Why they are doing it... (Score 1)

Something i thought of when i was reading the original article is this... Often when i do a traceroute i notice the ISP routers will often be named with geographic names.. perhaps they are gathering a database that will allow banner ads with regional flavor and maybe even different languages. It wont be a perfect system but it will be 'better' to adverstisers than the data they have now. IMHO i dont think its a big deal. They are running ping and traceroute only which is not at all invasive and quite easy to block, and not very intrusive from a security standpoint. If they were port scanning then i might be worried about it but this really seems like a lot of hype over nothing.. I bet it wouldn't have made it to slashdot if they weren't associated with marekting technology..