Nik Cubrilovic
TechCrunch.com
A large number of web services are geographically restricted, such as  ,  Pandora and  Spotify. The reasons are usually to do with content licensing restrictions, or because US visitors (or visitors from other advanced economies) are of a higher value from a monetization perspective. A web application can only guess at the location of a visitor based on an IP address and other information, such as browser language and regional settings.

IP addresses are mapped to countries (and in some instances, further to states and cities) using large commercial datasets such as GeoIP from Maxmind, which is a ‘best guess’ database based on data it has collected (how, I would rather not know). The system is accurate enough to enable services to block on a country level, but often fail at a more local level.

But the nature of the web means that geographically restricting web services is next to impossible, because those who are technically adept have known how to find and use proxy servers (both open and private) and VPN services to masquerade as being from another country.

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At this point, people wearing scandalously revealing Halloween costumes are hardly shocking. But when the trend leaks down to our furry friends, you know things have gone way too far.

Photo courtesy of Travis Huff

Just in time for Halloween, here are a few behind-the-scenes tidbits about some famous masks (of both the scary and not-so-spooky variety).

1. Leatherface

Portions of the classic horror film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre were based on the crimes of serial killer Ed Gein, but the trademark Leatherface mask was inspired by a far more personal (and equally grisly) experience. Writer/director Tobe Hooper had a doctor friend who’d once confided to him that, while a pre-med student, he’d sneaked into the morgue and harvested the skin from the face of a cadaver to make a Halloween mask. Bob Burns, the movie’s art director, took several of Leatherface’s props home with him after filming wrapped, including one of the three original “killing” masks, which he mounted on a Styrofoam head and sprayed with a transparent sealant. He kept the head in a shoebox in his closet for many years before selling it to a friend, who then auctioned it on eBay for an undisclosed sum. The successful bidder was a horror film fanatic who now proudly displays the mask in his home in a specially built air-tight case.

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