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Geolocation Enables Internet Borders
JimRay writes: "The Washington Post's Tech site is running an interesting piece on geolocation technology and its increased use on the net. The article explains the technology as being able to locate an Internet user in the world, at least to their mother country, and then grant access based on their location. They note how television broadcasters are interested in this kind of technology to prohibit the loss of distribution rights to things like the Olympics."
Isn't the whole idea behind the net to share information *without* any boundaries? Why do corporations and institution want to control everything? Sometimes control is bad.
This reminds me of the region coding restrictions on DVD.
Maybe it's too obvious to be worth pointing out, but a web server can't hope to locate the user, only the computer that the user is using to access the server. Will this really be enough to satisfy the law enforcement agencies or media rights holders?
11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101101000
404 errors are bad enough, now we will receive boundry errors to limit our access to the web.
:P.
Actually, since i only know how to speak and read english i have always had boundries. I can access the sites from another country written in a non-english language but i can't read or understand it
I wonder when the boundry technology is implemented if you will have to pay a tax or some kind of payment to grant full global access. Just think, not only do you have to pay for the size of your site on a server and the bandwidth it uses, but you will probably some time soon have to pay for the range of people that can access your site. For $232 you can have your site accessable by your local city, $5000 a month for your state, $45000 for the US, and for the world, well heck, we just want your soul and full access to any encryption technology you use.
I am not sure if i personally hate the idea or like it......
This has been done for some years now at certain sites - I think I remember that ICraveTV.com had a system that only let Canadian users in. Also, before crypto restrictions were lifted, you couldn't download the 128-bit versions of software if you were obviously from outside U.S./Canada.
.fr domain. It won't really hold people out if they are determined to get in, but common people will be 'spared' from those auctions)
The problem (or benefits, if you are the circumventing type) with this, however, is that I guess it will be mostly based on the TLD the user come from, which is often highly unreliable. But, if such filtering is enough to satisfy the demands of restrictive countries, I'm all for it. (Example: the nazi auctions at Yahoo could be rendered inaccessible to everybody from an
Used with moderation, this could be a much better solution than the endless legal battle mentioned in the article. The article is in fact very good, explaining all aspects of the way things are moving.
And for all the freedom-of-speech people out there: That freedom comes with responsibility. Nobody with a sane mind would call a wrestling champion names. The same goes for the online world. (But in the Yahoo case it's infact the inverse - somebody telling the wrestler (Yahoo) to shut up will suffer the consequences. I still think they could resolve it in a better way though.)
Thats what proxies are for! What happens when people start putting up HTTP proxies in the US and then allowing people from other countries to use it freely? Then they look like they are from the US.
And then there is AOL. Everyone on their network is funneled through their web caching servers. So they all look like they are coming from AOL's server complex.
Oh, and lets not forget VPNs and IP tunnels. I can send a US IP address over a VPN to the EU. I do that and vice versa to work around restrictions on things like IRC servers which only allow you to connect from specific locations.
It just wont work...
Brielle
This piece, by John Perry Barlow (barlow@eff.org) is all I have to say about Internet borders.
"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.
In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.
You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.
In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.
Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.
These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.
We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before."
Davos, Switzerland
February 8, 1996
this has been a question of mine for a while aol users for the most part I belive all ther Internet trafic leaves the AOL network and hits the net in reston? if that is not the case then most if not of all ther IP address are registerd to a Reston address as that is wehre the company was strated so would not all the AOL users or say UUNET users apear to be in Norther Virgina?
Do you even know what you are talking about? This is saying that sites can choose to block somebody based on their country. Why would a Linux, BSD, or any other site for that matter want to restrict access unless it was strictly forbidden by law. And since I don't see them forbidding Linux anytime soon (especially since it has Government endorsement in several countries).
Words you NEVER want to see in a new technology article:
geolocation
surveillance
information-gathering
spying
tracking
segmenting
marketing
When words like these are around, you know your privacy and civil liberties are at stake.
-Evan.
Fascinating, how different things can be in different countries.
I can reach that site (I'm in Sweden) and the first page features a prominent logo saying "This site is safe for kids", "Net Nanny approved", and then a note explaining that residents of the USA will not be admitted.
Kids from around the world can enter a site where adults from the US encounter a guardian to protect them from ... whatever.
Here's another example of surprising differences between countries: As a Swede I find it extremely curious that if I buy software from the US that shows human anatomy, it can be shown without genitals. It seems this is intended for children. As if children could somehow be unaware that they have genitals. I just can't imagine a Swedish parent or teacher wanting to show anatomy in such a strange, mutilated way.
Fascinating, curious differences.
Give a man a fish and he eats for one day. Teach him how to fish, and though he'll eat for a lifetime, he'll call you a miser for not giving him your fish.Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
What really bothers me about it though is that using this technology, it'll be much easier to start slapping sales tax on Internet sales. Maybe even 2 or 3 taxes - where the server is physically located, where the company operates from, and where I was sitting when I purchased the item.
What's wrong with targeted banners? What if Joe's Crabshack at 4th and Broadway (dunno if they actually could intersect, but imagine) could advertise only to people within 500m of his location? The reality is that, used properly, this could reinvigorate the net and pump billions of local dollars into it.
We use it for fraud checking and accurately analysing web logs.
The homepage is here and here is a quote from it :-
Geo-IP enables you to easily lookup countries by IP addresses, even when Reverse DNS entries don't exist. It uses the Berkeley Database to store the lookup table, and an easy to use Perl API to access the data.
Every man for himself, all in favour say "I"