Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 09/23/06 09:30

On Sat, 23 Sep 2006, BusyGuy wrote:

> In article <qrYQg.18098$0n.15086@reader1.news.jippii.net>, Jukka K.
> Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi> wrote:
....
> > So think again. _If_ you really have some special content for
> > people who are from Borduria (the proverbial country, you know),
> > simply put a link to such content on your main page. Such as
> > "Special prices apply in Borduria", making this expression a link.
> > Problem solved.
>
> Thanks very much, Jukka, I appreciate your reply.
>
> Unfortunately, it doesn't help me and I truly hope you are a little
> bit incorrect.

No, it's quite true what Jukka wrote.

> I did a search and found myself here
> <http://software77.net/cgi-bin/ip-country/geo-ip.pl> but I also notice
> these
>
> <http://www.ip2location.com/> (which can pinpoint beyond country, down
> to city)

Well yes - in favourable cases. But there are enough cases where it
won't do what was wanted, to make it impractical for real use. It says
I'm located in London, which is wrong. I'd say giving a wrong answer
is worse than admitting that the information simply isn't available.

> I want to deny access to a particular page for all visitors coming
> from a particular country. Visitors from all other countries can
> have access. It's a question of complying with a court order
> granting suppression of information to a particular country.

That might be different! Presumably now it's not so much a question
of actually working (in the technical sense), but of doing whatever
the court says you have to do. I don't think this newsgroup is really
a good place for getting legal advice, though, which I'm certainly not
qualified to give.

> I realise I can't stop determined people (who might use an
> anonymizing service, for example) so I know it's not going to be
> 100% but I want to do what I can.

That's not the only problem - some users will fall foul of your
acess-blocking measures through no fault of their own.

A friend works for a company whose IP numbers are all in Canada,
regardless of where they are geographically.

For a while, my ISP was routing traffic via Germany, and Google was
addressing me in German as a consequence. You can imagine how happy I
would be if someone had decided to block access from all "German"
users.

And so on.

[Back to original message]