Recently, I've had to ban most every IP address that originates out of China, Taiwan, Korea, Indonesia, India, etc. (Asia). You can blame China for this mostly; most of the problems of excessive bandwidth consumption, hitting my download counters nonstop for my patches and the Typing Tutor game have been from IP addresses out of that country. I've had snoopers from Korea looking to see if phpMyAdmin is installed on this server, I've had another guy looking to see where the donators-only Felghana patch is located even (that was from Europe, possibly the Netherlands). There is also the case of two individuals that I found to be unapologetic, self-righteous pirating punks that thought they were hard and also mistakenly thought I'd take their bullshit warez propoganda lightly. Another issue is if you're using a download accelerator to get files from this site, I'm going to consider you a spambot. Anyhow, all of that activity has resulted or will result in me banning not merely the singular IP address of the offender, but the CIDR of that network to handle the case of dynamically assigned/changing IPs.
Because the server has finally been able to take a breather since the Asia ban, I have no plans to remove this global ban anytime soon. Seriously. I'm rather enjoying not seeing the server & download logs grow at exponential rates since this ban. Obviously, you're browsing with a proxy if you're reading this (as well as being human, and not a bot) and if that is the case, you could email me about it with your IP and I can add an exception for it such as I did for one individual who was caught up in the ban, apparently in Japan, that wanted to continue to visit this site.
As I really don't expect to find English speakers in such countries, it really doesn't bother me to have done this. It's going to be a very small minority that would be interested in what I have to offer here (normally, and prior to DXWnd, which I'll get to below). Well, such is life. Until such countries do a better job of stopping spammers, bots, until its citizens do a better job of preventing their PCs from being infected with worms, viruses, etc. others will have to pay for it.
Also, I should mention what I believe was the cause of this. I used to host a nice little utility called DXWnd. This was the utility that lets you run fullscreen DirectX applications/games in windowed-mode, when the interface doesn't otherwise support it. That is, the application/game can only run in fullscreen mode, but you need to run it in windowed mode, for whatever reason, debugging or you prefer to play games that way while being able to multi-task. Suffice to say, this utility became very popular and was the number one downloaded item on this site. Specifically, it became very popular in Asian countries and "popular" doesn't always turn out to be a good thing... I was linked to in Chinese, Vietnamese, etc. forums all for the express purpose of getting this utility. Unfortunately, it became too popular, and put my site on the map for spambots, hackers, etc. in those countries. This is my suspicion of course. All my troubles seem to have begun by having made the mistake of offering up that utility... Anyway, I have since deleted it in the Downloads section and will never again share it in the future.
