I’m with you, but as Noam Chomsky said, power already knows the truth. They are busy hiding it. Better speak the truth about power.

Thanks for your help @infeeeee@lemm.ee ! I got in touch with admins at chaos.social and it turns out my IP is getting blocked because something on my network is making requests with user agent set to Googlebot 😬

It’s definitely not something I run intentionally. I suspect some malware. Will post about it in a separate thread I think.

I’m on NixOS. The use of sudo doesn’t really bother me. I just wish to understand what’s going on. It’s still like this today.

While waiting for the results I’m educating myself on traceroute. It was super slow, but here’s the result. How do I interpret it?

$ sudo traceroute chaos.social
traceroute to chaos.social (5.9.119.202), 64 hops max
  1   192.168.1.1  0.777ms  0.714ms  0.621ms
  2   5.132.112.1  4.105ms  4.055ms  3.946ms
  3   10.10.10.174  7.384ms  7.338ms  7.204ms
  4   10.226.4.3  7.275ms  7.230ms  7.053ms
  5   *  *  *
  6   80.249.209.55  9.276ms  7.288ms  7.112ms
  7   *  *  *
  8   213.239.252.45  18.652ms  12.801ms  12.992ms
  9   213.239.224.69  17.158ms  17.165ms  17.119ms
 10   213.239.254.190  17.323ms  17.269ms  17.427ms
 11   5.9.119.208  17.327ms  17.332ms  17.211ms
 12   *  *  *
 13   *  *  *
 14   *  *  *
 ... asterisks all the way down
 63   *  *  *

~ took 15m23s
$ echo $?
1

It seems to stop at 5.9.119.208, which seems close to the destination 5.9.119.202.

Note to self: traceroute has to be run with sudo, otherwise only gives asterisks.

Edit: I’m getting almost exactly the same result when connecting via mobile network, when the connection to the site works. Am I doing it right?

In the USA there are almost 650 thousands patent applications being filled (of which almost 400 thousands are getting grants) each year. So while technically what you wrote is correct, in practical terms finding an interesting patent is certainly not a trivial task for a journalist.