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How To Clean Up Incorrect Geolocation Information?
zorro6 writes "I thought this might be an interesting question/topic and it would sure help me to get some kind of answer. I recently got internet service from a small, local wireless ISP in my area (south central Colorado, USA). The strange thing is that many, many web sites think I am in Quebec, Canada when I use the service. Evidently some geolocation service thinks my IP address indicates I am in Canada. I have checked the obvious. The WHOIS information for my IP correctly indicates a location of Durango, CO. So the bad info is coming from some more sophisticated geolocation service. My ISP is at a loss as to how to fix this but it is causing me a lot of grief. Many of the ads I get shown on Yahoo! for instance are in French! Certain sites won't sell me goods or services because they don't do business in Canada. So far I know that Yahoo! (or their ad provider), Nvidia, Movielink, etc. all think I am in Canada. I would sure appreciate any help/info on how to get this corrected."
Adult Friend Finder would like to know too
it's silly when they show many hot looking ladies from Morrisville VT (pop. 2000).
I don't know how to fix it, but I know that some ads (before I got adblock plus) thought I lived in a town about 25 miles from here but it was later fixed. I don't know what happened but it was weird seeing "Find sexy ladies in xxxxxx, oh" and it not being my current location.
You might have to track down a proxy to surf from.
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
but you're going to get a lot more help if you provide your ip address, even if you don't like doing that to the crowd. Or at least let us know what your router's IP address is or some other address in your subnet, since they are probably all the same (wrong).
..." vs "call XXX at 555-1212 and ask for their geo department, problem solved".
Unless you are only interested in knowing the generals of how to fix it yourself, not more in depth examination of your problem (and possibly an immediate solution) This will be the difference between "try this and look that up and see what this is and google for that and
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Use ESRI's ArcGIS Software Suite to fix any problems that start with GEO or GIS.
Not to point out the obvious, but my first instinct is always "blame the user." Have you tried clearing out any cookies relevant to the offending sites?
-G
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
What's the difference?
Whois provides info on domain registrations. Go to arin.net and plug your IP into the search field. It should tell you who has been assigned the IP block you are in. That's probably how they are doing the tracking. Anybody can put whatever they want for a reverse DNS entry. Or nothing at all. No reasonable advertising service would use it to target ads. It's too slow and unreliable.
Hey! Cheap meds!
maxmind.com seems to pioneer GeoIP information, I suggest contacting them.
It's amazing how many people rely on geo-IP information when it's so unreliable. Denying potential customers use of your services because of tenuous assumptions you're making about them seems like bad business.
We'd use geo-IP data at my old job, but it was just in non-critical, stop-gap places, trying to provide a better experience to users that we knew nothing about. Denying some customers use of our site would have been costly.
Download anything and everything. The MPAA will think your in Canada and look for someone else to sue.
Jebus. Creede> .
Try another computer connected to the same wireless device - eliminate your own computer as culprit. Google "free proxy colorado" http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=safari&rls=en-us&q=proxy+colorado+free&btnG=Search Results in: http://www.cooleasy.com/index.php?act=whois&ip=128.138.207.181 - 5th hit In any case, google is always your friend when it comes to troubleshooting stuff, there's a good chance someone else has experienced what you have
Even if you do get the address corrected, it will take years before these companies update their databases and work correctly. About a year ago, the US Post Office changed the zip code in the area that I just moved into, and it has been a hassle left and right.
The electric company claimed they didn't offer service to a house that they were currently providing electricity to. My health insurance was changed to an 'out of area' plan even though my dad already had the right provider in the same zip code. Sears wouldn't deliver until I gave them the old, incorrect zip code. Even Google still has it wrong on some maps, but not others (and I filed the bug months ago, but no fix).
Welcome to another series of problems created by software developers who made bad assumptions.
You may not get anywhere with it, but it might be worth it to try and contact Yahoo's ad department about this. After all, its pretty worthless to be dumping a French ad to an American, and as a result a waste (however small) of the money the advertiser spent getting the ad to you in the first place. I'm suggesting Yahoo because you mention specifically their ads showing up, but if there are any others that do the same thing, it might be worth contacting them as well.
Yes, it does seem rather counterintuitive to most of us here who block ads, but they are a source of revenue for the likes of Yahoo, and if they can chip in some effort to more effectively target you, you've gone a ways towards solving the problem with the other sites.
The actual problem may be that your ISP is outsourcing the proxy to a datacentre in Canada thus it may be stuffing up the GEO_LOC software on some retail servers. Try using another proxy (within your area obviously).
Perhaps the person experiencing this should take advantage of his situation and test the censorship laws of various countries and see what content changes when non-Americans visit U.S. sites - at the very least NBC doesn't allow non-American viewers to see its shows, for instance.
As you may have been aware, the US economy has been in a rut. I'm not quite sure how "connected" you folks are out there in them sticks of Colorado.. but Bush decided he needed a new war to boost the economy and get cash flowing again.
The Russians weren't interested.. so we picked a fight with neighboring Canada. As is usual with US military operations lately, we failed.
Your part of the country actually IS Canada now dude. Good luck.. better than living in the States.
Try reading the whole summary.
"Certain sites won't sell me goods or services because they don't do business in Canada."
Yahoo and other sites rely on databases of geo data. E.g. databases mapping IP ranges to geographical locations.
There are a few providers of such databases and they constantly need to update their databases to fix issues as the one reported by you.
E.g. notify http://www.quova.com/
Move to Canada.
I live in Québec!
You insensitive clod!
Like radio, television, and newspapers, advertisers pay an advertising company for targeted ad placement. If the advertisers were to find out their ads are being viewed by people that aren't even in the same country they are trying to target (much less speaking a different language), they'll call the advertising company selling them the ads and yell about it - probably threatening not to pay. Once you start affecting the advertising company's income, someone will figure out the problem and fix it. This probably isn't your ISP's issue, or even the advertising company. The lesson, though, is to target the person that can bitch the loudest (the advertiser), and have them target the person they pay for the service the advertising company, with threats not to pay. The advertising company will find the bad database entry and force the location company to repair it. Good luck. Good luck.
My IP address is 127.0.0.1 and none of the geo-location companies can find me.
I'm interested to find out how to clean up "incorrect" Geolocation info too.
Increasingly it appears sites are using GeoLocation to route you to a different version of their website, or prevent you from viewing content.
Sometimes it may be useful, such as when Google serving you localised adverts, however when they get it wrong it can becomes a great pain in the arse.
Worse is when sites ban you from viewing content, or just ban you completely, based on your location.
I'm sure some people will rationalise the need for Geolocation for restricting content, but I think it is akin to putting a poster in a public place and then trying to restrict people from viewing it.
If I had this problem, I would be able to watch the current season of Degrassi!
My advice is to go the route Ares suggests, by contacting Yahoo about the problem, but in addition, I would emphasize in my communications with them that as a customer, they aren't getting full value for the money they pay their geolocation service. This may be more effective for actually motivating Yahoo to contact its geolocation service about it, rather than just complaining about bad ads.
a better solutio would be to learn French and INVADE Quebec. you would be doing both yourself, and the rest of Canada a huge favour.
-I only code in BASIC.-
Desole, mais je ne comprend pas. S'il vous plait, ecrit en francais.
Merci,
Jean-Guy de Tabernac
MaxMind are pretty big on Geo-location. Try their tool to see if it's them: MaxMind Geo-location
My ISP is at a loss as to how to fix this but it is causing me a lot of grief. Many of the ads I get shown on Yahoo! for instance are in French!
Ah, you're complaining about the utility of ads that you see on Yahoo...? This must be a first.
Three Squirrels
Does this new small ISP have a Pringles can on its roof, pointed North?
Canada, Eh?
Or perhaps you should just move out of Quebec???
Have your ISP contact Akamai. As an ISP who was also misidentified as "being outside of the USA" by Akamai's geolocation, our customers suffered from the exact same kinds of problems with region protection on network streaming. We didn't get it resolved until we were able to shake the tree properly at Akamai.
AFAIK, Akamai has the most utilized geolocation service out there.
Article summary says "Certain sites won't sell me goods or services because they don't do business in Canada."
That's a lot worse than inline ads.
i am a soviet space shuttle
Wait until the USA annexes canada-you/they will be happy.
all sarcasm aside, Is there much REAL difference anymore?
I used to LOL at the intro for these games, but not anymore.
Yes, my Karma can stand th 'fallout', but can you argue the fact?
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
It means when you surf those porno sites, you won't be able to find a fuck buddy in your area.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
I was in Mexico recently. Whenever I visited Google, I'd get the Mexican Google site. Getting the USA Google website was virtually impossible. As soon as I changed the URL, it'd just forward me back to the Mexican Google site.
Yahoo exhibited the exact same behavior. Same thing happened with a bunch of other websites. It was really damn annoying. As an American living in the US, I was never aware of this behavior because I never previously ran into it.
Hulu was particularly bad because they only display video for "US" IPs. This guy is legitimately living in the US, but with his IP coming up as Canada, he wouldn't be able to access that website.
with the MAFIAA trying to sue everyone with an american address, and with the massive attacks on internet privacy underway in the US, I'd think you'd WANT to be mistaken for canadian.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Most of the major Internet companies use Quova (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) for their IP geolocation data (linky. You don't need to have your ISP contact them. Just send an email to support@quova.com with your IP and physical location. They used to provide weekly data updates, so I imagine it is equivalent or more frequent now.
I would like to know how to fix this kind of information also. Incorrect Geocoding has affected my life in many ways.
About a year ago, I went for a job interview in a suburb of my city that I am unfamiliar with. It started out normal, they gave me the address over the phone. I looked it up in google maps, and printed out a map from my place to there. I also punched it up in my GPS in my car. It took me there. It took me to a residence, not a business. It turns out that where the place is on a street, there is an identically named avenue a few miles away, and all maps and directions point to the incorrect place, despite typing it either way. I was late to the interview because I was in the wrong spot.
This business gets their address misprinted in the phone book every year also, even though they point it out manually, every year, it never gets fixed because somewhere it says otherwise, incorrectly.
I pointed this mistake out to Google, they still haven't fixed it.
The neighborhood I live, underwent a zip code split about a year and a half ago, and I live in a new zip code now. Most websites and other places do not recognize this new zip code, or say it's otherwise invalid. Including Google Maps. A year and a freaking half later... It would seem that this new zip code only exists to the postal service.
MaxMind are the main GeoIP provider, afaik. You might want to try getting in contact with them.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
nice place, i went rafting there and then had some really nice beer brewed locally. i liked it so much i bought a gallon jar of it and i have it on my cabinet right now.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Uh... www.google.us
If you're on a Windows machine it may have nothing to do with geolocation and everything to do with your regional settings. Go to Control Panel, Regional Settings (XP) or Regional and Language Options (Vista) and make sure your current format is English (United States) not English (Canada). Yes, I know it's odd to have Language Options instead of Location affect this, but it does.
Neil
It hasn't been announced yet but GW Bush sold Colorado to Quebec for some magic beans. They'll be moving it some time next year.
In my laptop, this value was set to en-GB and this was leading me to UK websites instead of American websites. Yours is probably set to something different than en-US.
Hope this helps!
If that was your problem, you could be changing settings all over the place and none of it would help.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Did I read that right? You're complaining about the advertising? I don't care if it relevant or not, I'm not interested.
I'm from Toronto but living in Shanghai. I get a mix of ads for Toronto, which are utterly pointless as I don't live there any more, and most of the others are in Chinese, which I can't read and so utterly pointless. What seems to break things most is that my browser is set for en-GB (and then en-CA followed by en)... how many websites force you to the wrong version based on this? Stupid programming - use it for localising the diplay. Yes Yahoo Mail, the American date format is irritating and confusing when you're the only exposure to it in my life. And then sites like Yahoo Mail and Facebook can't keep up with all my time zone-changes, or just screw things up completely when I travel.
Advertising: intrusive waste of space.
Enjoy your relative privacy, and the fact that ads targeted at you are being routed elsewhere. I would love to have your predicament.
Now you can use Canadian torrent sites :P
But seriously there isn't anything you can do. Talk to your ISP. They have all the power in this situation. But than again not sure if they can fix it. Obviously your the ISP is getting their internet from Canada and even though your registered router is in Canada most Geo Location sites are only region specific and don't do an accurate trace.
They just try try to find the general area you live because doing a full trace for targeted ad is resource intensize. So pretty much no sites (besides adult friend finder) will get your location right.
Or www.google.com/ncr ... this sets a cookie that prevents further redirects to country-specific sites.
I'm on a shuttle bus right now going between Portland and Corvallis Oregon, and Yahoo thinks I'm in Canada. Of course the fact that there IS wireless in this bus definitely makes the 2.5 hour ride a lot nicer :^)
Oh, come on.... When I visit Google for the first time, I get it in German. You know what I do? Yeah, there is a small link on the bottom of the page named "Google in English" (and it's really written in English!) It's to the right, just above © 2008 Google. Click it and you will be in English nirvana. A cookie is set and it never asks you again.
I checked, http://www.google.com.mx/ has it too...
Have you tried looking down at the bottom of the page where, on every single google web search front page, whatever the language it is setup for, there is a link called "Google.com in English" ?
"My ISP is at a loss as to how to fix this but it is causing me a lot of grief. Many of the ads I get shown on Yahoo! for instance are in French!"
That sounds really tough.
http://www.maxmind.com/app/contact
To confirm that their database is incorrect, here is a simple frontend to MaxMind's data:
http://mapthisip.com/
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.
Alternatively, change ISPs.
Given the legal differences between various localities what other option do they have than restricting all of our rights to the lowest common denominator. I mean other than geolocation how does ebay avoid WWII german memorabilia or copies of mein kampf in europe? As companies expand to have operations in more places with more and more restrictions they don't have a choice about obeying the local laws but I certainly don't want to have an internet only of stuff that's legal everywhere.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Sounds plauseable, but do you have any sources/proof ?
This happened to me when my ISP bought some IP addresses from somewhere else. All the porn sites thought I was from a different country for about three months then it fixed itself.
B'y you're in a real kerfuffle. You might have better luck posting at http://ask.slashdot.ca/
Funny I just mentioned this reference on IRC a few days ago. I love you Slashdot. You make me feel all warm inside.
"Without curiosity and knowledge, the mind is a vast void. Without the mind, curiosity and knowledge are nonexistent."
For one thing, the top poster won't be able to watch videos from Comedy Central. They are using some GeoIP scheme to block views from Canada.
Because targeted spam is incorrect?
WTF?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
No Location information would be available. They less that is known about me by a complete stranger, the better.
My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my Father! Prepare to die!
Most people use the MaxMind database for geolocation. You can download the DB for free and check if your IP subnet is incorrectly listed. If it is, wouldn't hurt to drop them an email.
http;//www.maxmind.com
That is where the error probably is. Unfortunately, they only update their database every quarter or so, and even then who knows when customers update their copy, so you will probably be seeing this problem for a long time.
I for one welcome our new French Canadian Overlords.
May the Labatt and Molson reign over you for as long as it can.
'-)
End of Line.
http://www.ckdhr.com/dns-loc/howto.html
You won't be able to fix it yourself, but the ISP should be able to configure their domain to indicate its proper location. A reverse lookup on your IP should then work as intended.
Dear movielink, nvidia, {insert website here},
...
Your website is broken. I live in Colorado and my IP is 1.2.3.4. If you don't believe me, my ISP is Joe's ISP and Tire Shack, Inc, just perform a quick whois on the information. I would suggest you contact whomever you use for geolocation information to have them correct it.
Same information, not sent to Slashdot. If the people running the service don't respond to you, maybe they'll respond to a dozen companies who own the websites you go to. Remember, you're *their* customer, it's in their best interest to have your info correct.
I used to work as a SysAdmin for an ISP, we acquired a new block of IPs which previously were owned by a nefarious spammer. I had to jump through hoops trying to convince some blacklists to remove us. Finally, when there was one list with zero contact information and it seemed to no longer have any management behind it, I called our customers (there were only about two) having issues emailing a particular state office. I called the state office and explained the situation, they whitelisted just the IP of our particular mail server.
Think about solving the problem in a different way.
FLR
Lots of geo location information is often based on the requesting DNS server. The popular webpage does a geo-location lookup of your DNS server location. A way around this is to use Open DNS or request your ISP offer an alternative DNS server based entirely, in your country & ensure that all geo data would point to the same country, e.g. United states, IP Allocation, RADB/RSPL/ARIN information etc etc.
Personally, I'd say that's the real problem. Even if for some real or idiotic reason you don't want to ship to Canada, there's nothing to say that the "Canadian" you're bouncing from your online store doesn't want to have the item delivered somewhere you will ship to. Front page is the proper place to declare shipping destination policy; delivery address is the proper place to perform the software check.
Video display denial due to geolocation is one of the most utterly fucktarded features of the modern WWW. Firstly, it's fairly trivial to circumvent if the viewer is sufficiently interested. Or they can just download it from a P2P site or YouTube. Secondly, you really, really are being an asshole. It might gain you some trivial commercial advantage; it may be your "right"; but, you're an asshole all the same.
Name the sites! We'll morph the Agent Smith template into Guido and send over a few thousand copies.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Maybe you should just move to Canada, learn French, and be done with it!
Your provider probably has put new blocks online that have not been picked up by the provider of these websites. What is your provider plus your IP; i can check this. Please I do not need your exact IP only the first 3 octets eg: 62.100.201.xxx Thanks
Many of the ads I get shown on Yahoo! for instance are in French!
Oh, I see - you'd prefer them in Spanish. *rimshot*
you had me at #!
yes you have a point there davenaff, also note that many top sites actually use dns referrer targeting which countries servers you get directed too. e.g. if your sending a request from a server that is obviously in canada, then likely send you the .ca server locations etc.
It's a Firefox plugin, if you've got installed you already have the source.
When my company set up an office in Canada, the IT staff set up a VPN to connect the two offices. Unfortunately, they accidentally routed all US HTTP traffic through the Canadian office. All of the sudden we were all forwarded to Google.ca.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Yeah. I agree, and I don't get it either. It's one thing to guess where a user is, another to guess wrong and refuse them business. I'd say the OP should write polite but firm letters telling these companies how much business they lost from refusing to override their mistaken guesses.
i am a soviet space shuttle
Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day.
Teach a man to fish, and he'll feed himself for years.
Teach a man to fish and he will create a fishery that will soon be depleted.
I googled this myself out of curiosity, but could find none.
I was surprised to see, however, that they seem relatively legitimate. They have 8,000 of their own weather monitors, and even the National Weather Service has signed on to use some of Weatherbug's weather tracking data in some fashion.
Not that far east. Begins with P.
They have it correct.
I use statcounter.com to track use on my websites. I noticed that when I access my own sites from work, statcounter tells me that I was in Plano, Texas. I've only been in Texas once. I've noticed since then that LOTS of surfers are apparently from Plano, Texas. I'm guessing that some major ISP has a big operation there.
-- QED
While you are at it, cc a few of the advertisers who are paying Yahoo to target you incorrectly with their ads. They are more able to put pressure on Yahoo to fix the problem, being the source of the cash in question.
Maybe you could get one of the bilingual members here to translate the message to French for you. (Assuming their bi are the correct linguals.)
For those who want to try it, here's a link to the demo page http://www.maxmind.com/app/lookup_city. (And note the link to check your own IP in the bottom right :)
I think you should be glad to get ads in French. At least you don't understand them. Think about getting AdBlock, you won't even notice that.
Someone from the Avalanche probably put in their old address when signing up for some online service and set the whole range to QC.
As for fixing it, sorry, can't help you.
Uh, going to http://google.com/ from a foreign country takes you to that country's google website, typically not in English.
And yes, there is a setting for displaying English. However, you still get listings for that country, in their language, rather than the US listings, in English, which is what I really wanted.
Even so, the question I was answering comes down to: when does geographical information make browsing a pain in the ass? The fact that I have to know the settings for Google and every website that I visit to get the results I want is a pain in the ass. It's a further pain to apply those settings instead of my preferred settings (clearing the browser of cookies upon close). And the fact that applying those settings still don't give me the results I expect is a further pain in the ass.
I'd much rather prefer to have one global geographical setting which I could set.
Yes, and you're still on the German Google, with German results, only it's printed in English. That is not the same as getting the US Google website.
Further that was an example of a single website. The fact that I have to learn how to change the settings for every website I visit is a pain in the ass. Making those changes instead of my preferred settings is another pain in the ass.
Again, the Google example is an example of one website. Other websites may not be so flexible.
Further, even if those other sites are that flexible, it's a pain in the ass to figure out how to change the settings for all of them.
Further still, that means I have to change my browser settings from clearing my cookies on close - yet another pain in the ass.
The fact that I can get around all of these nuisances does not change the fact that they are a nuisance in the first place.
...but there might be some insight in this post too.
The "192.168.1.101" thing might be a funny joke, but NAT routing and proxies along the way do indeed interfere with geolocation. This can happen even if you have a proper public IP address that by all appearances comes from a local netblock.
For example, when I use my work computer at home, geolocation correctly identifies me as being in Alberta, Canada. Though my office is also in Alberta, when I use the very same notebook there it days I am in Wisconsin, USA. This is the case even though the public-facing internet addresses in our office are very obviously Canadian.
It isn't good enough to do "ifconfig" or "ipconfig" and figure out the IP address you have locally--it isn't even good enough to get the IP address of your gateway or the public IP address of your NAT router, because there may in fact be proxies, VPNs and the like. In my case we are a branch office in Canada for a parent company with its network operations centred in Wisconsin. Though local tools indicate local IP addresses, a proxy address different from anything on our local systems shows up when you go to a page that reports your IP address or hostname. This even happens when I log into the Citadel server in my home from my office--the "who's online" returns me with the hostname of a proxy server.
I wonder if this person has tried going to one of those sites that shows your hostname or IP address as its servers can determine. If you are using a small wi-fi ISP in that quite sparsely populated "4 corners" region of the US then there could be one or two levels of service providers above them yet, with all sorts of proxies and virtual networks and traffic-shaping gateways in between you and the 'net.
You need to contact Yahoo! about correcting the old data they have about this IP address because I think Yahoo! may use their own whois data a. Ehh! You should check several third party systems to check if whois data has propagated to all of servers in the world properly. You can use these websites to check:
http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp
http://www.internic.net/whois.html
http://uwhois.com/
http://www.whois.net/
If you see one that is out of sync then you need to contact that registry server/db owner and tell them to update that data.
I remember I updated my whois data for my company several months ago and occasionally I find a backwater server that still has the old whois information and depending who they are I'll contact them to update their server/db.
You're wanted aboard Spaceball One immediately! And I'll have someone change the IP address of your luggage :-)
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
I've noticed that changing the locale settings of the PC can affect what ads are displayed. I'm in the US but I run my Mac in Japanese mode and I regularly see adds for things in Japan. (At least, Adult Friend Finder thinks I'm in Japan... I didn't know there were so many hot foreign women living there!) I haven't tested on Windows, but I think running a different language browser (for example, Japanese Firefox on an English Windows) will also cause this problem. I'm guessing some sites look at the user agent of the browser for language settings.
Treat every day like it's your last; delete your browser cache before going to bed.
That's very interesting, because when I do my searchs and click on links they are not translated. So, I do my search in English, I get my results in English and I click the link and it's English, then what is the problem?
Try inverting that: it is a pain in the ass for native people to switch every webpage to their native language. Do remind: *you* are the *exception* in that particular country. Every other Mexican, is actually happy that he gets the page in his native language.
Try to see this world through the eyes of someone else sometimes, mmmkay?
It's localization and language problem, not a geolocation problem. Where you are or where they think you are has nothing to do with the problem. Quebec is officially bilingual English and French, so while you are correct in that the services like Yahoo! are wrong to serve you French ads, it's because they are ignoring your browser's language preference settings.
Many other countries and regions have more than one official language. It's pathetic to see the slow, steady evaporation of technical knowledge in the market. Ten years ago, anyone and everyone working with WWW services knew how to deal with user-specified language preferences and, where more than one language was required, used the HTTP content negotiation. It's very easy in Apache to support this HTTP function. For Lighttpd you need a lua script, but that too is easy. For Yahoo or Google, they have their own home grown HTTP servers, so have to file a bug report directly with them.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
I live on the Central California coast in Santa Maria and my ISP Comcast shows as being east of Oakland. I guess it depends on where your Internet provider leaves their private network and hits the public Internet.
I hate it when people like you don't even bother to read the thread before posting.
I did read this thread and you're complaining about something that is useful for others. That you weren't aware of this behaviour is not important.