On Apr 11, 2011, at 4:10 PM, Jeroen van Aart wrote: > http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20336-internet-probe-can-track-you-down-to-within-690-metres.html > "The new method zooms in through three stages to locate a target computer. > The first stage measures the time it takes to send a data packet to the > target and converts it into a distance – a common geolocation technique that > narrows the target's possible location to a radius of around 200 kilometres. > (..) > Finally, they repeat the landmark search at this more fine-grained level: > comparing delay times once more, they establish which landmark server is > closest to the target. The result can never be entirely accurate, but it's > much better than trying to determine a location by converting the initial > delay into a distance or the next best IP-based method. On average their > method gets to within 690 metres of the target and can be as close as 100 > metres – good enough to identify the target computer's location to within a > few streets." > > It seems to me to be a rather flaky way of finding out your estimated > location. But I guess it could be helpful when the objective is just to > create some global database of demographics for marketing and privacy > invasion purposes, where specifics of an individual's exact location don't > really matter.
The idea is to have finer and finer grained locations based on RTTs and a dense mesh of "landmark routers." Of course, if you were using a tunnel or proxy that took N msec of delay, the best they could say is that you were N msec from the tunnel endpoint. It would also be easy to institute something like the old GPS selective availability, with a software tunnel randomly adding a variable delay (say, varying by up to 50 msec every 100 seconds). Regards Marshall > > Besides the latter can always be subpoenaed. ;-) > > One more reason to use VPN and other such techniques to hide your location. > > Greetings, > Jeroen > > -- > http://goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/ > http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/plural-of-virus.html > >
