Paypal Donations for IPFire Don't Work with DNS Firewall Enabled

Community
1

Hi there, I tried to donate via local network and initially was not such successfull. I think some domains need to be put on the exemption list so Paypal donations work.

Excerpt of the log:

info: rpz: applied [ads.rpz.ipfire.org] *.stats.paypal.com
info: rpz: applied [ads.rpz.ipfire.org] t.paypal.com
info: rpz: applied [ads.rpz.ipfire.org] ddbm2.paypal.com
info: rpz: applied [ads.rpz.ipfire.org] *.googletagmanager.com

I did my dues by switching of wireless on the mobile so Paypal worked but there was definitely a warning regarding ad blockers.

Have a good day :slight_smile:

2

You should be able to whitelist Paypal?

A bit ironic that this get blocked, but I guess it fits the overall prevention logic, Paypal must have been abused soo many times a manual whitelist is indeed necessary.

With Advertising block activated

nslookup stats.paypal.com <ipfire-ip>
Server:  <hostname>
Address:  <ipfire-ip>
*** <hostname> can't find stats.paypal.com: Non-existent domain

nslookup t.paypal.com <ipfire-ip>
Server:  <hostname>
Address:  <ipfire-ip>
*** <hostname> can't find t.paypal.com: Non-existent domain

:laughing:

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3

I sent reports to IPFire_DBL, as is suggested for such cases.

4

The problem is not that. The logic is sound. Paypal SHOULD be blocked.

I did submit one domain via reporting, but after further investigation it ´turns out the block was legit, for similar reasons as Paypal should be blocked: a history on bad usage and spammed links. Now, the argument against that is of course that Paypal or the domain I reported are not in control of what their customers do, yet they still suffer from it.

5

Hi, your considerations are strategic security decisions and sure are well justified. I just wanted to point the Paypal related fact out so the team knows about possible impacts.

6

PayPal is a service you can judge in different ways.
There are users, that want or must use it.
There are installations, where this service should/must be blocked.
DNS Firewall should allow both.

  • without modifications you can use PayPal
  • you can add custom blocks for paypal.com
7

@firewire first of all thank you for donating.

The advertising list has a couple of problems, because it does not only strictly contain advertising, but also a lot of tracking. To most people that is the same, to some tracking is malware.

So for many domains it is not quite clear in which category they fall. And it does not only have to be only one, but to me it is clear that most advertising networks are built to track users.

PayPal is quite a bad player in so many ways, but I don’t think they are running advertising, or anything similar. They track their users. Sure, that is their business model, but after all, I don’t think there is any rationale to block PayPal at all on either the advertising or the malware lists. A lot of phishing is probably happening via PayPal too, but they are not the phisher, they are just a payment method being used. So let’s unblock them everywhere.