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Hi,

I own https://wonderproxy.com/ and the primary thing we sell our customers is "a server where we say it is so you can test your localization", and we have problems _all the time_. So I've been where you are, with the added bonus of having customers yelling at me because Google thinks my Madrid server is in France.

There's no real good options here, different people use different databases of different ages with different procedures to update (if they have one at all). MaxMind (http://maxmind.com) is pretty good at updates, as are most of the free options (like ip2location http://www.ip2location.com/). Google (which powers a lot of ads, and their own country redirect) has a form (https://support.google.com/websearch/contact/ip) which seems to pipe directly into /dev/null.

Most GeoIP providers want to handle things in large blocks, not one IP at a time. If you can convince your ISP (generally by pointing them at a few forms) to send in corrections they'll be able to correct their entire IP space all at once, which may be handled faster, or at least cover you now and next time your IP changes. Once these are submitted expect a delay of 2weeks -> before anything starts to get better.

Beyond trying to correct people, buying a cheap server from Linode and VPNing through should be a decent work around. If you set up an OpenVPN server, several routers are capable of connecting and routing all their data through them automatically, so you wont need to configure each device individually. Linode is a decent option as their servers are fast, stable, and you'll effectively only pay for half your symmetric bandwidth as inbound is free.

good luck :(

Use http://www.ip2location.com/

This is precisely why I don't give most companies this information -- because I don't trust them with it. Not to keep it safe, not to use it as they say, and not to provide it to someone else.

We are Internet. We know who you are. Resistance is futile.

Thanks to browser fingerprinting, flash cookies, ad network beacons, content beacons, and traffic bugs we put in every web page (digg, stumbleupon, facebook 'like this', twitter), you cannot escape our eye, we know every site you view. We also know your ip address and where you live.

Oh, and we already know your real favorite pet, you sure were naive back when you had that geocities account. Lying at this point is futile.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but it sounds like this DNS "fix" will require that before I can read web sites I have to submit some information about my location.

You absolutely are misunderstanding it (or rather you are correctly understanding most of the posts here but they have little to do with the real proposal). You will not have to submit anything before doing anything. Nobody is getting any extra information here. If you think websites don't already know where you are, think again!

In terms of telephone calls, DNS is the telephone directory service. You want to phone www.google.com, so you phone .com and ask them for the google.com number. Then you phone google.com and ask them for the www.google.com number. Because google has branches of www all over the country, they give you a number for www in your local area, so the call is cheaper and better line quality. They can do this because they can see your caller id so they know roughly where you live.

Now lets say you don't like having to do so many steps all the time so you use a 3rd party service, let's call it ultraphone. You always ring the same number for ultraphone and they perform all the steps and give you back the final answer. The problem is that the google.com now sees ultraphone's caller id not yours so you get back a number that's in ultraphone's home-town not your home-town.

This proposed extension just allows ultraphone to tell google "I'm calling on behalf of please give me the number you would give them".

So you get a number that's local for you instead of one that's local for ultraphone.

The problem that is being fixed here is that ultraphone saves you hassle while getting the phone number but it gets you a bad phone number (not a wrong one just not the best one for you). Right now you have to decide which you prefer, fast lookups with sub-optimal results or awkward lookups with optimal results.

This extension lets you have fast lookups with optimal results.

Assuming you were going to call www.google.com (and not just looking up their number for fun) then google was going to see your caller id anyway. This extension just changes when it sees it. Right now if you use a 3rd party DNS provider it gets your IP too late to do good load balancing and that hurts users and may consume extra bandwidth.

Chances are that if you don't know about this stuff then you're using your ISP's DNS service and for some big ISPs that may mean a server hundreds of miles away, giving you sub-optimal answers.

Zocalo, you are right about the crunch in Asia.

You can get the IP address allocation by country from the IP Address Report 2010.

Apparently, APNIC is getting the pressure and likely to consume all remaining IPv4 space soon.

-Tim

Sorry ... it WAS there when I previewed it, must have inadvertently edited it out.

" ... That's an obvious proof that they use simple scripts and read it from the IP address; see http://www.ip2location.com/free.asp/ (Scroll Down)

Until I heard about this company

Before you click, be forwarned they have a live demo on their homepage which estimates your longitude and latitude based on your IP address...

Just wait until they get one of these databases going for RFID tags...

There are two widely used geolocation services which should be your starting point:
MaxMinds and IP2Location.

I would contact them and get them to update their records, especially MaxMind, as they are probably the most widely used geolocation service on the Internet.

The company IP2Location will determine not only the geographic location of your visitors, but also their ISP.

... we just need to perhaps allocate them a bit more fairly.

According to the 2007 report, http://www.ip2location.com/ip2location-internet-ip-address-2008-report.aspx/, 50.5% of the whole IPv4 space is taken by just two countries ... US and UK.

IANA has reserved all these class A nets (reserved for WHAT exactly ... and at what point are they considering UNRESERVING them ?)

1,2,5,7,23,27,31,36,37,39,42,77-79,92-123,173-187,197,223,240-255 ... in real terms that is 79 / 255 or 31% of the whole bloody IPv4 structure STILL not being used .. all "reserved" by IANA.

Have a look at the 1-31 class A nets, and see exactly who stil has huge gobs of the internet for themselves.

GEC, Army, IBM, DoD, AT&T Bell Labs, Xerox, HP, DEC, Apple, MIT, Ford Motor Company etc etc all feel the need to have IPs for 16,777,216 computers EACH !!!

If you downclassed even the "private" corporations in that bunch to class B nets, and left the gov and mil alone, you'd still be able to free up about another 100 million IP addresses to the rest of the world.

The sky is NOT falling, they just need to perhaps make better use of what they've got.

At the top of the wired blog comments right now is this one: Wikimedia Foundation employee removes source about Wiki Scanner funding by Anonymous Vishal-WMF, an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation, has removed evidence from a news story that uncovered that Virgil, the scanner's creator, was HIRED by the Wikimedia Foundation! News story that was removed by Wikipedia Employee (not admin, EMPLOYEE): http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_vi ew.asp?at_code=428814 Backup archive link in case the WMF 'vanishes' the evidence: http://www.webcitation.org/5RAEP2kAl Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Virgil_G riffith&diff=prev&oldid=151814656 Yet Wired has claimed that this is a "false claim": "Update: 8/17/2007 A Wikimedia Foundation employee really did edit Virgil Griffith's entry today, but only to cut a false claim that Griffith was employed by the foundation to create the scanner. " So what makes Wired assume that it is a false claim? This is the same guy that brought us Wikipedia and the Intelligence Services, and he is stating something as fact, not as an opinion. "On July 26, OhmyNews alleged that Wikipedia may have been infiltrated by Intelligence Agencies. The story attracted more than 50,000 readers in just three days, was highly debated on the Web, and translated in several languages. Wikipedia quickly reacted to the news and hired Virgil Griffith, one of the best known American hacker, to investigate the matter." Yet Wikipedia claims its "unreliable". Wikipedia has used ohmynews as a source in 192 of their articles: and has been used in Google news 460 times: http://news.google.com.au/news?hl=en&ned=au&q=ohmy news&btnG=Search+News Virgil Griffith does claim that he wasn't paid by Wikipedia: http://virgil.gr/31.html and the Wikipedia staff went so far as to remove the links, and then ban the IP address of the person who had inserted them: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special: Log&type=block&page=User:123.2.168.215 Daniel Brandt claims that it is far too expensive for him to have done it himself: http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&showtopic= 11853&view=findpost&p=43697 But perhaps he really did do all of this just to make himself popular. Spend a few thousand dollars, including the $349 to do the reverse IP lookups: http://www.ip2location.com/ip-country-region-city- isp.aspx , saved presumably through his time as an unemployed student and spent several hundred hours creating something that does nothing more than make him well-known. Perhaps it'll help him to get a job sometime in the future? And perhaps its all one almighty coincidence that all this has happened just a week after Wikipedia was reeling after the massive censorship about the SlimVirgin scandal. Oh, and also note that another IP that reverted edits to the article belonged to Jayjg, the person most closely related to SlimVirgin: http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&showtopic= 11853&view=findpost&p=43641 Coincidence, coincidence, coincidence. And this over an issue in which we've proven that the CIA edits Wikipedia with a definite aim, as have many other industr

Peruse the following listing of IPv4 allocations by country:

http://www.ip2location.com/faqs-ip-country.aspx#18

Considering that virutal web hosting is pretty much de-facto and that NAT usage will definately continue to rise, does it seem reasonable to say that SOME countries are hogging IPv4 address space and subsequently hastening IPv4's demise?

Hee hee ... I just went to http://ip2location.com/ , and they informed me that I was located at "(US) UNITED STATES, VIRGINIA, HERNDON." Mm...no, I'm in Los Angeles, and no, AOL isn't even my ISP :-)

I have at least two misgivings here:

1. The precision seems to be horrible.
2. It might not even be a good thing if this kind of capability was reliable and easy. I recently got my site DDoS'd by a subdomain that reverse DNS revealed to be a block of servers owned by the government of a certain province in Spain. I e-mailed their webmaster (in my best high school Spanish), and got no response. One of the first things I thought of was, "Hell, I don't need these foreign freakos hosing my server! What if I just use geolocation to lock out people from outside the US from using this particular CGI script." Well, once I calmed down and thought about it, it became clear that I didn't want to turn away 90% of the world's population just because some psychologically disturbed IT worker in Spain was hassling me. But that's exactly what could happen if geolocation of http requests became cheap, easy, and accurate -- you'd get the internet becoming fragmented along national lines. CI can just imagine the state government of /(Georgia|Utah|Iran|Singapore)/ saying, "We're going to prohibit discussion of homosexuality on the internet, because it might reach young people. It's not an unreasonable burden on webmasters, because they can just use geolocation to determine that the user is in $1."

http://ip2location.com/ is the best database out there.

IP geolocation and a shotgun.

Works for me.

The porn sites try get your location from your IP address (such as this site does), which is often quite wrong. For example, even though I'm in Denmark right now, my company proxies http through Ireland, so I often get ads for "slutty girls in Dublin". Even when proxying is not being used, the result is often the location of your ISP's headquarters, for example.

Skype subscribers might want to check their IP address and ISP from IP2Location.com.

Bellsouth, like many ISPs, use airport city codes in the RR to show the nearest city. bna is Nashville International Airport.

And the lazy man's option... :-)

65.81.97.208 yields

Region: TENNESSEE
City: NASHVILLE
ISP: BELLSOUTH.NET INC

I know it's probably not true.... but how else could they know where you are from?

I'm guessing they'd be using your IP and doing a lookup of where it is in the world. Try it.

You can tell where someone is via ip address. Take for example ip2location.com. They pin point me to my exact city, as well as provide longitue and latitude, right on the front page.

Something like this:

http://www.ip2location.com/free.asp

but presumably on one of their servers to give a timely response...

Phil

ip address

I'm always wondering which company supply Monster.com geo-location information. Here are some in my list. ip2location.com infosplit.com digitalenvoy.net location.com.my