How do websites know which country I’m in?

Graham Perkins sent us a note, complaining that the internet radio service Pandora.com was suddenly unavailable to any of its UK users. We’re not the first country to lose access to its personally-customized channels; most Western European listeners were shut out a few months back, and today Pandora continues as a USA-only service while it argues over licensing terms with the various organisations who administer music copyrights. Of course, there are other sites such as last.fm who’ll happily scoop up Pandora’s listenership – but it does raise the question of how a website knows which country you’re in. And, indeed, why Pandora’s statement said, intringuingly, that “users in the UK and elsewhere will still be able to utilize the service through other means.”

It’s relatively easy for a site to spurn your unwelcome advances if it knows your internet address, or IP. Filesharing sites, for example, have been known to shut out employees working for copyright organisations after obtaining their IP details. But how do those IPs – a seemingly random sequence of numbers – relate to a country? Well, blocks of IPs are assigned by a grand overseeing organisation called the IANA to various global bodies, which in turn allocate blocks to countries and organisations – so your location in the world will usually be betrayed by your IP; check out tinyurl.com/y4787p for a surprising level of detail about your whereabouts. And as the software necessary for a website to obtain these details comes free of charge, it’s no great chore to block visitors from New Zealand, Norway or Norfolk.

In theory, however, you can use a proxy server to fool a website into thinking you’re located somewhere else (and this is probably what Pandora.com was alluding to when it said that we could still use their service “through other means”.) There are many websites that provide lists of currently operating proxies, and if you’re browsing with Firefox you can simply go to your network settings page, type in the proxy address and allow your net surfing to be cloaked in secrecy and subterfuge. However, in reality they don’t always work very well. I spent half an hour going through one list in an attempt to connect to Pandora, but without success; then I discovered that someone has already set up a website – globalpandora.com – that uses proxies to connect to the service. Perhaps predictably, it’s experiencing “unexpected technical difficulties”. Proxies can make IP blocking a pretty ineffective measure, but when thousands of people are overloading said proxies in an attempt to beat the blocks, there’ll only be a handful of people patient or persistent enough to get through – a handful that the site probably aren’t particularly bothered about.