[Geowanking] IP geolocation

[Mike Liebhold]

Most of the big commercial IP geolocation providers, like quova also 
have robust  and improving capablities to mine ip geolocations for 
addresses that might be behind a proxy.  I know from personal experience 
from behind a proxy a thousand miles away from my registered address, 
when I used the findme ip geolocation utility on a high profile web 
mapping site.

The International Herald Tribune has an astounding and chilling quote 
here from Madam Hu Qiheng, chair of the Internet Society of China, 
regarding China's impending wide scale adoption of IPv6,  and  plans for 
more traceable individual IP adresses:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/03/19/business/chinet20.php

"  The standard, known as IPv6, solves technical problems faced by the 
Internet around the world, but Internet freedom advocates outside China 
warn that the internationally developed norm would also allow Beijing 
authorities - or any government or company for that matter - to have a 
better idea of what individuals are doing on the Internet.
 
"There is now anonymity for criminals on the Internet in China," said Hu 
Qiheng, chair of the Internet Society of China, a public-private group 
founded five years ago to promote the Internet in China. "With the China 
Next Generation Internet project, we will give everyone a unique 
identity on the Internet."
[snip]
"It may not be popular everywhere to say this, but I think it is 
important for the government to monitor and police the Internet," Hu 
said. "Bad things now happen on the Internet, and we want to stop that."
 
Fighting Internet crime, which Hu defined broadly to include acts 
counter to the interests of the Chinese government, requires a more 
certain way of identifying people online, she said.
 
The IPv6 standard, Hu said, offered the best mechanism for establishing 
the identity of users online. "

 









James Muir wrote:

> those on the list with an interest in geolocating internet users and/or
> devices may be interested in the following:
>
> %%%%%%%%
> title:  Internet Geolocation and Evasion
>
> http://www.ccsl.carleton.ca/~jamuir/papers/TR-06-05.pdf
> http://www.scs.carleton.ca/research/tech_reports/2006/
>
> abstract:
>
> Internet geolocation technology (IP geolocation) aims to determine the
> physical (geographic) location of Internet users and devices. It is
> currently proposed or in use for a wide variety of purposes, including
> targeted marketing, restricting digital content sales to authorized
> jurisdictions, and security applications such as reducing credit card
> fraud. This raises questions about the veracity of claims of accurate
> and reliable geolocation, and the ability to evade geolocation. We begin
> with a state-of-the-art survey of IP geolocation techniques and
> limitations, and examine the specific problems of (1) approximating a
> physical location from an IP address; and (2) approximating the physical
> location of an end client requesting content from a web server. In
> contrast to previous work, we consider also an adversarial model: a
> knowledgeable adversary seeking to evade geolocation. Our survey serves
> as the basis from which we examine tactics useful for
> evasion/circumvention. The adversarial model leads us to also consider
> the difficulty of (3) extracting the IP address of an end client
> visiting a server. As a side-result, in exploring the use of proxy
> servers as an evasionary tactic, to our surprise we found that we were
> able to extract an end-client IP address even for a browser protected by
> Tor/Privoxy (designed to anonymize browsing), provided Java is enabled.
> We expect our work to stimulate further open research and analysis of
> techniques for accurate and reliable IP geolocation, and also for
> evasion thereof. Our work is a small step towards a better understanding
> of what can, and cannot, be reliably hidden or discovered about IP
> addresses and physical locations of Internet users and machines.
> %%%%%%%%%
>
> any comments are welcome.
>
> -James
>
> _______________________________________________
> Geowanking mailing list
> Geowanking at lists.burri.to
> http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://geowanking.org/pipermail/geowanking_geowanking.org/attachments/20060417/139bc978/attachment-0003.html>