Keep the French out
An imaginary correspondent writes:
You’re always banging on about DNSDBs mapping IP-to-country, but how can I leverage this technology to stop French people from looking at my website?
I mean, who knows what Johnny Frenchman is going to object to finding on the web? Already they’ve fined Yahoo for those auctions of Nazi memorabilia, and that college website that put up english adverts for a Paris-based (but in english) course. What next?
OK. So maybe you’ve got a particularly Gaul shocking site. Perhaps containing jokes about their personal hygiene or something? Assuming you’re using apache, shouldn’t be too hard. Firstly, you’ll need to compile in Mod_Access_RBL then drop a .htaccess in the proscribed directory with the following:
AuthName "No French" AuthType Basic ErrorDocument 403 "No French. Keep out, Pierre! <Limit GET POST> Order Allow,Deny Allow from all Deny via fr.countries.nerd.dk </Limit>
It should work. I haven’t tested it, of course and I wouldn’t use it myself.
And obviously the more cunning can get around it with proxy servers.
It’s worrying that content providers could use similar technology to
create the equivalent of DVD regions – for political or economic reasons.
Imposing these divisions on the medium (as might be dictated by advertising supported sites) has the potential to make poorer nations informationally poorer.
