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Yahoo Geographically Targeting Users
minna writes: "[The] SF Examiner reports that Yahoo! is now working on separating its content based on the location of its user. In a recent court case in France in which it was sentenced to block access to auctions of Nazi memorabilia for French Internet users, Yahoo! claimed this was impossible. Now in order to gain the rights to netcast the next Olympics, Yahoo says that while it's not 100% successful, it can essentially be done. There are already any number of services, for example infosplit.com that specialize on locating Internet users."
"..an address that begins with "24.92" is likely from a Time Warner cable system in the United States. Addresses starting with "161.23" are assigned to the London Hospital Medical College."
What happens when a user accesses a proxy in another IP range?
now it happens all the time.
So what, it was hard for Yahoo to do it, now they've figured out how.
One would think that it should be relatively easy to distinguish between countries. I'm not exactly sure how ISPs are discerned from one country to the next, but I'm sure something could be put in place to check where the person is from and direct them to where they need to be. Besides, isn't there already a couple of internationalized Yahoo pages?
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The COBOL Warrior
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
The COBOL Warrior
"COBOL's Not dead, it's just underground"
When I'm at school, advertisers from many companies including Yahoo! see that I'm on a .edu domain, and send me ads for things like textbooks and music. Seeing that I'm 19, when I use Yahoo! chat rooms I'm constantly pitched ads for Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears web sites and merchandise. (Fortunately, they can be moved off-screen for want of Junkbuster.) Seeing that I'm from New York (and I've said so in my Yahoo! profile), I often see ads for local businesses or web sites.
Targeted advertising isn't all bad, as long as it's targeted correctly. I, for one, am NOT interested in boy-bands or crappy fucked textbook companies.
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what about sites like anonymizer.com which allow you to roam around without giving your IP away?
Hide posts based on geographics locations?
I feel kind of guilty somedays talking about my big old luxury car, my big old house, my home computer network and my big breasted honey knowing there are UKians who can barely afford a 1.0 liter Festiva, living in a poorly heated 500 sf flat, and having to share a scrawny, emaciated girlfriend.
Maybe we can hide those posts so the UKians don't realize what a socialist purgatory they live in.
now they might stop trying to sel me sun-block, and push those snow-shovels.
borne
Digital Island can report things like the country code of the end-user with their TraceWare product. Apparently, info as specific as zip/area codes may be coming soon. Zowee.
Wasn't there a specification built into the way IP addresses worked (or maybe this is ipv6?) that allow you to roughly determine global positioning based on IP? Maybe my mind made it up. Anyone know? Heck, I think Mars had a class A assigned to it for a while, when we could waste IPs.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
The socioinformatic ramifications of this kind of action are quite disturbing. Imagine this sort of thing taken the other way...dictatorial regimes refusing to let anyone from outside nations access anything but shiny, happy government propaganda; entire nations being blocked from seeing certain information because it's "not useful to them," or "they don't need to know." The problem is, who decides? Who gets to censor the Net based on regional ghettoization? Based on some of the more paranoid scenaria I can think of in my cute little delusion, I can hear the howls of outrage now. (How dare X nation block YCorp's e-commerce site! and so on.)
...but don't call me collect, unless you're "Knute" Kennedy from Cleveland.
Call me an extremist, call me a conspiracy theorist, call me a crank...
Interrobang
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
This is all theory from my twisted mind, so don't automatically assume that this would work, but couldn't we defeat regional tracing, or tracking of any kind for that matter by having initial requests from clients be made through something that could be loosely termed a 'masquerading gateway ring'? I don't know if anyone already has a term for this, but the idea that I thought of while having a 101 Degrees Fahrenheit fever is that if a whole bunch of relatively high bandwidth computers, owned by the individuals who use the ring, have their masquerade and potentially TCP/IP stack rewritten so that instead of the owner's computer making a direct request it instead randomly picks an IP on the ring, sends the request, does NOT permanently log the request (and neither do any of the others, they only log for as long as is required for masq), to another computer on the ring, which decides at random whether or not to send the request itself or to forward it on to another random ring-member, and the final computer to decide to send the request sends it to the world, and waits for the answer which routes back through the forwarding computers until it reaches the original client. Basically, security through random hopping, none of the servers on the ring log to disk the directions to or from for the data, only in memory for the amount of time needed to perform the task, so no one can be permanently traced. Any node on the ring would not be able to tell if the computer it just talked to was the originator or not, and it would nullify things like regional targetting, traces, etc, so no one could do demographics.
I don't know if it is possible, but I'd like to see something like this.
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
One of the great promises of the Internet was that it would form a global community, free from geographical boundries. Information was to flow freely from country to country without the permission of local governments.
Unfortunately, the reality is that if you are doing business on the Internet, then that global presence you have created means that you are under the jurisdiction of all these other governments. Since it is possible to discriminate between users accessing data from one country or another, businesses can comply with these court orders and this means that information no longer travels over the Internet free of political boundries.
This is not great, but it is better to discriminate against users in select countries then to self-censor and discriminate against the entire world.
Now they're going to ban Allied paraphernalia in neo-nazi neighborhoods?
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
besides the anonymous users, mobile users, and unresolveable IPs. But VisualRoute has been out for awhile, and has been able to trace a map across the world to find out where the IP is located. Works pretty well too.
I would think that there are enough engineers in the audience to remind us that nothing is impossible, just currently unfeasable. And while this maynot be perfect, and have some privacy drawbacks, it may also be a way in the future to avoid having local jurisdictions (e.g., France) stop "objectionable" material to the whole world.
You shank my Jengaship!
no, just takes forever to load
This would only stop people who have no interest in circumventing the restrictions. If you really don't want someone to know where your email is coming from, use a remailer intelligently. If you don't want someone to know where you are surfing from, use a service like the Anonymizer intelligently.
I really don't see how you can regulate people from different geographic location when there is an abundance of ways to make it look like you're coming from somewhere else. XHost is a wonderful thing, be in France and run netscape off a machine with an American IP address. Damn that's hard.
But then again, I don't really know what techniques are being used to determine where a person is located, but I am truly very sceptical about the prospect of geographic tenderred material being close to 100% effective. I just don't buy it.
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"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
In my webserver logs, AOL users come thru any number of AOL proxies....
Could be difficult to map those users back to a geographical area-->other than the fact that they are likely in the U.S. (America OnLine)
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check out http://colotto.com
...because all users throughout Europe (UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Netherlands) access the Internet through a firewall in the UK. The internal networks all use 10.* addressing, so all web requests seem to come from the firewall address.
I'd imagine proxying screws the pooch on this one. While it's generally easy to find me at home (*.mrmnh.adelphia.net), absolutely anything that I would do at work goes through the corporate firewall. It will be really annoying if Yahoo targets me with crap thinking I am in Oklahoma when I'm in New Hampshire.
Are the Olympics becoming the center of all things evil?
Long the playground of the megamedia establishment, the Olympics represent the theft and repackaging of what should be in the public domain that is occuring in all aspects of society. During the past Olympics, internet coverage was not allowed in any real fashion for fear that it would cut into the "profits" of the old media fat cats, for the next Olympics we are now told that only by dividing the internet along national borders can a new media company enter the good graces of the IOC. Yes my friends, the Olympics are a way for all peoples of the world to come together in peaceful celebration of what is best in humanity. Unfortunately, what humans seem to be best at is greed, graft, and division.
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
I'm all for privacy as much as the next guy, but enough is enough. Yahoo is a company with profits to worry about, not a government, not a religious organization. If they want to collect demographic data they have every right to do so.
(We, as consumers, don't go around saying "Give me a portal to search with in my browser. But, uh, don't tell me who it is. And make sure I have no idea if I visit it again. I want to "respect" their "privacy"".)
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Mandatory GPS chips? What are you talking about? Most upcoming PDA's don't have GPS chips -- some have Bluetooth, but that only allows them to communicate with similar devices nearby. Bluetooth should work the same whether your devices are in the US, Singapore, Germany, on a ship in the middle of the Pacific, or wherever else your travels take you.
I think your paranoia is directed towards cellular phones, whose calls to 911 can be rerouted based on various location-determining measures (usually based on the nearest tower). IMO this isn't a bad thing for 911, but I'd never get a cell phone if it were to constantly beam me ads for businesses as I walk by.
For more information, click here.
...which means the black-helicopter types on /. will hate it.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
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Where's my first amendment???
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Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
A few years ago, I remember Yahoo would target UCB's CS subdomains the week before they came on campus to interview. So, in limited contexts, they've done this for a long time.
This comes from the broadcast televion side of things. Especially when dealing with the IOC(International Olympic Committee). They make tons of money off of selling rights to people in certain locations. So they are trying to enforce those rights. Meaning They don't want people paying money for the rights in the US, and then streaming it to Canada over the net. It is all about money (isn't it always)
To E-mail me, replace the first period in my domain with an @
There was a previous story on Slashdot about the Sydney Olympics and how the IOC would not allow the events to be web cast. I remember something else too about the IOC trying to ban ALL internet webcasting of Olympic content for the next 10 years or so, but I could not dredge up links on that.
Its amazing how fast they can perform an about face on this issue. Sadly, I would have thought that webcasting is the best solution to the Olympics. There are multiple sports at multiple times, and the sports that I like to watch are not always broadcast on TV, which sucks. (Whitewater Kayaking for example, I got to see *NONE* of it.)
I always thought that the olympics were about Sports and competition, and that you should be able to watch the athletes or countries or sports that you like, and not be spoon-fed the "important" events by the major networks. I guess I was wrong.
Maybe Yahoo broadcasting this will change things, but somehow I doubt it.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Here's another company that does geographic identification without the use of cookies.. DigitalEnvoy
I can see how this would be useful, and possibly even a Good Thing for, say, my Mom. But, for me it's not, really. Perhaps I am "bi-coastal" or just travel a lot...Maybe I'm just a paranoid, pain-in-the-ass nerd...but, uh, of course I'm not...*shifty eyes*
Seriously, though...Are they offering a way to get "generic" ads?
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
The two boilerplate responses to this type of news are "They'll never be able to do it" and "So what? If I just set up an IP proxy spoof masquerade hosts file, I'll get right past whatever they set up." The first response is inevitably refuted by a halfassed yet reasonably effective technical solution. The second response does no good for the 99.9% of Net users who have an interest in a free Internet but have absolutely no idea how to perform X workaround. Geeks need to raise their voices against Net censorship--it IS possible, and just shutting our eyes and claiming that it isn't won't do any good for the freedom of the Internet.
Coneheads: "We are from France!"
Presumably, they have a Flash home page (I don't have a Flash plug-in, and don't want one). I don't object to web developers using Flash, but I do object to Flash being critical to content & navigation.
Crispin
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Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
Chief Research Scientist, WireX Communications, Inc.
Immunix: Free Hardened Linux Distribution
Can't our fellow (from US) freedom lovers in France access ebay.com??
3426 items found for "nazi". Showing items 1 to 50.
German nazi pilot observer badge
German nazi assault badge nice
German Nazi Button Hole Ribbons Hitler Youth
So the French courts want $13 grand for each Yahoo! violation - that's like fining WalMart for selling cigarettes when you can go to any one of dozens of quickie marts and get the same damn thing. This is the very heart of injustice.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
No its not funny. Not at all.
And for the record, I am American.
... of a new discrimination. We already have sexual harassment, racial profiling, etcetera, etcetera... Do we REALLY need IP discrimination as well?
http://www.safeweb.com (an anonymizer proxy).
They have no idea where you're really from, when you use safeweb.
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63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
And this is supposed to be a good thing how exactly? Maybe for Yahoo as a business, but certainly not for the customer. I want my search results to be consistent, and not depend on the location where I happen to be at the moment, or on what skin color Yahoo thinks I have. Targetting banner ads may be acceptable, but please leave the actual data alone. Oh, well, but then I use Google anyways.
Say no to software patents.
Geographic load balancing has been a feature around for a few years now, with ConnectControl and BigIP both (that I'm aware of) supporting this. Geographic content customization has also already been around for awhile.. Nothing new here, either way you look at it.
There was a great article in the latest Forbes about Yahoo!'s seemingly incomprehensible ability to turn a profit based solely on web advertising. What it boild down to is that Yahoo! can charge 10x - 20x what other portals can charge, because they can target their ads with great precision. Most of this ability comes from the 75 million users of Yahoo!'s various services that have volunteered information such as age, location, and interests. This will simply allow Yahoo to target those who haven't volunteered info, or bock cookies etc.
The article is well worth a read anyway, they talk about such interesting concepts as predicting trends such as movie success (based on who's searching for info about it, the actors, etc.) apparently they've been quite accurate so far...
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
I just hope they think twice. Not that Im a Yahoo user, but it would definitely kill diversity. Keeping folks happy just by showing them what theyre used to is not a good idea. Just look at what happened to kids in Germany. Not that Germans (as a whole) are gresat English speakers, but at least younger folks used to know some. Since MTV has put on a German version noone bothers to learn any English anymore. Why the heck should we bother ??? Its all presented in German anyway - why use that thing called brain (whereever may be located) when we can happily live without it. Of course, Yahoo and the likes arent going to do too much for peoples education anyway, but why deprive folks of at least a little bit of whats going on beyond their own little backyards...???
Don't click on the link. It's a nasty maze of pop-up windows. Yes, one of them even contains picture of 2 guys 69'ing, but the worst problem are the pop-ups.
Say no to software patents.
Geographically they always ask for a zip code most places.This is geographically targeting,who cares if they know your zip codfe.Cookies can follow you to other sites,though windows seems to warn you at least.AAAAgain,most can be blocked and who cares.This gets close to invasion of privacy,also E Mails can easily be traced.Like any phone service,these net things are private,yet public domain.Now Insurance companies want to put tracers on your car,if you go to certain areas higher rates.I will avoid these companies.Yahoo is mild.
&DELETE if ($stuff =~ /nazi/i);
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il-duce2
http://bizcrd.com/il-duce2
MSN redirects you automatically to either the American or British one based on your IP. I'm in Northern Ireland, so if I try to reach MSN.com, I am shown msn.co.uk. However, if I go in through an American proxy, I am able to see the American version of MSN.com, with completely different news and stories.
(I just know this'll be modded down for admitting that I've ever gone to msn.com...)
"There are bad people out there that will try to do bad things." - Microsoft 05/11/00
I'm interested in creating an open source project to locate the country of the user based on the IP address. One useful application would be to locate the nearest download mirror for a ftp site. If you are interested in this project, or know of a similar open-source project already under way, please email me.
There is (theoretically, at least), already the capability to do some of this stuff, as outlined in
RFC1712-DNS Encoding of Geographical Location
and
RFC1876-A Means for Expressing Location Information in the Domain Name System
Assuming IP addresses truly represent the users they are coming from, that might be possible.
However, since IP addresses are meaningless, with the various forms of tunnelling connections, this whole idea is dubious.
Good luck solving the TSM problem too, Yahoo!
there is also a site called www.bordercontroll.com you type in a ip or url and tells you the contry.
life, the universe and everything? = 42
Only because that is the zip code that you happened to enter...
Yahoo's merely taking advantage of the the unjust ruling against them from the French government, to launch a new source of revenue.
Revenues from banner ads are declining to all-time lows, with many dotcoms going bust. Yahoo's just trying to adjust with the times to find better targetting methods to increase pofits.
I know this already happens in limited form -- lots of sites have local editions, e.g. bbc.co.uk, cnn.com, ikea.com just to name three of the top of my head. But to go a step further and automagically give visitors the right version (presumably with a version to switch languages / locales, to catch the inevitable errors) would be a huge boost to bringing the web to the non-English speaking world.
I know that there's a lot of talk about doing this sort of thing, but this would be the first largescale application of it that I'm aware of. I'd love to see this take off...
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
With the right programming, this would not be an issue. You could pick your desired starting and ending location. You could even tie it into some sort of DNS server, where information could be transported under the guise of DNS information... so that it could potentially get thru firewalls.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
It's based on language settings. I was formally a Brit on an H1 in the US. I'm now in Canada. I keep my machine localised to UK English, and a language setting in IE for en-gb. It's a pain in the arse going to look for airline tickets, etc, at the Expedia web-site. I have to change my languages settings... it seems to think I'm too stupid to differentiate between expedia.com, expedia.ca and expedia.co.uk. I want to shop in the country where I'm currently residing... and I don't want to keep changing my language settings (maybe I will once I've chosen somewhere to settle pemanently). Interestingly, the MSN website doesn't redirect me - unless I've confused them by creating a passport that claims I'm from Wallis and Futuna.
Can we access Nazi pages on ebay from Europe? Yes!
/. S/N ratio, this case was brought about by a French law student's organisation, not the government. The LICRA is just one of hundreds of similar orgs where law students are expected to volunteer their time bringing cases to court before they start work in a cabinet. Other groups attack environmental abusers, hunting, illegal construction, or other bleeding heart issues that only students could care about. Consider these groups to be the FSF of the law world, the students do this for free to earn a reputation for themselves before job hunting. The higher profile the case, the more known their names, and the more likely they are to get a job with the Transmeta of the French law industry.
When someone accesses a web page containing nazi memorabilia, or any page with containing a keyword from a list of questionable terms, we get a warning that the item may not be legal for sale in some countries. But only if the originating IP address is from a RIPE assigned range.
That warning is sufficient to comply with French and German law. By providing a warning to a user, eBay has complied with the law. If a user were to continue with the sale or purchase of a banned item, it is now the user, not eBay, who has broken the law. If a European user were to go out of their way to use a U.S. based proxy, then they have taken a step to circumvent the law, thus indicating they are knowingly breaking the law. eBay and Yahoo do not have to catch 100% of all cases, they merely must make an effort to inform. That is all the French court ruled.
Yahoo swore in court it was impossible to determine with any kind of accuracy at all how to determine the physical location of a person based on IP address. But they change their web banners based on IP address. Their local office sells banner space to French companies with the guarantee that the ads will be served to people in France, and not to an uninterested audience in another country. It was this fact alone that caused the French court to rule against them. Yahoo proudly markets their ability to determine user location based on IP addresses, they know every IP block allocated to French ISPs and businesses and universities, and they filter on that. But they lied to the court, and the court wasn't fooled and ruled against them.
And as others have pointed out, but were mostly lost in the
The LICRA has made a name for itself in tearing down the ultra-far-right Nazi worshiping Front National, but since the FN almost doesn't exist today after a bunch of scandals, they have turned their interest towards the internet. Yahoo is the project of a group graduating next year, and they are as well versed at PR as they are at law.
I hereby invoke Godwin's law, and declare this whole thread terminated
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Anyone who still watches the Greedlympics must be too dumb to figure out how to use an anonymiser.
Not to say that many collectors of Nazi memorabilia are much smarter. But it would only take one to get Yahoo into trouble, while I don't see why the Olympic organizers would be terribly concerned if a few percent of Aussies managed to see the Yank version of the coverage. I have even more trouble imagining why the Aussies would bother.
The thing I don't understand about the Yahoo/Nazi memorabilia case, is why it wasn't sufficient that Yahoo exclude those with a French shipping address? Preferably from everything, those stinking rude frogs don't deserve to keep up with the world. (Just kidding.)
...And realize you are missing an important point.
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"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
CNN used to display different news depending on which geographic region your IP address was in. It was very annoying or amusing, depending on your point of view.
I used to have two browser windows open side by side, one using a local RIPE address, the other going through an IPSec tunnel to an american IP address. The differences were pretty bad, the americans tended to get lots more shallow, local, happy news and less international coverage. The European servers just didn't have very much american coverage, nor a lot of the content from the american site.
Recently, CNN has taken to popping up a very annoying window to every European asking them to change editions every time they access the site. But if you just close the window, you can access american content. If you click Ok, you get redirected to the European server. They also set a cookie which then permanently redirects the browser.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Whois will work, or you can use this nifty website.
Crispin
---
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
Chief Research Scientist, WireX Communications, Inc.
Immunix: Free Hardened Linux Distribution
I'm currently working on a dutch e-commerce site. Submitting it to Yahoo, I found out that every company that wants to be listed in their directory needs to be from the UK or US. We e-mailed them, called them on the phone... If you're not from the UK or US, you simply don't get listed! We ended up calling a UK friend, asking him to use his address :) Now something tells me this isn't right... (btw, 'wat zeg je?' means 'WHAT?' :)
Another great example of how NOT to create a website. And I guess these suckers have paid a fortune for this flash content...
Hey guys. I believe this is becoming a lot more possible, but on the DNS level. I work for F5 networks that makes a product called 3DNS that acts as a smart load balancing DNS server. You can set the balancing mode to the topology load balancing mode which has most of the CIDR blocks in the world hard coded into the code and you can tell the 3DNS what to do with requests coming from certain Continents, or countries. Right now, they're about 98% accurate on continents and about 93% accurate on countries and its getting better every release. You can also code in any subnet range or local DNS server you know and tell it how to specifically handle those requests. Remember though, this is based on the client's Local DNS server, so if someone in Florida is using a Local DNS server in California, we're going to treat them like they're in California, but I haven't seen anything much better than this. Many customers user this to server different continents different content without having to ask them where they're coming from. Companies like Yahoo could use this to block or allow content from certain countries for the olympics. For more info on it, check out: http://www.f5.com/f5products/3dns/
Contrary to the site of infosplit.com...
I did geolocation over 3 years ago using RIPE,ARIN, traceroute and gethostbyaddress() with domain and Agent parsing (in Perl) to distribute home pages. It's because of these actions (and mail spam) that ARIN stopped publicly posting it's database. Like anything else, if you are providing a wanted service (by users that is), then it's a good thing. The rest is spam. I also displayed local weather info for people as they hit the home page (I wish Intelicast would try). As for accuracy, known proxy services can be filtered out, as they tend to be big, fewer in nuber, and well known.
I think that the expanded domain space is going to be a big data problem, especially for smaller outfits.
Sigs are for propeller heads.