Country Flags

Feature requests not specific to either the Mac OS X or GTK+ versions of Transmission
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drsassafras
Posts: 15
Joined: Thu May 08, 2008 1:23 pm

Country Flags

Post by drsassafras »

Deluge has country flags beside the peers. It's a neat feature that has helped me to understand the cultural interest in the torrents I'm using. Thought if its simple to implement it might be a neat feature for Transmission.

Thanks for the great app guys.
killemov
Posts: 533
Joined: Sat Jul 31, 2010 5:04 pm

Re: Country Flags

Post by killemov »

It is NOT simple AND you will lose anonymity.
drsassafras
Posts: 15
Joined: Thu May 08, 2008 1:23 pm

Re: Country Flags

Post by drsassafras »

The country is figured out from an IP address. As long as the IP address is provided, one is no more or less anonymous if the country is determined.

Remember that its also not always correct. Using a VPN may change the outcome, and I've seen different geo-location software sometimes return different results.

This kind of lookup happens, on well over 80% websites that one visits. Google uses it to figure out language settings, advertisers use it to target advertising, it gets logged in web-traffic statistics.

I'm also not sure I agree with your idea of anonymity. I think of anonymity as something where a user can remain unidentified. Providing a likely country is not much help (if any) in identifying a specific user. However, if you know the IP address, then you can likely do it with a court order. So it sounds to me like you're concerned about making a mountain bigger by depositing a cup full of soil on it... to be sure it will make the mountain bigger, but anyone who really tries to investigate will never know the difference.
cfpp2p
Posts: 290
Joined: Sat Aug 08, 2009 3:14 pm

Re: Country Flags

Post by cfpp2p »

Upgrade GeoIP Lite to GeoLite2 #1104
https://github.com/transmission-remote- ... ssues/1104
killemov
Posts: 533
Joined: Sat Jul 31, 2010 5:04 pm

Re: Country Flags

Post by killemov »

drsassafras wrote:The country is figured out from an IP address. As long as the IP address is provided, one is no more or less anonymous if the country is determined.

Remember that its also not always correct. Using a VPN may change the outcome, and I've seen different geo-location software sometimes return different results.

This kind of lookup happens, on well over 80% websites that one visits. Google uses it to figure out language settings, advertisers use it to target advertising, it gets logged in web-traffic statistics.

I'm also not sure I agree with your idea of anonymity. I think of anonymity as something where a user can remain unidentified. Providing a likely country is not much help (if any) in identifying a specific user. However, if you know the IP address, then you can likely do it with a court order. So it sounds to me like you're concerned about making a mountain bigger by depositing a cup full of soil on it... to be sure it will make the mountain bigger, but anyone who really tries to investigate will never know the difference.
My point is that once you implement a call to the service doing the mapping, you force your users to forever trust that service not doing anything nefarious with their (meta)data. Exposed mappings of your IP address to other IP addresses could be valuable information for possible unsavory entities.
orangensaft
Posts: 1
Joined: Sat Mar 30, 2019 8:13 pm

Re: Country Flags

Post by orangensaft »

killemov wrote:My point is that once you implement a call to the service doing the mapping, you force your users to forever trust that service not doing anything nefarious with their (meta)data. Exposed mappings of your IP address to other IP addresses could be valuable information for possible unsavory entities.
That's why you'd make the country lookup access a local database, not a data-hungry external service. It's beyond me why anyone would willingly hand their users' data out to services like that when a local solution is viable, faster and more reliable.
You'd need to implement or include:
  • a local geoip database
  • country flag images, preferably SVG. Wikipedia has a wealth of CC-licensed SVG flags that are small of file size
  • a call to the database to look up the country for each IP
  • a new column in the GUI next to the IP for the image
Anyway, +1 from me for this idea. Could be a nice gimmick.
Giorgos
Posts: 4
Joined: Sun Aug 11, 2019 10:54 am

Re: Country Flags

Post by Giorgos »

+1 from me too!
rmlazzari
Posts: 1
Joined: Sat Sep 14, 2019 6:37 pm

Re: Country Flags

Post by rmlazzari »

It's too easy to ask something to developers. I know that because I worked for 30 years, a looong time ago, as developer (COBOL for IBM/370), hehe...

But as a suggestion, I think it's funny keep looking the country of a downloader or uploader copying files from or to my PC while it happens. Just funny, to fantasize about people, thinking "wow, now this world became very small...", nothing else. So if someday you think about showing flags, to avoid loosing privacy, you could make that as an option in Preferences menu. Something like "Do you want (or mind) other peers know where are you? (Nothing more than that will be shown)." For me this options will be always ON, :)

Thank you.

P.S.: Actually, I saw just now, already there's IP info. Not such anonymous...
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