Re: WWW Visitor Blocking

[Alan Peery <peery io com>]

"Ashley M. Kirchner" wrote:

>     Is it possible to block access to one's website by checking the IP
> address?  For whatever political reason at a company I do consulting for, I've
> been asked to deny access to their website to any visitor that doesn't
> originate in the US.  Now I realize someone sitting in Australia could use some
> proxy in the US to get to someone else's site, but they're not too concerned
> about that.  They just want to outright block any IP that's not a US one.  This
> only for WWW access.

It can't be done.  IP addresses are simply not managed in this manner.  If they
attempt to do so, they are just fooling themselves.

For example, I worked for a US company that was purchased by IBM.  Shortly we had
employees in the US, UK, Japan, and several other countries accessing the web.
Depending on where they logged in normally, where they logged in this time, and
what network configuration their local admin happened to be using,  they could
emerge onto the Internet at  five locations--two in the US, two in Europe, and one
in Japan.  There is no way for an external user to know that I (a US citizen) was
using an IP address internally assigned to the Italian office--part of the Italian
traffic even emerged onto the Internet in the US...

Alan