from Hacker News

Is it possible to detect a visitor's ISP, could websites educate Comcast users?

by iOSGuy on 4/28/14, 4:14 PM with 3 comments

As I understand it, there are limitations, it will not be 100% accurate ie: a user could be using a proxy, or VPN, etc.

Still, if Comcast is going to throttle specific websites, or charge specific websites for faster connections, can't we use the knowledge that a website visitor is a Comcast subscriber to our advantage?

More than that, could Reddit use a protest day to demonstrate what may happen to Comcast customers?

For example, instead of a blackout day, Reddit loads slow for Comcast subscribers and only Comcast subscribers.

For programmers, here's a possible solution using PHP: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/855967/how-do-i-retrieve-the-visitors-isp-through-php

  • by kogir on 5/2/14, 2:52 AM

    It's super easy with this: https://www.maxmind.com/en/isp

    If you're unwilling to pay, then you can get pretty far with their free ASN database: http://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/legacy/geolite/

  • by feld on 5/5/14, 1:36 AM

    I'd imagine a varnish vmod could be created to do a lookup in a maxmind database and then serve slowly with some new page elements.

  • by jesusmichael on 4/28/14, 5:18 PM

    nslookup? you get the hostname of the IP and you can resolve for that.