Geobytes

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Geobytes is a global company that provides geolocation and anti-spam software. Geobytes was incorporated in the State of Delaware, USA in 1999.

Contents

History

Geobytes was one of the first companies to build a global IP address location database by overlaying geographic user data on to a map of the internet's infrastructure. [1] Geobyte licenses spam management tools to various email providers and software vendors.

The company's technology has been cited in numerous government and legal documents as ‘evidence’ that ‘Geolocation’ of the Internet is possible. [2] Geobytes’ technology has also been used in both civil and criminal court proceedings, in law enforcement, and in the location of missing persons. [3] The company was founded in 1999 and originally catered to the online advertising industry.[ citation needed ]

Pre-incorporation

Adrian McElligott thought of mapping the Internet and targeted adverts whilst promoting an email notification tool that he had developed. He wanted to limit the marketing of this product to certain geographic regions, and he did this using the available ad-serving technology of the day. This discovery led to the commencement of the NetWorldMap project in July 1999, and later[ clarification needed ] that year to the foundation of the Geobytes Technology Project.

Incorporation

Geobytes, Inc. started as a global Internet Business-to-Business (B2B) technology company, primarily servicing the needs of the Internet advertising industry. The company was incorporated in the State of Delaware, United States in December 1999. The principal shareholders of the company were, and still are the founders, together holding 90% of the issued shares. A further 8% is held by other individuals who were involved in the project's early development. The remaining 2% is held by the company's original seed investor.

The company's legal representatives are in Seattle. Its US office is in Nevada, and its Web servers are located in Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas. The company's executive and research and development operations are based in Brisbane, Australia.

After the dot-com bubble burst on March 10, 2000, in response to the downturn in the internet advertising industry, [4] Geobytes diversified into other geo-niches such as fraud prevention, site analytics, geographic site customization and regulatory compliance. In mid-2002 Geobytes launched its GeoSelect product suite.

In April 2003, Geobytes’ CEO invented CaseKeys and Spamborder technologies to address the problem of spam filtering Type I and type II errors, and Geobytes incorporated this new technology into a new spam filter.

In May 2004, Geobytes improved its infrastructure-mapping technology to overcome the limitations of the previous ICMP-based techniques that were used previously. The new technique uses packet-cloning technology that can "see through" modern stateful Internet routers.[ citation needed ]

Technology

Geobytes' technologies fall into two main groups; geolocation services and anti-spam technologies. There is some overlap between the two groups, however their product utilizes geolocation technology to detect the geographic origins of emails.

Geolocation software

Geobyte provides a geolocation service, identifying users' locations by their IP addresses. The data used to compile the company's database is gathered from a large number of websites that require users to enter their location information. This is then processed by a set of algorithms that overlay this data onto Geobytes' infrastructure map of the Internet creating a global database that can be used to map IP addresses to geographical locations. The GeoNetMap system does not use WHOIS data, DNS reverse-lookups or cookies; it relies totally on its own proprietary IP address location database. City accuracy is less consistent and can vary considerably from country to country. [5]

Sender Authorization System

Geobyte provides technology to implement a "Sender Authorization System" intended to reduce the need for any special software or action to be installed or performed by the sender. The software uses a system that uses a combination of lower and upper case letters to encode email addresses with a unique key.

The concept is that CaseKeys software is installed on either the client PC or the mail server which allows every message – both incoming and outgoing to be intercepted and processed. Outgoing messages are processed with each instance of the protected user's email address being encoded with a unique key. The CaseKey encoding, the message recipient, and optionally other details of the outgoing message are then recorded. In the other direction, incoming messages are scanned for any CaseKey-encoded instances of the protected user's email address, with the recovered CaseKey codes being authenticated against the list of those previously issued. Messages found to contain valid CaseKeys are then marked as not spam to prevent spam filters from misrouting the message to the user's junk folder. Other details may be included with the message, such as who the original message was issued to and when it was issued.

Related Research Articles

The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard communication protocol for electronic mail transmission. Mail servers and other message transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages. User-level email clients typically use SMTP only for sending messages to a mail server for relaying, and typically submit outgoing email to the mail server on port 587 or 465 per RFC 8314. For retrieving messages, IMAP is standard, but proprietary servers also often implement proprietary protocols, e.g., Exchange ActiveSync.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open mail relay</span>

An open mail relay is a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server configured in such a way that it allows anyone on the Internet to send e-mail through it, not just mail destined to or originating from known users. This used to be the default configuration in many mail servers; indeed, it was the way the Internet was initially set up, but open mail relays have become unpopular because of their exploitation by spammers and worms. Many relays were closed, or were placed on blacklists by other servers.

A Domain Name System blocklist, Domain Name System-based blackhole list, Domain Name System blacklist (DNSBL) or real-time blackhole list (RBL) is a service for operation of mail servers to perform a check via a Domain Name System (DNS) query whether a sending host's IP address is blacklisted for email spam. Most mail server software can be configured to check such lists, typically rejecting or flagging messages from such sites.

A whitelist is a list or register of entities that are being provided a particular privilege, service, mobility, access or recognition. Entities on the list will be accepted, approved and/or recognized. Whitelisting is the reverse of blacklisting, the practice of identifying entities that are denied, unrecognised, or ostracised.

An email address identifies an email box to which messages are delivered. While early messaging systems used a variety of formats for addressing, today, email addresses follow a set of specific rules originally standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in the 1980s, and updated by RFC 5322 and 6854. The term email address in this article refers to just the addr-spec in Section 3.4 of RFC 5322. The RFC defines address more broadly as either a mailbox or group. A mailbox value can be either a name-addr, which contains a display-name and addr-spec, or the more common addr-spec alone.

Various anti-spam techniques are used to prevent email spam.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Email spam</span> Unsolicited electronic advertising by email

Email spam, also referred to as junk email, spam mail, or simply spam, is unsolicited messages sent in bulk by email (spamming). The name comes from a Monty Python sketch in which the name of the canned pork product Spam is ubiquitous, unavoidable, and repetitive. Email spam has steadily grown since the early 1990s, and by 2014 was estimated to account for around 90% of total email traffic.

Greylisting is a method of defending e-mail users against spam. A mail transfer agent (MTA) using greylisting will "temporarily reject" any email from a sender it does not recognize. If the mail is legitimate, the originating server will try again after a delay, and if sufficient time has elapsed, the email will be accepted.

A bounce message or just "bounce" is an automated message from an email system, informing the sender of a previous message that the message has not been delivered. The original message is said to have "bounced".

Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. It involves using email to send advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations. Email marketing strategies commonly seek to achieve one or more of three primary objectives: build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. The term usually refers to sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing a merchant's relationship with current or previous customers, encouraging customer loyalty and repeat business, acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately, and sharing third-party ads.

In computing, Internet geolocation is software capable of deducing the geographic position of a device connected to the Internet. For example, the device's IP address can be used to determine the country, city, or ZIP code, determining its geographical location. Other methods include examination of Wi-Fi hotspots, a MAC address, image metadata, or credit card information.

Email filtering is the processing of email to organize it according to specified criteria. The term can apply to the intervention of human intelligence, but most often refers to the automatic processing of messages at an SMTP server, possibly applying anti-spam techniques. Filtering can be applied to incoming emails as well as to outgoing ones.

Email authentication, or validation, is a collection of techniques aimed at providing verifiable information about the origin of email messages by validating the domain ownership of any message transfer agents (MTA) who participated in transferring and possibly modifying a message.

Emailtracking is a method for monitoring whether the email message is read by the intended recipient. Most tracking technologies use some form of digitally time-stamped record to reveal the exact time and date when an email is received or opened, as well as the IP address of the recipient.

In marketing, geomarketing is a discipline that uses geolocation in the process of planning and implementation of marketing activities. It can be used in any aspect of the marketing mix — the product, price, promotion, or place. Market segments can also correlate with location, and this can be useful in targeted marketing.

A challenge–response system is a type of that automatically sends a reply with a challenge to the (alleged) sender of an incoming e-mail. It was originally designed in 1997 by Stan Weatherby, and was called Email Verification. In this reply, the purported sender is asked to perform some action to assure delivery of the original message, which would otherwise not be delivered. The action to perform typically takes relatively little effort to do once, but great effort to perform in large numbers. This effectively filters out spammers. Challenge–response systems only need to send challenges to unknown senders. Senders that have previously performed the challenging action, or who have previously been sent e-mail(s) to, would be automatically

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geotargeting</span> Website content based on a visitors location

In geomarketing and internet marketing, geotargeting is the method of delivering different content to visitors based on their geolocation. This includes country, region/state, city, metro code/zip code, organization, IP address, ISP, or other criteria. A common usage of geotargeting is found in online advertising, as well as internet television with sites such as iPlayer and Hulu. In these circumstances, content is often restricted to users geolocated in specific countries; this approach serves as a means of implementing digital rights management. Use of proxy servers and virtual private networks may give a false location.

With email spam, which involves the unwanted inundation of unsolicited bulk emails, an array of user-side anti-spam techniques have been developed. These are methods created on the client arrangement of a situation, as opposed to the server-side.

SmartScreen is a cloud-based anti-phishing and anti-malware component included in several Microsoft products, including operating systems Windows 8 and later, the applications Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge. SmartScreen intelligence is also used in the backend of Microsoft's online services such as the web app Outlook.com and Microsoft Bing search engine.

A cold email is an unsolicited e-mail that is sent to a receiver without prior contact. It could also be defined as the email equivalent of cold calling. Cold emailing is a subset of email marketing and differs from transactional and warm emailing.

References

  1. ↑ ,Mcelligott, Adrian,"Method and Apparatus for Identifying Locale of Internet Users",issued 2001-08-09
  2. ↑ "House of Commons Committees - HERI (37-1) - Evidence - Number 073". 2011-08-05. Archived from the original on 2011-08-05. Retrieved 2022-11-01.
  3. ↑ "Whenu.com, Inc. vs. The State Of Utah" (PDF). The Third Judicial District Court Salt Lake County, State of Utah. 1 (1st ed.). 1 (1): 1–33. November 1, 2022. Retrieved November 1, 2022.
  4. ↑ Mannes, George (December 12, 2000). "Online Ad Revenue Declines". ABC News. Retrieved 2022-11-01.
  5. ↑ "GeoIP2 City Accuracy | MaxMind". www.maxmind.com. Retrieved 2022-11-01.
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