Order of the Bath

… but read on to understand why. My workstation in the office is connected to a large international company network so when we send mail to colleagues around the world it travels entirely on our own wires. There are a number of places where it makes contact with the Internet so that field workers can get in using VPN and mail can pass to and from our customers and suppliers. This is also true for web access and the proxy I have been given access to is in Germany. The web servers I contact are given the I/P address of the proxy not my workstation address; that is not unique. This address is part of a block allocated to the German branch of the company and many web sites know this, so they think that I am also in Germany.

This may seem like no big deal but it has some strange side effects. Some web sites, particularly search engines and advertisers (is there a difference?) try to be clever and present “targeted advertising likely to interest me.” So if I go to www.google.com it automatically redirects me to www.google.de and I can’t read the instructions to change it back. Advertising on many pages, if it is outsourced to a major provider, is directed at the imaginary German “me.” There is a possibility that I would be unable to see some sites at all; I am told that parts of the BBC web site are for national use only but I haven’t found them. It does have some advantages though; I don’t get distracted by the advertising so much any more as I can’t understand a word of what they are about. So when I am offered “Komplettes Zugriffs und Identitäts-Management” I take no notice, which is probably just as well.

In some ways, what is more disturbing is that, at home, some sites know I am in Bristol, not just the UK. They will know my address soon.

This entry was posted on 16 Mar 2007 at 09:46 by Rick and is filed under Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.