Re: Getting longitude and latitude from an IP address

[mojotoad]

There is an interesting article in the International Herald Tribune today that discusses the impending balkanization of the internet using tools such as your script (i.e., servers denying access based on geographical location).

I´m not convinced it will become as widespread as the author seems to believe, but it´s a good read.

Matt

Update: The original IHT article, from Jan 4, 2002, can now only be found on The Washington Post archives although it requires a pay-per-whack account for the full fetch. :-(

[Kickstart]

I suspect it's already happening...I once wrote a script for a girlfriend who wrote an online journal that sent visitors to various pages depending on their IP address (well, the first two parts anyway - testing for ISP). This allowed her to send her parents and other relatives off to a page telling them to screw off! :)

The thing is...who knows? It's hard to tell how many people are doing this sort of thing. I suspect that I wouldn't mind terribly much if I went to (for example) eBay and all the prices were in Canadian dollars (since I'm in Vancouver). I might get a little annoyed if I went to Google and my searches came up only with Canadian sites though. It would remove the effectiveness of the service, rather than enhancing it.

Kickstart

[belden]

Anecdotal information relating to this: back in college I was trying to update my MS-IE to handle 128-bit crypto and was denied the download by the Microsoft website; some script on their end had used my IP to (incorrectly)determine my location to be outside the US. This was perhaps 5-6 years ago, when US companies couldn't export 128bit software. (That has changed, hasn't it?)

blyman
setenv EXINIT 'set noai ts=2'

[zakzebrowski]

Unless you're in Afghanistan, Iraq, or some other place like that... yup. There are still some restrictions but they are a little more relaxed now (to the best of my knowledge).

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Zak