I am adding a new security program that performs Geo Coding and Proxy Detection this weekend. This means you may get cut off from my site by mistake.

OK, now in English for you poor Non-Geeks....

All computers that access the Internet are assigned "Public Addresses" in the form of 4 numbers from 0-255 separated by periods. I am not going into RFC 1918 Private Address discussions here...but you are welcome to Google it. Think of it just like regular old mail...you send a letter off to request something and you include a return address. The person you mailed the letter to then sends the response back to your address. Well, computers work the same way, just a little faster. You send a request to my server asking for a copy of my web site, which my server sends back to you (at the simplest level).

The trick is identifying your address. Regular mail uses countries, cities, states and ZIP codes. IP Addresses do not - just numbers. So this government organization named ARIN divides up all the addresses and domain names and says who can use what and which country gets which ranges of addresses. This changes all the time based on needs. So with an accurate list in hand my server can look at your address to determine what country you are coming from (and in most cases down to the correct city). This is known as Geo Tagging. Then I can create rules that ONLY allow certain countries, or ONLY block certain countries.

To complicate matters there is a technology known as a Proxy Server. This is a third server that you can connect to and then tell that server to go get what you want. It is kind of like having a PO Box for regular mail. People send things back and forth to your PO Box and never know your REAL address. Well, I have additional software that tracks and detects these Proxy servers, since hackers in blocked countries will often just try to use a Proxy in the United States, making generic Geo Tagging useless. (FYI, using public anonymous proxy servers is a common way people get around porn filters at work...just sayin'.)

So here is the bottom line. I am blocking all proxy servers and most of the countries in the world. Unless IHMSA has had some miraculous International resurgence in third world countries that I am not aware of, this should not be an issue at all. If you are deployed in the Middle East, you should be able to reach the site through U.S. Military supplied computers, but not from local connections. I have noticed traffic from some countries in the Norway/Sweden area hitting my site, which will be blocked. If you are coming from there, speak up now. This system is by no means perfect, not impossible to get around, but should reduce the issues tremendously.

Thanks!