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According to my source, that IP traces back to a railroad track. Better call Steven Seagal to investigate.

Apologies, I should cite my sources:

This should clarify if you read the whole thing: in a nutshell, Microsoft were dragged through pretty much every US court by pretty much every service provider and competing browser, for bundling IE with Windows 95 OSR2. The claim that Gates made when the EU took him to task for continuing this trend in NT was that IE cannot be unbundled - it is part of the platform. The phrasing he actually used, IIRC, was "cannot be unbundled from the OS". The argument was that Win95 Gold did OK without a bundled browser; as did 3.1 and WFWG, which is completely logical in the face of it. Whether or not a single-vendor OS platform that comes bundled with a browser that already does everything and leaves the choice of whether or not to install Nutscrape or other browser to some political ideology, is a great idea, I leave to the reader to determine for himself, but as far as competing browsers were concerned, as they didn't have the option of bundling with the fastest selling desktop platform on the planet they felt a little put out - as I'm sure I would.

The whole argument, as far as I'm concerned, is a fallacy: I for instance wouldn't expect to find Windows 7 on my Mac, or Android on my iPhone - because they are competing hardware and software technologies on the same market, but as with shoes and everybody's favourite analogy, one size does not fit all. IF you want a computer for something a Mac is good at, you don't go buy a PC. If you want a computer for power gaming, YOU DO NOT GO BUY A MAC!

Microsoft bundling is not what killed Netscape, what killed Netscape was the bitching and moaning it made through its deluded fantasy that its severely outdated browser (that did not innovate because they were too busy biting the hand that fed it) deserved a space on a platform that they did not have any sort of hand in developing, and it died a well deserved death. Netscape usage fell because something better came along and Netscape stood stagnant. This might be an arguable point to some, but history recalls this as fact.

Back to the originating issue in this subthread: when it came to the point of arguing against bundling IE with NT, the EC imposed daily mounting fines on Microsoft sometime in the late 90's (I forget the exact date) for what it considered to be "anti-competitive policy". To date, even though the oversights have ended, I don't think any portion of the fines have been paid nor have the fines stopped. Please correct me if I'm wrong (don't forget citations!). In the US cases, Microsoft offered, and had accepted, the issue of discount vouchers to the value of the fines for individuals, groups and companies for volume licensing of Windows, Office/BackOffice and Exchange, and SQL Server. At around this time the price of new computer equipment also plummeted overnight because as part of this deal, Microsoft agreed to subsidise the ICO of PC equipment to all. It was the scam to beat all scams: Microsoft won anyway - they guaranteed sales and also guaranteed that nobody could force it to part ways with itself.

My tax return demands a signature on paper.

No, it doesn't.

On June 30, 2000, President Bill Clinton signed into law—using a digital signature—the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act, or E-Sign. This act, which went into effect on October 1 of that year, officially conferred the same legal status on digital signatures as handwritten signatures. The United States government, meanwhile, mandated that all federal agencies accept digital signatures by October 2003.

Read more: Digital Signature http://ecommerce.hostip.info/pages/325/Digital-Signature.html#ixzz0r7rZ8hUU [hostip.info]

Sometimes a document need a signature. And a digital signature is not legally recognized as sufficient -- it must be done in your hand.

Bill Clinton says you are wrong.

On June 30, 2000, President Bill Clinton signed into law—using a digital signature—the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act, or E-Sign. This act, which went into effect on October 1 of that year, officially conferred the same legal status on digital signatures as handwritten signatures. The United States government, meanwhile, mandated that all federal agencies accept digital signatures by October 2003.

Read more: Digital Signature http://ecommerce.hostip.info/pages/325/Digital-Signature.html#ixzz0r7rZ8hUU

You are wrong.

While it does involve having thousands of addresses, this kind of thing is pretty easy to automate, given what your goals are. For example, I use this tool to determine which country my visitors are in and display the relevant contact information (show the French address to people in France, the Belgian one to people in Belgium, etc). I have a cron job set up to update the database once a week; it is fully automatic and very reliable.

If you need to be more specific, this guy has a php class that can supposedly give you information as specific as city, or you can write your own using the db you can download here, although I can't personally vouch for either. You could also parse the hostnames in your server and only allow service providers in your area.

Also, google code has a really good tutorial for a client side application if your server is limited in its capabilities.

Either way, it sounds from the summary like you have access to a database of ip address ranges you want to allow. Just set up a cron job to download it and parse it.

AT&T for a long time didn't own the phone network. It did at first, but then the infrastructure was nationalized in the interests of 'national security'. Read the link I provided.

The relevant quote is

In 1918 the federal government nationalized the entire telecommunications industry, with national security as the stated intent. Rates were regulated so that customers in large cities would pay higher rates to subsidize those in more remote areas. Vail was appointed to manage the telephone system with AT&T being paid a percentage of the telephone revenues. AT&T profited well from the nationalization arrangement which ended a year later.

Some other sources are AT&T Corp - Early History from the "Free Encyclopedia of Ecommerce":

In 1918, President Wilson nationalized the U.S. phone network, promising that rates would fall under public control. However, expenses related to wartime activities prompted AT&T to raise prices, and U.S. citizens began calling for the government to release control of the phone system. By then, AT&T operated a network of roughly 10 million telephones. Mounting public pressure prompted the government to privatize AT&T in 1919.

(Google for

nationalized phone 1918 at&t

to find more.)

Use hostip.info. Everytime you reset your router go there and tell it where you are. Stop after you've done 10-20 subnets and wait a while. Hopefully the updates will propagate down to Maxmind and the others ... reasonably ... erm ... soon.

On 16/09/2007, Marc Espie wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 16, 2007 at 09:17:41AM -0400, Eben Moglen wrote:
> > We will make no more public statements until the work is complete, and
> > we will be neither hurried nor intimidated by people who shout at us
> > instead of helping.
>
> http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2007/jul/31/openhal/
>
> As I said in a former email, this has several glaring problems.
>
> As far as I understand, this is a public statement, even if it predates
> the issue at hand.
>
> Please fix it in a timely manner, or take it down for now.

Most noticeably, I fail to see any credits to Reyk Floeter in the
above press release.

Moreover, back when the release was first posted at the above address,
there was no credit even to the OpenBSD project, which I found simply
outrageous! Only after I (and possibly others) have complained to
SFLC did they append the release to give some really vague mention
that OpenHAL is based on OpenBSD's ath(4) HAL.

Eben, is this the work that you are doing in bringing the communities
together, by omitting such vital information as giving credit to the
people and projects who performed most of the work? After all of
these mistakes, after ignoring the ethical side of the relicensing,
after failing to inform when relicensing is even legally an option,
are you seriously even surprised about the negative attention that
SFLC is getting now? Taking a step aside, don't you agree it is
well-deserved?

http://bsd.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/13/156258

Replying to my own question, but I think I found the most complete OS project out there for geolocation log statistics....

I've been playing with phpMyVisites and it looks a very nice and thorough implementation of what I was looking for.

Although it's method for country geolocation is a bit *cough* rough, I think a module to hook into Space Cowboy's hostip.info shouldn't be too difficult...

The only problem with it is it uses mysql to store the logs *grrrrr*

OpenLayers looks slick!

I created the hostip.info website a couple of years ago which is an open-source geo-location system. I've since passed it to others to maintain.

On their front-page right now is a geographic map of website traffic, which is a "public-beta" of a mapping system (upload IP addresses, get a map).

They don't actually appear to give out the code (from only a quick look on the site, that may not be correct), but this ought to be pretty trivial to do yourself if you wanted... The public API of hostip.info returns the lat/long of any IP address it knows, and plotting lat/long on an image of the world ought not be too hard.

I designed the whole system so you could download and set up your own geolocation database, slaved from the master at hostip.info with regular updates. Then you can query IP addresses locally and generate charts however/whenever you wanted...

Just a thought,

Simon

http://www.hostip.info/ is a community project to geo IPs and the site is listed in rdf.dmoz.org

Not that I have anything to do with a geolocation project, you understand [grin]

I did a pilot test for the Weather Xchange folks a couple of years back, and was monitoring the temperatures around the UK and making mpeg movies of location-averaged temperature snapshots - a bit like time-lapse photography. I've just moved to the US and the computer with the movies is on a ship somewhere, but it did look pretty cool (no pun intended :-) to see patterns of hot and cold move around the country over time...

Simon.

Hmm - just been glancing at my weblogs for hostip.info and there's a shit.slashdot.org link in there - I get the same 'Nothing to see..' message when I click on it though...

Always nice to know what others think of you and the work you've done, even when it's not particularly complimentary....

Ok, this is weird - I've just previewed it and checked the 'shit' link, and it works now... most odd. Still, at least it shows they consider their own work at the same level as mine :-)

Simon

There's some guy who has that link in his sig, it links to his own geo-location thingo. Where is he when you need him?

Some regular poster on /. - I forget who - has a link in their sig to a new Geolocation project, which can be found at Hostip.info

Might be of interest if the authors of NETI or similar projects are reading this.

[grin] touche

But then, if you think they'd be tracking you by your IP address, then 'authority' has far easier (and way more accurate) ways of getting your information than via my website. My thoughts on the subject are outlined on the 'Privacy Issues' section of the site.....

Simon.

I looked at using the whois db for my IP to city project, but rejected it because (a) it's forbidden [which was the most important reason, honest :-), and (b) the correlation between locations I did know and what was in the whois DB was pretty poor.

So I just depend on good folks like yourselves to fill in the data. I think that gets around the various patents that Quova etc. have got on populating a city/ip database as well :-)

Frankly I'd give it about 50% accuracy, and I'm approaching that without using it at all...

Simon

Ah dammit.

One of the sites using hostip.info has a smily/ok/sad face at the top of the page. Imagine a photo of your loved one which reacted to how they felt at the time :-)

Real-time feeds of "I'm happy", "I'm sad" could come from SMS, email, web, irc, whatever, and update the picture.

Look, it's my idea, and there's no copyright or patents on it, ok, feel free to do whatever you want :-)

One of the sites using has a smily/ok/sad face at the top of the page. Imagine a photo of your loved one which reacted to how they felt at the time :-)

Real-time feeds of "I'm happy", "I'm sad" could come from SMS, email, web, irc, whatever, and update the picture.

Look, it's my idea, and there's no copyright or patents on it, ok, feel free to do whatever you want :-)

Simon

I suspect whoever wrote this is an idiot!

Anyone who uses urls for their user-feedback is an idiot.

That really should be all the info you need :)

Whereas this isn't really related, I've just put up a resource for geolocation of IP's to country/city. It'd be cool if some slashdotters were to type in/select their city - only takes 10 seconds :-)

The url is hostip.info. The idea is to provide a free geolocation service that you can download the DB from. All the other ones I've found are either pay-for, limited in what you can do, or only to country-resolution. At the moment, this is just to country-resolution as well, but who knows how far it'll go :-)

Simon.