Presence and IntComm WG

[Ben Teitelbaum <>]

Candace,

Thanks for the pointers.  As far as I know, these sort of heuristic-
based location schemes began with CAIDA's NetGeo, which I played with
years ago while the project was still active.  Now, there are all
sorts of dot-coms doing it (as [1] and [2] mention).  NetGeo used
latency only as a sanity check (e.g. does ping take at least as long as
direct path / (0.66 * speed-of-light)).  Mostly it relied on whois
records and understanding various ISP's conventions about naming
routers (many embed airport codes).  To get a sense of the heuristics
that NetGeo used (which are probably similar to what the commercial
services are doing today), see:

http://www.caida.org/outreach/papers/2000/inet_netgeo/inet_netgeo.html

Best,

-- ben

Candace Holman 
<>
 writes:

> Hi all,
>
> I'd like to tell you about two news articles regarding location
> services.   There was a great suggestion during the member meeting
> conference call,  to try to expand user agents to provide location
> services for rich presence.  Perhaps we can start with geolocation? Or
> maybe eliminate it as an option?  Here are some ideas:
>
> The first article is about a new patent that was issued to the NSA for
> location tracking [1].  It appears that the location tracking patent
> is based on creating a "network latency topology map" based on IP
> addresses that are already located and known to be static.  Then an
> unknown computer location can be estimated based on the latency of
> connection attempts with it.  There are fears that this could be used
> for spying, but it seems to me that it would be pretty simple to
> confuse any program that is attempting to locate you based on round
> trip time variations to your IP address.  Not to mention that these
> latencies would have to be constantly monitored, and the topology map
> would have to be updated in real-time.  But the basic idea is
> interesting.
>
> A related story [2] has some great Use Cases, social implications, and
> real-life examples of geolocation but also lacks a good technical
> explanation.  I found some details on IP address geolocation online in
> the Linux Journal [3], and came across the July '05 internet draft on
> SIP location conveyance [4] which describes the use of  PIDF-LO and
> geopriv.
>
> [1] NSA granted Net location-tracking patent
> http://news.com.com/NSA+granted+Net+location-tracking+patent/2100-7348_3-5875953.html
>
> [2] Geolocation: Don't Fence Web In
> http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,64178,00.html?tw=rss.TOP
>
> [3] Geolocation by IP Address, October 2004
> http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/7856/print
>
> [4] SIP Location Conveyance
> http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-sip-location-conveyance-01.txt
>
> Candace
>
>
>

-- 
Ben Teitelbaum   http://people.internet2.edu/~ben/