Steve's patent link didn't work, so I'm left to extrapolate and interpolate...
The article made me think of GPS, and how it plots position from the relative time ticks from several satellites.
The key to Internet GPS, I think, is to ping or traceroute several known addresses from the target's address/position. For example, a Web page could use graphics from these different reference sites, forcing the browser to send out request packets to each of them, whose relative latency could be measured. Think of those sites as "beacons" whose positions on the latency map (i.e., their coordinates in "latency space") are already known. I'm guessing it should be possible to triangulate (or whatever you'd call using many more than three vectors) your position from those latencies. Just like GPS...I'm guessing.
Current Events » in reply to Not sure how that can work
Speculation
The whole thread (30 posts)
- National Security Agency gets fix on Internet users location
- Not sure how that can work
- Suppose Bin Laden is using dialup.
- Speculation
- Here's the patent
- Not sure how that can work