--On Thursday, June 8, 2017 09:58 -0700 Randall Gellens
<rg+ietf(_at_)randy(_dot_)pensive(_dot_)org> wrote:
I personally find the effects more an amusing artifact that an
actual hindrance, but that's just me. However, when I'm
traveling and not part of an IETF, I find that using a hotel
provided IP address without a full VPN causes its own set of
difficulties with web sites assuming the language and
character set of the country I'm in. In some cases I'm unable
to use a Capcha since it's in a script I can't read, and I'm
unable to select a language or country on the web site for the
same reason.
While I agree, I think this may be a different problem and one
that we (and/or W3C) could fix if we were motivated. A
variation on the "incentives" theme is useful here too -- very
few actors have incentives to condition information being
provided to you based on bad choices of language or locale, even
if there are complex case-by-case decisions (or sheer laziness)
about whether the costs of getting things right in a larger
number of cases are worth it. We've got machinery for
specifying preferences in cultural or locale information to web
browsers (and the SLIM WG has been working on somewhat parallel
arrangements for other kinds of real time communications). Are
those options right? Do they provide enough preference
information that you (or a typical user, or a heuristic) can
figure out whether to use the information they think you've
given a browser (or failed to provide), rather than what the
hotel, or the hotel network, or even the choice of computer if
you are using one you don't own) are telling them?
Those are actually not easy questions in terms of designing the
right sorts of tools and indicators. Pursuing your example,
suppose you are in Lower Slobbovia, don't speak or read Lower
Slobbovian, but want to find a nearby pizza restaurant.
Probably you want to have the system communicate with you in
English, but you don't want the locale information to reflect,
e.g., California, because knowing where the nearest pizza
restaurant would be if you were in California would not be of
much interest. That, in turn, leads to another economic issue:
if the local, Lower Slobbovian, restaurant operators federation
has concluded that it isn't worth the costs of supplying
information in English, then you don't even have a localization
issue any more, you simply have a choice between asking in Lower
Slobbovian (or some other language they want to support) or not
asking in any way that yields answers.
On can respond to that example by asking questions about
automated translation, etc., but I'd just make the example more
complicated.
It seems to me that set of issues has little to do with how the
servers that interact with the hotel network guess at language
or location and, in particular, whether they use the IP or MAC
address to get there. But it does seems to me that it suggests
we should review whether our various means for explicitly
telling systems about locale information do what is wanted and
fix them if they don't. Certainly, such fixes should recognize
the right of those who don't want accurate location information
under any circumstances to starve in the dark, but it is not
clear to me that they should be our primary audience.
john