Friday, December 7, 2012

I'moving to Zurich

One of the wonderful features of the internet is that it should not matter where in the world you are located. The protocols of the internet were designed to treat all traffic fairly so once you have a connection to the internet you should be able to get at any internet resource.

However, there are a number of industries (primarily music and movies) who continue to try an pretend that the internet is not a global phenomenon and continue to try and limit availability of their products and services to particular geographies. As I wrote before, these services are doomed to obsolescence - partly because such a business model is seen by consumers as unfair, but also because it is a technically difficult task to restrict your internet service to a particular country or set of countries.

There is an advertising series running on Irish Radio stations at the moment with the punch line "That's it, I'm moving to Zurich". The "joke" is that the speaker is actually planning to change pension providers to Zurich Life rather than actually emigrate to Switzerland. However, it seems that the administrators of our work network are planning a similar move.

It used to be the case that we could not access any Irish related web sites from work because most internet geo-location serviced (such as Where is my IP) seemed to be of the opinion that we were based near Portsmouth in the South of England (presumably since we used an internet service provider who was based near there). My colleagues didn't mind too much because it also meant that we got a chance to try out services which were supposedly only available in the UK. However, a recent change in our network configuration means that most internet servers now thing that I am based in Switzerland (not too far from Zurich).

I wonder are there any interesting TV shows running in Switzerland that I should try to catch up on?

2 comments:

  1. Who was your Portsmouth ISP? NTL used to be based in Hook, Hampshire, and I think Virgin Media may have taken over their IP blocks. Might that have been the culprit?

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  2. Actually Rupert I am not sure who our ISP was or is because I don't have anything to do with running the network. I just noticed that I am being redirected to the Swiss version of many web sites, while I used to get directed to the UK version.

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