ie8 fix
madison

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Not exactly a good idea.
SID S-1-1 1st Feb 2010
I'm not so concerned about any privacy aspect, but rather that this might limit the ability of a user to see what a user in another country might see - i.e. the universal web experience. I do not want to be further spoon-fed what is assumed to be approprite for my country and stupid assumptions about what I want to see based on where I am. If I want to visit www.google.de instead of the US site, I shouldn't have anything getting in my way. I realize that many sites already use IP lookups to supposedly add geographical awareness. I've seen it. I don't like it. It's often wrong. (Corporate backhauls through a central connection point and mobile device identification are almost guaranteed to be wrong.) Why make stupid web site behavior easier to implement?

Apart from the basic annoyances of attempted geographical identification by IP, the more disturbing part is that this mechanism would make it just a little bit easier to censor web access by denying or misresolving DNS requests from certain geographical locations.
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ie8 fix