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How To Clean Up Incorrect Geolocation Information?
zorro6 writes "I thought this might be an interesting question/topic and it would sure help me to get some kind of answer. I recently got internet service from a small, local wireless ISP in my area (south central Colorado, USA). The strange thing is that many, many web sites think I am in Quebec, Canada when I use the service. Evidently some geolocation service thinks my IP address indicates I am in Canada. I have checked the obvious. The WHOIS information for my IP correctly indicates a location of Durango, CO. So the bad info is coming from some more sophisticated geolocation service. My ISP is at a loss as to how to fix this but it is causing me a lot of grief. Many of the ads I get shown on Yahoo! for instance are in French! Certain sites won't sell me goods or services because they don't do business in Canada. So far I know that Yahoo! (or their ad provider), Nvidia, Movielink, etc. all think I am in Canada. I would sure appreciate any help/info on how to get this corrected."
I'm interested to find out how to clean up "incorrect" Geolocation info too.
Increasingly it appears sites are using GeoLocation to route you to a different version of their website, or prevent you from viewing content.
Sometimes it may be useful, such as when Google serving you localised adverts, however when they get it wrong it can becomes a great pain in the arse.
Worse is when sites ban you from viewing content, or just ban you completely, based on your location.
I'm sure some people will rationalise the need for Geolocation for restricting content, but I think it is akin to putting a poster in a public place and then trying to restrict people from viewing it.
Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day.
Teach a man to fish, and he'll feed himself for years.
Hackers follow this model when giving support. Even if the asker gave such details, we'd likely show them how to figure out the answer themselves. It's not that we don't care to give a quick solution, it's that we want to share the knowledge so they can help themselves and help others in the future.
And frankly, I wouldn't want to make it immediately obvious what my IP address was to such a large audience. There's inevitably going to be some jackass that sends a botnet at it.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I would have suggested he have his ISP assign him different IPs until he gets one that geolocates to America.
"Don't know what's going on" is different from "we can't resolve the matter"
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
It is always wrong to blame the user for stale cookies. Cookies are set by the server, not the user, and the server can (and should) update them as necessary.
Besides, that has nothing to do with the problem here, which happens when the web site looks up the IP address in a locator service, and gets wrong information back. The IP address is independent of cookies.
Geolocation services are just large databases that map IP addresses to physical locations. There's really nothing else to it. Who owns a set of IP addreses can also change quite frequently, and so these databases need constant updating.
As an example, here's the FAQ provided by a geolocation service I've used in the past:
GEO I/O compiles several sources of data to achieve 99% accuracy at the country level, 85% at the state/regional level, 80% at the (US) city level (within a 25-mile radius), and 60% accuracy for cities outside of the US. The data is stored in a proprietary format, limiting our ability to make individual changes to it, however the database is updated monthly by our data providers.Basically, it will get fixed when the group maintaining the data updates it, which in my experience can be anywhere from a couple weeks to a year.
Or, a hidden proxy upstream is the problem.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
It's stupid, but I always look twice... pop 10k here, so I would have seen them before.
Still, my favorite has to be this one, and ones like it.
Seriously, one of these days, I have got to get into the porn business. If any idiot with FrontPage can make money, imagine what will happen when you get someone competent... I can see it now: PornDB! Complete with buzzword compliance (social networking! REST!) and a query language!
SELECT videos.* FROM models LEFT JOIN videos ON model_id WHERE bust_size > size('33C') AND bmi 120;
(Nobody mod me insightful!)
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!