Quoting Graham Miller on Monday July 03, 2006:
| 
| We are considering closing down certain ports/services on our hosting system
| by limiting them to only australian IP addresses.

I would caution you to consider any approach to block based upon IP
address "location" will provide false results, and therefore suggest you
provide alternate mechanisms for people to access content.

Some personal experiences:

* I travel frequently, and therefore get assigned IP addresses
  from all sorts of exotic places. Do you really wish to block
  Australians accessing content when they are travelling?

* From my office I get assigned an IP address from our company's
  allocation. For multinational companies it is very likely
  the block was assigned somewhere else (e.g. the head office
  in the USA). Do you wish to block people in large companies
  from accessing the content?

It is frustrating to be blocked from sites because they are trying to be
too clever with this kind of stuff. You should carefully consider how
you implement such blocks unless you can guarantee your audience will
absolutely have IP addresses in the APNIC "AU" range -- simply saying
you want it to be "Australia only" isn't enough.

kim
(whose email right now will show to originate in Washington DC, but is
being penned in Brussels by an Australian from a .au domain)