Slashdot Mirror

Most of the major Internet companies use Quova (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) for their IP geolocation data (linky. You don't need to have your ISP contact them. Just send an email to support@quova.com with your IP and physical location. They used to provide weekly data updates, so I imagine it is equivalent or more frequent now.

Yahoo and other sites rely on databases of geo data. E.g. databases mapping IP ranges to geographical locations.
There are a few providers of such databases and they constantly need to update their databases to fix issues as the one reported by you.
E.g. notify http://www.quova.com/

Their homepage carries some (vague) information: here.
You can apply for a job (mostly in sales though), if you want to know even more.

On their website www.quova.com they have a contact page giving various email addresses including one for concerns .. I don't see what there is to get upset about really.

If you have sensitive services that you don't want accessible by the whole internet, use hosts.allow / hosts.deny etc. .. seeing if a machine is alive does not endanger security .. only if AFTER establishing that then particular security flaw exploits are attempted on these services is there a problem. Use qmail for smtp, apache for www, and lock down ssh to only a few allowed hosts or networks and that should help alleviate a lot of fear imho. For those that would whine about ssh, if you allow telnet then you're not serious about security.

If your network and system is secure, who gives a flying fuck what people do on the internet? .. it IS a public network after all..

--

On their website www.quova.com they have a contact page giving various email addresses including one for concerns .. I don't see what there is to get upset about really.

If you have sensitive services that you don't want accessible by the whole internet, use hosts.allow / hosts.deny etc. .. seeing if a machine is alive does not endanger security .. only if AFTER establishing that then particular security flaw exploits are attempted on these services is there a problem. Use qmail for smtp, apache for www, and lock down ssh to only a few allowed hosts or networks and that should help alleviate a lot of fear imho. For those that would whine about ssh, if you allow telnet then you're not serious about security.

If your network and system is secure, who gives a flying fuck what people do on the internet? .. it IS a public network after all..

--