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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.
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?
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.
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
http://www.ukbetting.com
or
http://www.ukbetting.co.uk.
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
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!