[LINK] Internet gambling ban announced

[Glen Turner]

When discussing finding the country of origin of a web site user
Kevin Littlejohn wrote:

> Hrm.  There are ways of making fairly educated guesses - those ways are fairly,
> um, fun to setup :)  mirror.aarnet.edu.au has one of the better
> implementations thereof, I understand (tips hat to Jason and co),

I did the work, so thanks.  We simply configure the routers not to advertise
the mirror's network to the expensive international links.

This is more efficient than the scheme you describe.  However, we
will be moving towards such a scheme as it allows us to put
a nice message on the web page (saying "try a closer mirror")
rather than appear to be unreachable.

We are *not* interested in country of origin.  Rather, we are
interested in preventing expensive international links from
using the mirror -- after all, there's almost certainly a mirror 
closer to that user than one accessed via 14,000Km of undersea
fiber.

That's why we don't cry over satelite customers located in
Australia or multinational corporate networks with users in
Australia.  They use the expensive international links and
*should* be excluded from using the mirror.

Our application is a world away from using routing
information to determine the country where the user
is domiciled for the purposes of legislation.

> (If anyone wants to fund the open-source creation
> of such a beastie, I'd be happy to discuss *grin*)

You can already interogate the Zebra routing daemon
from Squid.  I have unreleased code awaiting deployment
on the AARNet mirror that will do this from Apache too.

-- 
 Glen Turner                                 Network Engineer
 (08) 8303 3936      Australian Academic and Research Network
 glen.turner@aarnet.edu.au          http://www.aarnet.edu.au/
--
 The revolution will not be televised, it will be digitised