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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."
I almost loathe to post the URL because I don't want it to get slashdotted, but one of my favourite online utilities is:
The Net World Map
Just follow that link, type in an IP (defaults to yours), and it does a reasonably good job at locating the address.
Does anyone else have a link to another public service like that?
One would assume that if this technology becomes widely used then it would generate a market for subscription funded proxies in countries where desirable content is restricted to local users. Kind of like the way ships use flags of convenience.
Perhaps I should start writing my business case for the bank manager.
...some technologies can pinpoint one's location.
That's a pretty big pin. Pinpoint an IP address maybe, but that doesn't tell you much about where someone really is. Ignoring the effect of proxies, some dynamic address allocation schemes can cover huge areas.
I think the more "Big Brother" aspects of this can probably be ignored for a while - until ISPs start getting more involved with content providers at least.
VisualRoute provides a similar service and is normally pretty accurate.
Gawyn
Freedom of Speech?
No, no no.
The Internet is (IMHO) a global community. Identifying and restricting people by ip address is, to my mind, contrary to the whole ethos.
I dislike the thought that people will be allowed to track who and where I am. I also dislike the thought that it'll be possible to prevent/deny access to your site based on where in the world the person who's trying to access it is located.1
Then again, I suppose there's always enough anonymous proxy servers out their to circumvent this.
...commerce killed the internet star.
What will be left if all information access will be restricted by local laws and economic interests ?
No more free connection to the whole world.
And don't think that this will apply by the laissez-faire rule: what's not forbidden is allowed.
Connectivity to/from non 100% legal correct countries will soon be 100% crippled leaving nothing but CNN, AOL and MSN crap. I just wonder if they'll restrict access to linux/BSD sites, too. With theses system being "h4X0r" systems.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
Its for law enforcement. If you can know what country a user is in you can apply local laws to that user. This is a boon for things like unauthorized computer entry, IP laws, jurisdictional determination, as well as determining what rates to charge somebody.
Really... if The Man wants such a thing he'll get it one way or the other. Passing laws is cheaper, but determining where somebody is, is the first step to enforcing the laws on the book.
It won't be long before the SSSCA is amended to add anonymity and location scrambling to its list of prohibited activities.
I think this story was run a year or so back too.
I could see this being abused at a high level. Someone could definately take this technology, and make it into a form of tool. For instance:
Good:
Company had 4 divisions: US, UK, China, Brazil. The company sets their website up to detect browser's location, and directs them to the site for the proper division.
Bad: Company has banner adds on their site. When someone from Las Vegas goes to their site, they advertise hookers and casinos, (since they are legal in vegas, lets entise the natives to go boost the economy!). Someone sitting in California goes to the same site and gets a banner for suntan lotion. Wow.. we just geographically marketed our products!
Btw.. "visitors try to enter UKbetting.com"
I went there, and tried to sign up. The program they use to detect your location seems to take forever (over 5 minutes)! Probably because I'm in the US =P
Can all fish swim?
This technology (and damn, it's really not perfect yet) is incredibly important for internationally-broadcast shows. We're currently developing a system which will hopefully tune a website to the market the show is playing in, so that the audience gets their language, their teasers (watch XYZ this Thursday at 8) and limits spoilers based on their broadcast schedule. If it worked all the time, it'd be great, which is why you have to introduce the loophole of letting the user override the setting if it's just plain wrong. Some of the things that make the internet great, like big pools of people from all over the world in one place, bring with them bad things (what happened on this episode of X-Files months before it hits Australia). Things like this, when used for noble purposes, are making the whole business work much better.
The world's only surviving livewriter.
The article talks mostly about commercial web sights that sell services that are illegal in some places - like on-line gambling and drugs.
To me, I want to know where I'm spending my money. Many on-line services do hide behind the web, trying to mask their true identity (and legitimacy and legality).
Clearly it is good for consumers to know with who they are dealing with.
It is, however, disconcerting that this same technology can prevent legitimate news, views, and opinions from easily making it to one location or another.
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
I just went to www.ukbetting.com and the page opened right up. Apparently the geolocation isn't completely foolproof. No tricks; we're on an rr.com connection, which isn't exactly tough to track or anything.
Skivvy Niner? Email me!
HEY! Look left just ONE MORE TIME!
...that you don't have to read further than the second paragraph before coming across the word "Terrorism". :-(
Still, from a networks point of view, it seems that geographical barring as described would always have to take place at a high protocol layer (e.g. HTTP). Anyone who *truly* wants to break the law will just go "underground" by inventing their own protocol, using an older version of an existing one, or subverting the geographically secure one by some redirection method or other.
And of course, if you start the blanket blocking of all IP traffic between two countries, the net would fall apart. Any CS monkey knows that one of the key design criteria for reliable and usable networks is location transparency.
Ho hum.
These sigs are more interesting tha
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
http://www.ukbetting.com
or
http://www.ukbetting.co.uk.
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
So how long until this is used to make sure people don't buy import DVDs, games, or even music, online?
I can see the RIAA/MPAA coming up with some 'if you don't agree to use this technology, we won't let you distribute our products' contract.... The larger retailers (Amazon, etc) would probably agree quickly enough, as it reduces the hassle of international shipping (lost orders, returns, etc) anyway...
(I buy lots of import CDs... many that are never released in the UK. Region coded music (DVD-Audio) is going to piss far more people off than region-coded DVDs ever have... you'll first need to get your player chipped, then shop through a proxy to get the discs... Or just use a napster clone...)
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?
The first reaction might be... so what, great for Canadians.... It's great, because at least SOME of the world can access the journals freely... as opposed to nobody at all. After all, they are government sponsored publications, so the Canadian people should be able to access them freely (while still being able to recover costs through international subscription sales). Check it out at: http://www.nrc.ca/cisti/journals
Mmmmmmm. Floor pie!
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.
I remember when caller id first rolled out and many were concerned with the fact that someone could easily get your phone number simply by placing a call to them. As the use and features available of caller id expanded we found that many of us use it to filter out unsolicted phone calls on a daily basis, or to identify secific calls we want to take. Initially it was used by government agencices, then commerical business, then individuals. This may very well have much the same cycle of use.
I expect that we will see browsers that will be able to be from an "anonymous" country just as there are browsers (such as Opera) that can identify themselves as a different browser. Of course as the software develops and evolves, there will tweaks and adjustments to the "gatekeeper" software that will allow the operator to reject "anonymous country", or as now, specific countries. And the browsers will adapt as well. Net shattering? I don't think so, but like most things in life it will have advantages as well as disadvantages.
Big corporations have their internal networks that can route huge amounts of global traffic out to Internet from centralized locations. This way quite a few Nokia, IBM etc users appear to come from country X regardless of the actual location of the user. I wonder how the media companies will agree the distribution with these guys. :)
"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid, it is true that most stupid people are conservative."
The problem with this is that in the *internet age*, people in the farthest reaches of the world (I live in Argentina, so I should know...) are exposed to all the hype sourrounding movie or CD releases, just like everybody else...
Media companies should realize that delaying releases just doesn't cut it as in the snail mail times.
As a Slashdot discussion grows longer, the probability of an analogy involving cars approaches one.
Aside from the usual privacy rants, there's another chilling effect here.
What if what I'm looking for is the info that is not normally availible to me through my local-access media.
Maybe I WANT info in not-my-language. Maybe I WANT the teasers from the other market. Maybe I WANT the spoilers. Etc. Etc Etc.
Something a lot of old-media people haven't seemed to grasp yet is that the Internet-as-media is an INDIVIDUAL DEMAND system, or if you prefer, a "pull" instead of a "push"
The more you try to force push-style paradiems on me, the less useful your outlet becomes.
The overriding consideration for any Internet media is "make it as easy to find what I'm looking for as possible" with things like clear indicies, functional and accurate searches, and so on. Don't make assumptions about what it is I want, and push it at me.
Here's the best analogy I can think of: A "push" media, like TV or Radio, can be used by a group. Assuming the audience has similar interests (and that the TV/speakers are large enough) a TV show can be watched alone, in a small group, or even a football stadium full of people.
Can you imagine a football stadium of people, watching the screen as one guy surfs the site?
Using the Internet is a personal and individual experience. It's a library, not a program. Trying to force broadcast-media concepts on it just doesn't work.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
This really isn't anything new... Our good friends at DoubleClick have been on top of this for a LONG time. I live in the tiny little state of Connecticut, but for at least the last year and a half I've been getting ads targeted for CT while browsing national and international sites. It started with banner ads for ctnow.com well over a year ago, followed closely by ads trying to get me to subscribe to The Hartford Courant. Now in the last month or so, SBC/SNET(which only serves CT, and yes, the ads are branded with the SNET part of the name, not just as SBC) has been putting on a really annoying campaign for their DSL services that include popunders and big flashy graphics. It's disgusting.
sharkyfour.com
I should have added that as well. :)
Most address block registration information contains geographical adresses. It's just a matter of pluging Whois into an application to provide location.Of course, it is not so easy since the records are mostly free form, but still it's a beginning.
In this thread everyone will cry out at the Evils of regional laws restricting the internet. The Evils of companies invading your privacy by tracing your location. The Evils of restricting internet access based on geography. "They can't do this to us! We'll fight back! We'll use international proxies! The internet is international and borderless! Keep your stupid local laws out of our net!"
And how many of these people will recall that just 13 articles back they were cheering on California's anti-spam law. Forcing spammers to identify the location of recipients, and having to learn and comply with 50 different sets of state regulations was a GoodThing. Anything to make life tough on spammers.
SPAM IS EVIL AND MUST BE STOPPED AT ANY COST! We need laws to protect us from spam! ACLU / EFF are evil if they defend spammers in court! We need to protect the children! Anyone who opposes anti-spam laws is probably a child molester!
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I work for a mapping company and we do banner ads in some of our applications based on the region of the map a user is looking at. True smart-region advertising.
A gnutella like multi-proxy system.
Imagine something similar to anonymizer.com, but completely distributed. You have a local ingress to the proxy network, and before your http sessions leave, you select the country/ip you'd like the egress to come from. Your connections are encrypted while on the proxy network, and its decentralized to be impossible to legally shutdown. You just need one or more computers on the proxy network in each locale you want to impersonate, willing to run the proxy software.
You could manually choose the locale of egress, or have it just randomize each connection for you. The latter might make targeted content not work at all (i imagine peoplewill embed detected locales into URLs, so it might suck to get
foo.com/ENU/index.html
but then get
images.foo.com/JPN/title.jpg
displayed in the html.
Oh, i think IPv6 throws a huge wrench in all of this, btw. (geolocation)
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Where would you like to be from today?
VisualRoute has been able to do this since like 1995, the first time I remember it. It gives a crude-looking world map, and it tracert's to a given IP/hostname, placing routers and eventually, the final destination, in semi-accurate places on the world map.
Maybe they got it down to a little less of a novelty and more of a useful tool, finally.
Spam is a major monkey wrench in electronic communications, but it's the same way with phone numbers! If you don't want phone calls, don't give your number out. And you can get a new email instantly- it's really no big deal. Anyone who's been around the block a few times has multiple emails- private, public, and spamtoilet. Actually, bigfoot.com has been doing a remarkable job of keeping shit out of my inbox for years now.
There's no need for John Law to put his fingers in there. We'll be just fine, thanks.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Wasn't the Cult of the Dead Cow going to be releasing some software that did exactly this? Whatever happened to the project?
How will this stop someone from dialing up a modem in a remote country?
Or use a proxy?
Also, how are they getting the geographical info anyways? From the databases of the respective registrars? A lot of them have incorrect info, and I don't see any other way of getting the address info, short of legal requirement for ISPs to disclose geographical locations.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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"
The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.
Nice sentiment, but as we've learned recently, it does require their wires. As long as that's true, we're fucked.
When we go wireless via public satellites, we'll be free. Until they shoot them down. There are powerful people who don't want us talking to each other, and the hard-core among them won't be swayed by passionate speeches. This declaration is an eloquent opening-ceremonies read, but don't think anybody on the other side is going to hear it and say "aww, drat, they're right."
-- http://frobnosticate.com