Yahoo!/France — different today?
I've been looking into IP address filtering by content providers. I understand that IP addresses can be attached with confidence to geographical locations (at the country level, at least) about 80% of the time. You have to make up the rest with heuristics. So there are companies that are in the business of packaging those geolocation heuristics for sites.
Quova has a patent (No. 6,684,250) for
A method and an apparatus operates to associate a geographic location associated with a network address. At least one data collection operation is performed to obtain information pertaining to a network address. The retrieved information is processed to identify a plurality of geographic locations potentially associated with the network address, and to attach a confidence factor to each of the plurality of geographic locations. An estimated geographic location is selected from the plurality of geographic locations as being a best estimate of a true geographic location of the network address, where the selection of the estimated geographic location is based upon a degree of confidence-factor weighted agreement within the plurality of geographic locations.
Quova's competitor Digital Envoy has a patent (No. 6,757,740) for
A method of determining a geographic location of an Internet user involves determining if the host is on-line, determining ownership of the host name, and then determining the route taken in delivering packets to the user. Based on the detected route, the method proceeds with determining the geographic route based on the host locations and then assigning a confidence level to the assigned location. A system collects the geographic information and allows web sites or other entities to request the geographic location of their visitors. The database of geographic locations may be stored in a central location or, alternatively, may be at least partially located at the web site. With this information, web sites can target content, advertising, or route traffic depending upon the geographic locations of their visitors. Through web site requests for geographic information, a central database tracks an Internet user's traffic on the Internet whereby a profile can be generated. In addition to this profile, the central database can store visitor's preferences as to what content should be delivered to an IP address, the available interface, and the network speed associated with that IP address.
Both of these issued in 2004.
Quova also has a 2006 patent (No. 7,072,963) for
A method and a system perform geolocation activities relating to a network address. A database of network addresses, and associated geographic locations, is maintained. A query, including a network address, is received against the database for a geographic location associated with the network address. Information, concerning the query received against the database, is logged. Geolocation activities relating to at least the network address are modified based on the logged information.
That's pretty broad — a patent covering the modification of geolocation information based on queries.
So here's the question: How widely are these services used? If they are in wide use (and I bet they are for advertising services), does it now make sense to put content sites to the burden of complying with the laws applicable to the people/machines they know are visiting them? Hmmm?
In the famous Yahoo! case, Yahoo! argued that it couldn't know where people were coming from and that therefore it couldn't block/filter usage of Yahoo.com based on geographical location. Is that still true? Google has its own geolocation heuristics. According to this press release, 35% of US online merchants were using geolocation tools as of the end of 2006.
All comments more than welcome.
(to find these patents, search this database)
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When researching methods to measure real-time cyber election districts, We found there were several systems that utilize Geo-Location.
First we looked at a few Social & Commercial networking websites use systems that are based on GPS and IP addressing combinations:
http://loopt.com/loopt/aboutUs.aspx
http://www.friendster.com/
http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html
http://www.orgnet.com/
Then we looked at IP specific Locators:
http://www.frappr.com/
http://geourl.org/
http://www.clustrmaps.com/
http://www.buzztracker.org/
http://neoearth.neoworx-blog-tools.net/neoearth_v2.php
and mapping specific products like
NeoTrace (Now McAfee Visual Trace)
Until we settled on Morphix’s MetaSight
[ http://www.morphix.com/1_MetaSight/introduction.htm ]
There are a few other ‘Knowledge Management Solutions (KMS) (like General Dynamics), but these are quite expensive.
We’re still developing, but for demo’s sake here is a prototype.
The goal is to have a viable way of conducting an online-Vote not just to tally an outcome, but also measure the metrics and map the dimensions of the ‘cyber-district’, if you will.
That’s to say in Internet Cyber-Space, a District can be defined in terms of a number of Individuals who have voted similarly to define a community (kind of like a voting-block of people), rather than lines (or metrics) based on geo-political or IP-Local.
This provides greater efficiency & flexibility in how our Tax dollars are distributed. (providing for IT goods & services). So Tax-Dollars could be spent/budgeted either in an: Area, Multiple Areas, and in Internet specific Community, addressing needs more directly.
Voter-Databases combined with 'Geographic Information System' have been around for some time.
Cyber-Voting differs somewhat from 'geographically-referenced' systems, in that the 'GISystems' information is a combination of IP address, Geospatial, Registration (Cyber-Voters Registration), GPS, and Other database information (Rep/Dem, Male/Female, etc..) directed into a primary key (e.g: objective results, e.g.:the basis of the ballot item).
There are items that need to be addressed with this new technology;
Cyber-Gerrymandering (a kin to spam-voting) and a slew of other concerns before we arrive.
If we change how we look at the World, maybe we could bring it closer together.
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/cartograms/
Here’s a few Links for you Susan:
Propositions : http://www.wgcig.net/wgcig/propositions.htm
Arguments : http://www.wgcig.net/wgcig/Arguments.htm
Labs/Volunteer : http://www.wgcig.net/wgcig/Volunteer.htm
Our World : http://www.wgcig.com/