Tor, IP Addresses, & Country of Origin

[Chrystal Ocean]

Am a Canadian frustrated by the price gouging that's been going on for months, with the Canadian dollar approaching and now at parity with the US dollar. Canadian retailers, and International corporations that sell to Canadians (including Apple), have been making huge profits on our backs and it's time this stopped. I am one angry puppy!

This lone Canadian consumer, therefore, has been attempting to investigate and compare prices of online stores that are operated by International corporations that sell both to US and Canadian customers. Most of these large retailers have .com and .ca domains and some of them (not Apple) have coded their .com sites to determine the country of origin of the visitor. If that country is Canada, the visitor never gets to see the .com site, but is automatically switched to the .ca site.

Now I'm no programmer or developer, just your (no more than average) web designer, but doesn't this browser behaviour suggest that the user's IP address is being read? And if so, would installing Tor get rid of the problem?

 

[colocolo]

Can you provide a link to one such site? Maybe there's something in the headers that redirects you to the .ca site that can be bypassed.

 

[szark]

Your IP address is always read by the destination web server -- that's the only way it knows where to send the page you requested. But yes, that's how they usually determine where your request is originating from.

The only problem with Tor is that it randomizes the final IP address, so you can't guarantee what country your traffic is coming out in. (Unless there's some configuration option I missed.) I played around with it once and tried to do a web search -- could only get the German version of Google because that's where my traffic was exiting the Tor network.