How do you ban a geographic area from a website?

[MillCreek]

I was reading that a large porn website was banning access from North Carolina to protest their new LGBT law.  This made me wonder: how do you identify a user/group of users from a particular geographic area?  Is it something to do with IP addresses?  Are the IP addresses in a given geographic area similar, such as having the same number codes in the address?

[cordex]

It would typically be done at the IP address level, although it is not a simple range based categorization. There are a number of sources for IP-to-geography translation with varying levels of accuracy.

[AJ Dual]

I was reading that a large porn website was banning access from North Carolina to protest their new LGBT law.  This made me wonder: how do you identify a user/group of users from a particular geographic area?  Is it something to do with IP addresses?  Are the IP addresses in a given geographic area similar, such as having the same number codes in the address?

There are large databases that have rough geographic information for various ISP routers and even countless home and small business WiFi SSID's that were geo-located by people's smartphones to aid in improving GPS data when the satellite signals are blocked or not reliable. Many routers have an option where you can actually input their latitude and longitude voluntarily in them as well, which is used for the various fancy maps of a country or the world showing airline route-like lines going around from city to city. YouTube, Netflix, and other services use data like this to block or show movies/videos that may be copyright restricted in certain countries for instance.

(The wide array of Hitler "Downfall" parodies with alternate subtitles for instance are all blocked in Germany by YouTube, but can be viewed in America where they come under "fair use" stipulations of Copyright for "parody" etc.)

However, there's problems with this, the databases are constantly changing etc. and there's inaccuracies, and some randomly chosen "dumping grounds" for IP's that don't have reliable geographic data in them. Like these poor people: http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/

And the geo-location, depending on the way IP info is reported by the ISP can show you in a completely different state at times. For instance, Facebook records my home access through AT&T U-Verse as being in Michigan at times rather than Wisconsin. And my smartphone with Verizon often shows up as Texas...

Someone using this data could certainly inconvenience a large portion, say 80-90% of a state's users accessing your site this way if they wanted to. And a savvy user could easily get around it too.

[RevDisk]

I was reading that a large porn website was banning access from North Carolina to protest their new LGBT law.  This made me wonder: how do you identify a user/group of users from a particular geographic area?  Is it something to do with IP addresses?  Are the IP addresses in a given geographic area similar, such as having the same number codes in the address?

The 'best' geo-IP is about 99% accurate by country, 90% accurate by state, 80% accurate by city/zip. It's virtually never accurate below zip. Morons (ie the government) has assumed so in the past, and raided people off it.

[TechMan]

A timely article that is relevant to the discussion at hand:  http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/

[MillCreek]

I just did an IP lookup and location on the Internet.  It shows my correct service provider, Comcast, but gives a city about 20 miles south of me as my current location.  Hmm.

[Ben]

I just did an IP lookup and location on the Internet.  It shows my correct service provider, Comcast, but gives a city about 20 miles south of me as my current location.  Hmm.

Yes, that's standard. When I had Cox, which had dynamic IPs, I would often jump to neighboring cities, depending on which of their nodes they were providing me bandwidth from. Now that I'm static on microwave, my location is the tower my antenna is pointed to, 30 miles away. Whenever I use my Verizon 4G modem locally, it provides my location as a city about 100 miles from me.

[230RN]

I accidentally put in my zip as 808 sumpthin' somethin' (Hawaii) somewhere and that kind of propagated around a little bit.  I was gettin' ads for Honolulu car dealers and whatnot.

Right now, my TV over the air programming is set to my ISP's location southeast of Denver and I get program listings up the ying yang which I can't actually receive.  Gotta figure out how to change that someday.

If I enter the actual one in the "ZipCode" box for the TV listings, it switches to the ISP zip anyhow.

Poor me. <snif>

Terry

[freakazoid]

A timely article that is relevant to the discussion at hand:  http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/

That's pretty crazy.