French Court Gives Yahoo More Time Country Watch: France7/25/2000; 8:20:29 AM 'A French court has extended its order against Yahoo (YHOO) to Aug. 11, giving the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company three more weeks to either remove Nazi-related items on its auction site or block the access of French citizens to such items. According to the original order issued by Judge Jean Jacques Gomez on May 22, certain items on Yahoo's U.S. auction site violate a French penal code outlawing the trivialization or denial of the Holocaust.''But Cyril Houri, founder of New York City-based Infosplit, disagrees [with Yahoo's claims of inability to selectively filter French people out based on geography]. Houri says he was contacted by Yahoo's expert witness, Paris-based EdelWeb, to simulate a server system using the company's software and see whether the system could determine the geographic location of visitors to the site. The test project worked, enabling the controlling Web site to block access to certain users. '"If you are in France, you would have seen a site that said, 'Access denied,' " says Houri, who listened to both sides testify before Gomez on Monday. According to Houri, Yahoo's experts did not mention his test trial in court.'As far as I know, these geographical location services work by collecting massive databases of IP addresses (which every computer must have), and recording where those IP addresses are used. For instance, 35.8.x.x - 35.10.x.x would be listed in East Lansing, Michigan, USA, because those are the IP addresses of Michigan State University, recieved from the Merit 35. class A block. (More techical description of IP addressing; just read up to Class D.) There are no other technilogical tricks they can play to find out where you are.These services can be very accurate, because IP addresses must have a certain order corresponding to the real world to them in order to be routed correctly. If someone in France labels their computer as 35.9.24.53 and claims to be a computer from MSU, that's fine, but all the return packets that a server tries to send back to that server from any external network will cross the Atlantic and end up at 35.9.24.53 here on my campus, where they will be either discarded or just plain lost if there's no computer with that IP.However, it's not perfect because you can use a proxy server, which will make all requests look like they are coming from the proxy computer, not the actual requesting computer. Most of the anonymizing services work in this way (including Anonymizer). If you still want to get at the geographically locked data, it can be done, and it's not all that hard, esp. in a 'community' of people that will be passing around instructions on how to do this, even if they don't understand what they're doing.'Plaintiffs are not demanding that Yahoo necessarily alter its content, but rather that it make it impossible for France and its territories (including Corsica, Reunion, Guadeloupe and Tahiti) to access prohibited content. If Houri's claims are true, then Yahoo and other international companies can no longer dodge such situations by saying that the technology does not exist."Of course Yahoo is not willing to block access," says Arie Aboulafia, VP of business development at Infosplit. "Every single country will ask them to start blocking sites."'That would be an impossible burden for any but a huge company with lots of money.