Where I work they pay for some moronic company to proxy the internet access and block results. This is typically harmless, as most sites that I run accross that are blocked as being "tasteless". Cracked.com is an example of a blocked, tasteless site. And I must agree at least with the categorization.

But the other day I tried going to linode to log into my account at linode.com and was informed that the linode.com was blocked for containing "malicious software."

I called the in-house IT people to explain to them how moronic this was, and they in-turn contacted the vendor, but 'twas useless. Linode.com will, I assume, remain blocked for the foreseeable future.

I imagine our proxy vendor is a major vendor, and as such probably lots of workplaces are now blocking access to linode.com for no good reason. I can't help but think this must be related to the China/google hack associations, as I have never seen malicious software linked from linode.com.

I also can't help but think how f***ing lazy and stupid the people running the blacklist site are to block linode.com in response to the news. It's not like sites hosted by linode are blocked. It's sort of surreal, how incompetent these people are.

I would post the vendor's name, but I am at home posting. I will get the name tomorrow and update -- maybe they can be contacted and have sense be talked into.

It was blocked all last week and yesterday. Fixed today. Mein Gott.

It's possible it was because of some rooted customer at li12-345.members.linode.com or whatever. Still excessive and unfortunate, but...

My employer blocked www.linode.com sometime in the last couple weeks under "software downloads" or something similar. Idiotic and wrong, but I've come to expect that from Websense.

A couple of the places I have to work at block all sorts of things. I run a SOCKS proxy over SSH to port 443 on one of my Linodes.

_________________
/ Peter

I work for one of these companies and we don't all get input or to review what gets added to the "list" before it goes out. Within the constantly growing and changing context of the web, sometimes we have to retrospectively review what has been added upon reports from users.

Having said that, we don't block linode.com, but we do (by default) block members.linode.com so if you're using your default hostname to access your linode (rather than IP address or your own domain) then it will be blocked.

[ ~]# rate linode.com
ALLOW/allow <GET linode.com> [computing & internet]
[ ~]# rate members.linode.com
BLOCK/malware <GET members.linode.com> [spyware]

I guess the theory behind this is that anyone utilising Linode for distributing malware generally doesn't bother setting up their own domain when Linode provides a perfectly good one.

Why would you do such a thing? If you see something bad going down, fire off an email to abuse@linode.com, give us a few days to get it resolved, and I assure you it will be taken care of.

Thanks,
-Chris

It is *only* the URL we block. We don't block the IP address so using either the IP address or a registered domain will still work.

I don't know anything about why this specific block was made, and I don't have any way to find out easily. We just put in customer specific overrides if any of our clients have issues with a given site being blocked.

I would not necessarily claim that it is for "no good reason". I used to work for an Investment Bank. They go through great pains to make sure that nothing gets in or out of their environment that shouldn't.

You can imagine the ramifications if someone offloaded priviledged financial information or client data to their own personal server...

I suppose that would be a concern if they blocked the IP addresses for linodes. But they don't. I could still access my linode, and any other linode -- whether by domain name or IP address. The only thing that was blocked was www.linode.com, which in all likelihood was by far the safest domain and was in no way involved with whatever some of its customers may have been doing.