Don't know for sure it's Russia but the speculation about the new company running the store, Xsolla, in the thread here leads me to believe that the store is actually hosted in Russia.

I use my company's internet from home to play DDO (live right next door to the office) and we aggressively firewall things to prevent issues with spam email, etc. One of those tactics we use is a country-based ip blocker. I could not pull up the DDO store from our internet but once I switched to a backup DSL connection it worked fine.

Best guess based on that information - DDO's store is now being served from computers in Russia. Enjoy! I won't be...not changing our firewalls for DDO.

I have only ever used gift cards for DDO.

Even the suspicion that the store is hosted in Russia means I will continue this practice.

Revaulting wrote on Oct 22^nd, 2015 at 6:15pm:


lol  don't let truth stop a good rumor.

I strongly suggest not doing a google image search for Svetlana, unless you have some free time on your hands, free private time that is.

Who Cares wrote on Oct 22^nd, 2015 at 7:00pm:


Let me save you some. Time, that is.

Quote:


Revaulting wrote on Oct 22^nd, 2015 at 6:15pm:

Yeah, haha! Russia lol.

secure.xsolla.com resolves to 185.30.21.21

https://secure.xsolla.com/

Hmmm....

https://merchant.xsolla.com/signin (at least it's on a separate IP... (185.30.21.73))

a demo... hrm...
https://demo-merchant.xsolla.com/signin

Typical these days, video documentation - everyone is too fucking lazy to actually write anything these days and assume everyone has hours to waste watching fucking stupid videos instead of just providing answers in searchable text... grr. Pet peeve.



So we know what ol bluehair has been up to lately, in between sessions of pegging the hipster doofus.

Surely somebody can find some holes in this?
https://github.com/xsolla/xsolla-sdk-php

Interesting reviews of the unity3d "SDK":
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/35719

Quote:



ICANN assigned blocks to the Regoinal Registrars ( ARIN, RIPE, AFNIC, ... )
The Regional Registrars then divided what they got when Local Registrars requested it.
This is how lots of stuff make wild assed guesses regarding geographical location.

With the shortage of IPv4, people needing IPs have been pilfering the addresses that aren't in their real region.

Thus you can end up with an American Company that uses Europeans IPs.
Add to that the fact that the Registring company can be in a country and the IP Block depend of another country
( typically that's the case for me at $ork... Registry say I'm working in Sweden, but the IP Block is in France and is provided by a Local French Registrar )

Add to that Content Delivery Networks that for a given DNS name will provide the nearest CDN server IP...

So as a rule, while it's generally possible to guess where on the planet somebody is based on the IP, it's not totally true...
And to get the exact location of an IP you need to go through more than looking at the bare data from the Registrars.

I don't have to do any complicated lookups or research to confirm that a) the IP in question doesn't belong to the US and b) it doesn't belong to Germany as suggested on the ddo forum. I've got a country IP blocker set up that allows both US and German traffic. It's blocking the DDO store. Not rocket science here.

Now, what Flav posted - that a US company is using a Russian address - is completely plausible. The server could be in the US, it could be in Russia, it could be wherever, but there's no question that the IP is a country that I've got blocked on the IP blocker. With those ping times listed in yabbers post I don't think there's any question the box is in the Continental US though. However, they've done nozzed up the store for me with that stupid Russian IP.

I talked with my boss about this and he reminded me that we actually had an issue before where our cloud servers weren't accessible to us once because our cloud vendor who's located on the East coast swapped in a router with a European IP. So yeah, this sounds like it's something that happens with legit companies as well as fishy things. I guess it only sucks for me in this case as I doubt very many people are bothering with hardware-based country IP blocks. I'll just suck it up and do all my store purchases over my phone wifi. It's not like I buy stuff that often anyway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xsolla

They may have moved their HQ to the US, but it was started in Russia, by a Russian citizen, still has one or more offices in Russia and uses public IP addresses from ranges assigned to Russia.  Once someone has purchased the rights to an IP range from a valid registrar, there is nothing preventing them from using that IP on a server in another country if they setup the network and routes properly.

Additionally, it is essentially a payment processing middle man handling large amounts of monetary transactions across the world.  If you don't think that a company like this would be a high value target to the Russian government and certain criminal elements, you're kidding yourself.

It is amazing how much SPAM email you can eliminate at work by blocking the IP ranges assigned to China, N. Korea, Russia, Nigeria, and about 10 of the other frequent offender countries.  https://www.countryipblocks.net/country_selection.php makes it easy to generate lists for ACLs and blacklists.

Sometimes you have to make sacrifices.

Digimonk wrote on Oct 24^th, 2015 at 1:09pm:


That's exactly why we did it. We run an email server which made us a high value target for spamming operations. We tried manually doing firewall rules for offenders for awhile but it got to be a full-time job for someone just keeping up with all the incoming spammers. Our country IP blocker got rid of that headache and had a huge impact on spam issues.