Why Are Some Japanese Sites Japan Only?
As part of urban apartment life, I often help out neighbors with various computer problems. Eventually, I’ll probably buy this “no, I won’t fix your computer” t-shirt, but until then it lets me make friends of neighbors in an old fashioned/new technology sort of way.
Tonight, I helped out a Japanese student who found herself unable to access a variety of sites that she normally would, all of which were located in Japan. I headed to her apartment to check out the situation. When she would try to access the sites, she was met with a message that said use of the sites was only available from within Japan, but you could email them your IP to ask for access specifically for yourself. In other words, if you’re not in Japan then this site is not available to you.
Why would a site institute a policy like this? To save on bandwidth? Something seems terribly wrong when a site removes itself from the world part of the world wide web.
Permanent Link
What site was it? Something doesn’t click. What if you are on a dialup connection and you have a dynamic IP that changes everytime you log on? What if you’re traveling or sharing a wireless hub somewhere?
Why would you have to email them your IP address anyway? The server would know what IP address you were accessing the site from. I’ve never heard of a site that limits access based on IP addresses. Isn’t that what userids and passwords and cookies are for?
All I can think is that it’s a spam site fishing for live email addresses.
Basically, they are making sure the domain you are coming from, the IP that you are using, is from a known range of those used in Japan. I got to see a lot of sites last night that do this.
Strange. Why would they do that?
Maybe it cuts down on viruses, spam, and fraud from foreign countries that don’t have laws against such things. Or maybe it’s so they know they can take legal action against abusers of their sites. I would think that a clever spammer would be able to have a forwarding IP address within Japan to thwart this though, kinda like a mail-drop system, or that there is some kind of software you can use to mimic an IP address from Japan. Still…weird.
Well, there could be legal reasons. For example, the BBC is due to open up its material to the licence fee paying public: more or less anybody living in the UK. I guess they will restrict access to this content via IP addresses. Alternatively, lots of servers in eastern europe restrict access to within their country because they host illegal material, but the local governments can’t be bothered to enforce copyright laws. Foreign governments might have a word to say though if their citizens could get access…
BTW, nice site!
I have bumped into the same problem but I am not able to solve it. (I am trying to access japanese movie sites like yahoo japan, gyao… to show children stuff to my 5 year old daughter who was brought in japan until now and I am being denied access) Do you have any idea how I could get around that problem ? Thank you in advance !