Yahoo Geographically Targeting Users 114
minna writes: "[The] SF Examiner reports that Yahoo! is now working on separating its content based on the location of its user. In a recent court case in France in which it was sentenced to block access to auctions of Nazi memorabilia for French Internet users, Yahoo! claimed this was impossible. Now in order to gain the rights to netcast the next Olympics, Yahoo says that while it's not 100% successful, it can essentially be done. There are already any number of services, for example infosplit.com that specialize on locating Internet users."
IP Lookup problems (Score:2)
What happens when a user accesses a proxy in another IP range?
It used to be impossible to download music (Score:1)
So what, it was hard for Yahoo to do it, now they've figured out how.
Divided... (Score:1)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
The COBOL Warrior
So what? (Score:3)
Targeted advertising isn't all bad, as long as it's targeted correctly. I, for one, am NOT interested in boy-bands or crappy fucked textbook companies [bigwords.com].
what about anonymizer? (Score:1)
Can Slashdot do this? (Score:5)
I feel kind of guilty somedays talking about my big old luxury car, my big old house, my home computer network and my big breasted honey knowing there are UKians who can barely afford a 1.0 liter Festiva, living in a poorly heated 500 sf flat, and having to share a scrawny, emaciated girlfriend.
Maybe we can hide those posts so the UKians don't realize what a socialist purgatory they live in.
...striving to make comercials more bearable (Score:1)
now they might stop trying to sel me sun-block, and push those snow-shovels.
borne
Software That Does this... (Score:1)
Re:It used to be impossible to download music (Score:2)
I'll agree with you, though, that this isn't necessarily earth-shattering news.
OK,
- B
--
Specification range (Score:1)
Re:what about anonymizer? (Score:1)
However, they probably think that is an acceptable loss
Vote Vader in 2000!
http://www.vaderfor2000.org [vaderfor2000.org]
(Digital) Divide and Conquer... (Score:2)
Call me an extremist, call me a conspiracy theorist, call me a crank...
Interrobang
Defeating the ability to be regionally targetted (Score:1)
I don't know if it is possible, but I'd like to see something like this.
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
This is unfortunate (Score:1)
One of the great promises of the Internet was that it would form a global community, free from geographical boundries. Information was to flow freely from country to country without the permission of local governments.
Unfortunately, the reality is that if you are doing business on the Internet, then that global presence you have created means that you are under the jurisdiction of all these other governments. Since it is possible to discriminate between users accessing data from one country or another, businesses can comply with these court orders and this means that information no longer travels over the Internet free of political boundries.
This is not great, but it is better to discriminate against users in select countries then to self-censor and discriminate against the entire world.
So...? (Score:1)
--
Don't see how it could be impossible (Score:3)
Re:IP Lookup problems (Score:1)
Isn't AOL really one big proxy? Sort of defeats geographic location.
The impossible (Score:1)
Re:Infosplit web site (Score:1)
Re:IP Lookup problems (Score:2)
Yeah, right . . . (Score:2)
I really don't see how you can regulate people from different geographic location when there is an abundance of ways to make it look like you're coming from somewhere else. XHost is a wonderful thing, be in France and run netscape off a machine with an American IP address. Damn that's hard.
But then again, I don't really know what techniques are being used to determine where a person is located, but I am truly very sceptical about the prospect of geographic tenderred material being close to 100% effective. I just don't buy it.
Re:(Digital) Divide and Conquer... (Score:2)
The american government decides all the time what information it's citizens get to see/not see in the media. Haven't you ever heard of censors? That is why nudity is not allowed on TV nor swearing on radio and why pornographic magazines cannot be sold withing 500 yards of a public school - porno and cigarettes.
If a governemnt chooses to extend this power of censorship to the internet, why should we complain. Again, the US is already doing this with child porn; try downloading some and see how many FBI agents bust in your door the next day.
Remember, it was DARPA and Al Gore that brought you the internet <grin>! Don't complain if they want to regulate it.
-----------------
AOL users (Score:1)
Could be difficult to map those users back to a geographical area-->other than the fact that they are likely in the U.S. (America OnLine)
---
Interested in the Colorado Lottery?
Re:The impossible (Score:1)
Re:(Digital) Divide and Conquer... (Score:1)
The theory you propose might be to some too extremist. However, it has come to be a socially acceptable way of controlling the masses in modern society, utilizing everything from public bookburnings, to jamming radio waves at territorial borders, to simply outlawing and prosecuting "offending" material.
Scary.
Vote Vader in 2000!
http://www.vaderfor2000.org [vaderfor2000.org]
Wouldn't work in my company... (Score:1)
Re:(Digital) Divide and Conquer... (Score:1)
But really, I completely agree with you. However, people have always been the ones to advocate change. The US should not police the world, nor should we make other countries follow any type of standard we think that they should or shouldn't have. While the internet is a nice medium and all, if people demand more freedom, let 'em fight for it.
And then let them give it away like we're doing here in the US.
Re:Don't see how it could be impossible (Score:1)
Re:AOL users (Score:1)
ALL international aol users requests go through AOL proxies in the US (randomly, of course)...
OK for home -- awful for business. (Score:1)
Olympics, evil? (Score:5)
Are the Olympics becoming the center of all things evil?
Long the playground of the megamedia establishment, the Olympics represent the theft and repackaging of what should be in the public domain that is occuring in all aspects of society. During the past Olympics, internet coverage was not allowed in any real fashion for fear that it would cut into the "profits" of the old media fat cats, for the next Olympics we are now told that only by dividing the internet along national borders can a new media company enter the good graces of the IOC. Yes my friends, the Olympics are a way for all peoples of the world to come together in peaceful celebration of what is best in humanity. Unfortunately, what humans seem to be best at is greed, graft, and division.
So what? (Score:1)
I'm all for privacy as much as the next guy, but enough is enough. Yahoo is a company with profits to worry about, not a government, not a religious organization. If they want to collect demographic data they have every right to do so.
(We, as consumers, don't go around saying "Give me a portal to search with in my browser. But, uh, don't tell me who it is. And make sure I have no idea if I visit it again. I want to "respect" their "privacy"".)
Re:Can Slashdot do this? (Score:1)
Dude, what the hell are you doing here? If I were in your shoes I'd never touch *ahem* silicon again... I'd be too busy in extracurricular activites...
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
Re:two great reasons to boycott upcomming pda's (Score:1)
I think your paranoia is directed towards cellular phones, whose calls to 911 can be rerouted based on various location-determining measures (usually based on the nearest tower). IMO this isn't a bad thing for 911, but I'd never get a cell phone if it were to constantly beam me ads for businesses as I walk by.
Sounds both interesting and useful... (Score:2)
Here's how Open Source will succeed in peace! (Score:1)
Where's my first amendment???
--
Yahoo has targeted cs.berkeley.edu in the past (Score:1)
One Reason Why -- Perhaps (Score:2)
My how times change. (Score:1)
Its amazing how fast they can perform an about face on this issue. Sadly, I would have thought that webcasting is the best solution to the Olympics. There are multiple sports at multiple times, and the sports that I like to watch are not always broadcast on TV, which sucks. (Whitewater Kayaking for example, I got to see *NONE* of it.)
I always thought that the olympics were about Sports and competition, and that you should be able to watch the athletes or countries or sports that you like, and not be spoon-fed the "important" events by the major networks. I guess I was wrong.
Maybe Yahoo broadcasting this will change things, but somehow I doubt it.
Re: (Score:2)
Another Company that Does this - DigitalEnvoy (Score:1)
Opt-out. (Score:1)
I can see how this would be useful, and possibly even a Good Thing for, say, my Mom. But, for me it's not, really. Perhaps I am "bi-coastal" or just travel a lot...Maybe I'm just a paranoid, pain-in-the-ass nerd...but, uh, of course I'm not...*shifty eyes*
Seriously, though...Are they offering a way to get "generic" ads?
Re:IP Lookup problems (Score:1)
I'm guessing almost that IP lookups would be the best way to geographically locate users... because no matter what IP ATT gives me, i'm still xxxx.ne.mediaone.net
eternal vigilance (Score:1)
Re:IP Lookup problems (Score:1)
I am sure that most log analyzers point out the well known Class B's such as Roadrunner by name, and it is probably a safe assumption that the most frequent hitters of their page are proxies, and further logic could be derived from the browser's default character set, e.g. EN/US.
--
Geography masquerading firewalls? (Score:1)
Coneheads: "We are from France!"
Re:Infosplit web site (Score:1)
Presumably, they have a Flash home page (I don't have a Flash plug-in, and don't want one). I don't object to web developers using Flash, but I do object to Flash being critical to content & navigation.
Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
Chief Research Scientist, WireX Communications, Inc. [wirex.com]
Immunix [immunix.org]: Free Hardened Linux Distribution
Slightly OT - why are they picking on Yahoo!? (Score:3)
3426 items found for "nazi". Showing items 1 to 50.
German nazi pilot observer badge
German nazi assault badge nice
German Nazi Button Hole Ribbons Hitler Youth
So the French courts want $13 grand for each Yahoo! violation - that's like fining WalMart for selling cigarettes when you can go to any one of dozens of quickie marts and get the same damn thing. This is the very heart of injustice.
Re:IP Lookup problems (Score:2)
-1 Flamebait, -1 Offtopic, -1 Overrated Pick one (Score:1)
No its not funny. Not at all.
And for the record, I am American.
Yahoo! -- Ushering in the era.... (Score:1)
Re:Can Slashdot do this? (Score:1)
silicon, as in a computer, not silicone, as in jelly to make breasts bigger...
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
I have one solution for this: (Score:1)
They have no idea where you're really from, when you use safeweb.
========================
63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
Re:So what? (Score:1)
So you are interested in Britney Spears then. Mhh, naughty boy.
Sorry, couldn't resist:-)
Re:Here's the real story (Score:1)
And this is supposed to be a good thing how exactly? Maybe for Yahoo as a business, but certainly not for the customer. I want my search results to be consistent, and not depend on the location where I happen to be at the moment, or on what skin color Yahoo thinks I have. Targetting banner ads may be acceptable, but please leave the actual data alone. Oh, well, but then I use Google [google.com] anyways.
Re:My how times change. (Score:1)
Not only that. The IOC banned all weblogs also. The athletes were not allowed to publish text accounts of their experiences during the Olympics.
And yes... you're wrong. The Olympics are not about sports and competition. You do not get to watch your chosen athletes nor your chosen sports. It's about advertising and the last time I checked, a spot during a major sporting event on television costs much more than a banner ad on a web site.
[cynicism hat on]
On television, the shows are not the product. We the viewers are the product that is being bought and sold.
[cynicism hat off]
Oh... and sports and competition... right... there is nothing sporting about sending the NBA to the Olympics. Sure, it wasn't really fair to compete against government funded athletes but so what? At least when you won, it meant something.
cheers...
Doesn't BigIP already do this? (Score:1)
Logical extension of Yahoo!'s business plan (Score:3)
The article is well worth a read anyway, they talk about such interesting concepts as predicting trends such as movie success (based on who's searching for info about it, the actors, etc.) apparently they've been quite accurate so far...
Re:So what? (Score:1)
Re:It used to be impossible to download music (Score:1)
I tend to disagree. They claim the solution is not good enough for liability charges, but good enough for targeted adverticing and netcasting of the olympics. I'd say that's pretty reasonable. Getting something right 90% of the time makes most adverticers happy, but surely doesn't make the courts happy. That's it!
Geographic targetting, hmmm... (Score:1)
Re:This Is Done Using DNS (Score:1)
Re:So what? (Score:1)
Re:So what? (Score:1)
Re:Olympics, evil? (Score:1)
Excellent point. The Olympics used to be noble. It was about athletes meeting without regard to nationality or political boundaries.
Now, it's just corporate greed... that is... unless it's being used as a political tool.
Yahoo targeting (Score:1)
Wouldn't it be easier... (Score:1)
&DELETE if ($stuff =~ /nazi/i);
--
il-duce2
http://bizcrd.com/il-duce2
Re:Slightly OT - why are they picking on Yahoo!? (Score:1)
Microsoft already do this. (Score:2)
(I just know this'll be modded down for admitting that I've ever gone to msn.com...)
Open Source Locator (Score:1)
Capability (theoretically) already exists... (Score:2)
RFC1712-DNS Encoding of Geographical Location [faqs.org]
and
RFC1876-A Means for Expressing Location Information in the Domain Name System [faqs.org]
Re:So what? (Score:1)
I've even found that I get metamodded for knocking up any post with a tone that's tolerant to corporations or the government, or advocates MS in any way. Unfortunately, I haven't yet found a good place with a smaller proportion of close-minded wackos, so I stay here.
Geographically separating users (Score:1)
However, since IP addresses are meaningless, with the various forms of tunnelling connections, this whole idea is dubious.
Good luck solving the TSM problem too, Yahoo!
Bordercontroll (Score:1)
Re:IP Lookup problems (Score:1)
Re:Yahoo already separates my data (Score:1)
Re:Olympics, evil? (Score:1)
Yes, the Olympics have pretty clearly been completely corrupted, but they're hardly the only ones in that position. There's just too much money for athletics of all kinds for any sport claiming to be amateur to remain really clean. What's worse is that their amateur status winds up attracting the worst kind of profiteering, because it gives them an excuse not to pay the athletes and put more into their own pockets. The net result is that they often wind up much more corrupt than sports organizations that are willing to admit their profit motive. Another very good example of this is the NCAA.
Re:Logical extension of Yahoo!'s business plan (Score:2)
(...) Yahoo! can charge 10x - 20x what other portals can charge, because they can target their ads with great precision.
Believe you me, if my online business offered service in California, Nevada and Arizona, and I were to choose between
the second option would win hands down. This was the great promise of the Internet, remember? Advertising would be targeted so narrowly that we users only get to see stuff that is interesting to us. If Yahoo can offer that and others can't, they win.
Re:Can Slashdot do this? (Score:1)
That's part of my idea [slashcode.com]. Well at least for stories, but I suppose you could do the same for posts if you didn't mind the overhead of sorting on that criteria all the time. You'd have to assume that the users would enter the data, and enter it correctly.
Re:Olympics, evil? (Score:2)
this year was the worst year of ratings that the Olympics have had yet.
if it continues, most large media companies will not pay the millions and billions of dollars to gain the distribution rights to the Games. By not watching the Olympics, you are standing up for your rights and for what you believe in.
Will ABC, NBC, etc. pay tons of money next year after such a disappointing year this year? Doubtful. Will the IOC have to deal with market realities like everyone else does? I'm sure they will.
Don't like what the IOC is doing? Don't watch. Read about it the next day.
Re:So what? (Score:1)
I agree. I'm glad that Opera 5 [opera.com] allows you to customize the ads sent to you, instead of invading your privacy in an attempt to deduce that information like DoubleClick does. I hate the thought that people I don't know are compiling statistics about me. It happens all the time, I know, but I still don't like it.
Good move (Score:1)
Revenues from banner ads are declining to all-time lows, with many dotcoms going bust. Yahoo's just trying to adjust with the times to find better targetting methods to increase pofits.
Re:Can Slashdot do this? (Score:1)
And cut that hair! brush those teeth!
You slimy toad limey coont!
The heroin look is out dammit! This is America! be fat!
Be happy!
"I like big butts and I cannot lie!"
-Sir mix-alot
Re:Olympics, evil? (Score:2)
Re:Logical extension of Yahoo!'s business plan (Score:1)
And of course reasonable targeting of ads is a boon for the consumer, too. I can't speak for anyone else, but I'd be much happier if I only saw ads for things that I'm actually interested in, rather than a completely random selection. Well targeted advertizing is potentially useful, and is also more likely to be an attempt to inform instead of just capture my eyeballs. And don't forget that if Yahoo can charge a lot more per ad then they can make money while still cutting down on the total number of ads displayed and hence my bandwidth consumed and the visual blight on my page. Sounds like a (potentially) great thing to me.
Isn't this the holy grail of I18N? (Score:2)
I know this already happens in limited form -- lots of sites have local editions, e.g. bbc.co.uk, cnn.com, ikea.com just to name three of the top of my head. But to go a step further and automagically give visitors the right version (presumably with a version to switch languages / locales, to catch the inevitable errors) would be a huge boost to bringing the web to the non-English speaking world.
I know that there's a lot of talk about doing this sort of thing, but this would be the first largescale application of it that I'm aware of. I'd love to see this take off...
Re:Olympics, evil? (Score:2)
The Olympics have been the center of quite a lot of less-than-savoury human behaviour over the years. Aside from the Berlin Olympics (everybody knows the story of Jesse Owens. What doesn't get told is the story of the two Jewish runners removed from the US 400 metre relay team at the order of the IOC president to mollify Hitler. While the athletes may have not liked the Nazis, the officials were playing right along), there is the systematic doping systems of the East Germans of the 1970's, the corruption and greed of the IOC itself, the ludicrous "shamateur" status of most of the athletes over the years, and so on. Andrew Jennings' books on the Olympic movement, tabloid in style they may be, are most enlightening.
Re:Olympics, evil? (Score:1)
Quite frankly, the Olympics used to enthrall me -- I can remember staring continuously into the TV at the Atlanta Olympics. But now the TV companies bicker and pay billions of dollars to air one or two events, none of which really interest me.
The "Official whatever of the Olympic Games" thing has gone way too far, too. Wasn't IBM and Windows the official hardware/software combo of the Olympics, or something like that? If Nike was the official shoe or something, that I could understand. But official computer? WTF?
Re:Defeating the ability to be regionally targette (Score:1)
Re:Don't see how it could be impossible (Score:2)
Each IP address is allocated to a certain ISP or individual, if you can find that IP from an ISP you generally have a good idea as to where they are logging in from.
Personal IP blocks (for example, if I lease a T1 line and rent out a class C) also must have your address associated to them.
The major problem with this solution (Which VisualRoute solves, I use it at work all the time to solve this) is that with companies like AOL and other megacorps most of their IP addresses are based in a central location (Virginia in this case) - and then you have to default to a traceroute via VisualRoute or something else.
Re:Can Slashdot do this? (Score:4)
But as a 'UKian' who visits the US on frequent extended trips let me state with certainty what a load of bollocks you're spouting.
Not quite - Re:Microsoft already do this. (Score:1)
Because Yahoo lied to the court, and here is proof (Score:3)
When someone accesses a web page containing nazi memorabilia, or any page with containing a keyword from a list of questionable terms, we get a warning that the item may not be legal for sale in some countries. But only if the originating IP address is from a RIPE assigned range.
That warning is sufficient to comply with French and German law. By providing a warning to a user, eBay has complied with the law. If a user were to continue with the sale or purchase of a banned item, it is now the user, not eBay, who has broken the law. If a European user were to go out of their way to use a U.S. based proxy, then they have taken a step to circumvent the law, thus indicating they are knowingly breaking the law. eBay and Yahoo do not have to catch 100% of all cases, they merely must make an effort to inform. That is all the French court ruled.
Yahoo swore in court it was impossible to determine with any kind of accuracy at all how to determine the physical location of a person based on IP address. But they change their web banners based on IP address. Their local office sells banner space to French companies with the guarantee that the ads will be served to people in France, and not to an uninterested audience in another country. It was this fact alone that caused the French court to rule against them. Yahoo proudly markets their ability to determine user location based on IP addresses, they know every IP block allocated to French ISPs and businesses and universities, and they filter on that. But they lied to the court, and the court wasn't fooled and ruled against them.
And as others have pointed out, but were mostly lost in the
The LICRA has made a name for itself in tearing down the ultra-far-right Nazi worshiping Front National, but since the FN almost doesn't exist today after a bunch of scandals, they have turned their interest towards the internet. Yahoo is the project of a group graduating next year, and they are as well versed at PR as they are at law.
I hereby invoke Godwin's law, and declare this whole thread terminated
the AC
Re:Isn't this the holy grail of I18N? (Score:2)
Re:Microsoft already do this. (Score:1)
I should also mention a very unpleasant encounter with opensound.com. When I was in Russia, stuck due to the INS/Visa regulations, I needed to get some drivers for my YMF724 sound card. Since ALSA didn't support it back then, I was going to buy OSS drivers from 4Front.
It was pretty disturbing to find out that the entire .ru domain was banned from the opensound.com website for whatever reasons. Naturally, I used an american proxy, but that left a very nasty aftertaste, as if I somehow I was a lesser human, only because my DNS traced back to Russia.
So, the supposedly "good" guys do this, too.
Re:Microsoft already do this. (Score:1)
~~~
The difference is... (Score:1)
Not to say that many collectors of Nazi memorabilia are much smarter. But it would only take one to get Yahoo into trouble, while I don't see why the Olympic organizers would be terribly concerned if a few percent of Aussies managed to see the Yank version of the coverage. I have even more trouble imagining why the Aussies would bother.
The thing I don't understand about the Yahoo/Nazi memorabilia case, is why it wasn't sufficient that Yahoo exclude those with a French shipping address? Preferably from everything, those stinking rude frogs don't deserve to keep up with the world. (Just kidding.)
Re:Isn't this the holy grail of I18N? (Score:2)
You're smart enough to know how to override this (say, by logging into something like my.yahoo.com, and thus getting your own language preferences), while the newbie, who understands neither computers nor English, is able to get started without any unnecessary obstacles.
I agree that a lot of these "usability enhancements" do absolutely nothing to enhance usability, especially for say the typical Slashdot reader that knows the way around a computer without any problems. But technically proficient people are not the norm (sadly), and when it can be done well (e.g. without pissing off the experts or further confusing the novices), there is a lot to be said for enabling those novice users to get up to speed quickly.
I see this as such an example. The possible benefit to non-English speaking users (a hugely underrepresented group) is more than enough to offset the comparitively mild annoyance that experts will be imposed with, especially considering that the only people that should be getting the foreign editions will ideally be the visitors from those foreign countries and, presumably, the experts there will be smart enough to figure out how to switch to English if that's what they prefer. It's not exactly "first do no harm" (because it is making the experts do a bit more work), but it's better than the current "only do much harm" method.
Of course, on the other hand, sorting out which language to feed to a visitor from, say bilingual Montreal is left as an exercise for the implementor.... :)
Read This post (Score:1)
--------
Re:So does CNN (Score:2)
I used to have two browser windows open side by side, one using a local RIPE address, the other going through an IPSec tunnel to an american IP address. The differences were pretty bad, the americans tended to get lots more shallow, local, happy news and less international coverage. The European servers just didn't have very much american coverage, nor a lot of the content from the american site.
Recently, CNN has taken to popping up a very annoying window to every European asking them to change editions every time they access the site. But if you just close the window, you can access american content. If you click Ok, you get redirected to the European server. They also set a cookie which then permanently redirects the browser.
the AC