They can absolutely work if you aren't expecting any traffic from those countries whatsoever.
I don't expect any international calls... ever, so I block international calling numbers on my phone (since they are always spam calls) and it cuts down on the overwhelming majority of them. Don't see why that couldn't apply to websites either.
Although it's a very lazy practice, this is exactly how many Japanese sites (and internet services) fight against bad actors. In short, they block non-Japanese traffic and data center IPs. I expect these measures to become insufficient as consumers adopt IoT devices and provide ample amounts of residential IPs for botnets.
As for phone numbers, businesses and individuals employ a similar strategy. Most "legitimate" phone numbers begin with 060 or 070. Due to lack of supply, telcos are gradually rolling out 080 numbers. 080 numbers currently have a bad reputation because they look unfamiliar to the majority of Japanese. Similarly, VoIP numbers all begin with 050, and many services refuse such numbers. Most people instinctively refuse to answer any call that is not from a 060 or 070 number.
Country or region blocks based on IPs used to (c. ~2000) be pretty standard. Blackhole the blocks associated with China, Russia, and maybe Africa, and your failed-login logs drop from scrolling so fast you can't read them, to a handful of lines per minute. Almost all the traffic was from those blocks, and was malicious. Meanwhile, for many sites, your odds (especially back then) of getting legitimate traffic from, say, China, was nearly zero, so the cost of blocking them was effectively nothing.
Cloudflare is basically still just this, but with more steps.
Sure. Absolutely works. Right up until it doesn't. I think the MIL was the wrong people to assume "we will never need packets from these network blocks"
The other thing is that phone numbers follow a numbering scheme where +1 is north america and +64 is NZ. Its easy to know the longterm geographic consequence of your block, modulo faked out CLID. IP packets don't follow this logic and Amazon can deploy AWS nodes with IPs acquired in Asia, in any DC they like. The smaller hosting companies don't say the IP range they route for banks have no pornographers on them.
It's really not sensible to use IP blocks except for the very specific cases like yours: "I never terminate international calls" is the NAT of firewalls: "I don't want incoming packets from strangers" sure the cheapest path is to block entire swathes of IPv4 and IPv6. But if you are in general service delivery, that rarely works. If you ran a business doing trade in China, you'd remove that block immediately.
It depends on whether the information on the website is supposed to be publicly available or not. "This information is publicly available except to people from Israel" sends a really terrible message.
A DoS attack is a DoS attack even if someone is pretending to be a “Researcher.”
People in Iran, Russia, etc get annoyed with sanctions but that’s kind of the point. If your government isn’t responding appropriately, yes you’ll get shafted it’s what you do after that which solves the problem.
Me, I prefer to relate to people as individuals rather than, as you are advocating, interchangeable representatives of their area of residence. If what you want is World War III, this is how you get it.
In particular, universal access to knowledge is a fundamental principle of liberalism.
I’d personally love for someone to hand me a billion dollars no strings attached.
That’s got nothing to do with solving the issues created by these people, but if you’re going to toss out meaningless non sequitur’s then I figure I might as well join in on the fun.
I don't expect any international calls... ever, so I block international calling numbers on my phone (since they are always spam calls) and it cuts down on the overwhelming majority of them. Don't see why that couldn't apply to websites either.