push bike. It had taken him years, and it looked like it. I've never seen someone so wirey, so obviously fit. Yet he rode at a slow measured pace. That was no doubt a habit forced by the trailer his bike towed. I guess the trip was around 15,000km.
ASN is even worse, honestly. If I'm behind starlinks AS then I'm American? AWS, I'm also American? Level 3? American. Colt leased line in my office in Madrid, apparently I'm English.
I honestly still cannot believe that a simple blogger needs to potentially comply with the regulations of some ~200 countries. What happens when the law of two countries conflicts? What if the UK say I need to verify everyone's age, but another country rules I cannot collect peoples IDs? Well I could geo fence the best I can and serve two different paths right? Nope, it seems not.
It's all total madness, and it's not just the UK there are even more crazy regulations coming from the EU. China, and others in Asia are well known for regulating too. A mess.
There's more than an element of truth to this, we do not always dream big enough or take enough risk. We are efficient and frugal sometimes to a fault.
However it's not the whole story, there are actually people who want to swing for the fences, but who cannot and ultimately end up either scaling back, failing, or moving to the US. There isn't good access to early-stage funding here, and there is no real ecosystem either.
We have absolutely obscene amounts of untapped potential, it's infuriating.
In all honesty most countries in europe have at least one airport in a city centre. I mean look at lisbon, RKV, BHD/LCY (even glasgow,LHR to some extent), BMA, NCE.
Well, is "a ton" a level that can fit in a dedicated server or many? Just looking at https://serversearcher.com you've got 72TB of storage on 10Gb pipe for $360 or so a month: 128 GB RAM 6c/12t E-2276G 2X 512GB NVME + 4X 18.0TB HDD 300TB / 10Gbps
Just a few PB, and sharding it across servers is fine.
It looks like all the disk-optimized examples on that site (still much more expensive than paying for raw disk, barely 5x cheaper than S3, when a disk-optimized colo solution only has ~3% overhead over the disks themselves) are through some no-name provider "HostKey". I suppose beggars can't be choosers, but in the contexst of storage (where systemic failures should be accounted for in the model) are you aware of more than one provider with reasonably priced storage?
I mean on that site you also have clouvider who are cheaper $423.79/mo for 72TB including bandwidth, compute and two extra boot SSDs. I just searched by a minimum disk size of 12TB.
Colo will be cheaper I'm sure but it's fundamentally a different comparison you have to pay for drive failures, networking, bandwidth, remote hands, network switches and so on and so forth.
Interesting, not sure how I missed that (edit: I missed the 4x on the drive count). Thanks for mentioning it.
And, yes it's a different comparison, but that's why I was asking; I was curious if it was even viable (and initial searches had indicated it wasn't). 4-5x cheaper than S3 as a substrate is potentially workable.
Yeah, I mean thats what like ~$4.9/TB/Month including 4TB+ of internet transfer at a substrate level. So with say 10 servers on 8+2 parity you're looking at ~$6/TB/Month including >5TB of internet. Probably makes sense until you can fill at least one whole rack and buy a 2X100Gb internet connection.
reply