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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."
but you're going to get a lot more help if you provide your ip address, even if you don't like doing that to the crowd. Or at least let us know what your router's IP address is or some other address in your subnet, since they are probably all the same (wrong).
..." vs "call XXX at 555-1212 and ask for their geo department, problem solved".
Unless you are only interested in knowing the generals of how to fix it yourself, not more in depth examination of your problem (and possibly an immediate solution) This will be the difference between "try this and look that up and see what this is and google for that and
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Not that cookies have anything to do with geo-location of IP addresses, but you're only 98% correct. Cookies are set by the server. And servers should updates them as necessary.
But sometimes you have old cookies with names that still mean something to the server, and values that don't. It's bad programming practice, but it happens. In particular it can happen if you don't go to the site very often -- when the site is updated from v1 to v2, v2 can read v1 cookies without a problem. And when the site is updated from v2 to v3, v3 can read v2 cookies without a problem. But if you visit during v1, and don't visit again until v3, the server could be confused by your cookies that are invalid for both v2 and v3. Obviously the right choice is for the server to clear/update cookies it doesn't understand, but that doesn't always happen. And while clearing the cookies client-side is lame, it does fix such problems.
I was in Mexico recently. Whenever I visited Google, I'd get the Mexican Google site. Getting the USA Google website was virtually impossible. As soon as I changed the URL, it'd just forward me back to the Mexican Google site.
Yahoo exhibited the exact same behavior. Same thing happened with a bunch of other websites. It was really damn annoying. As an American living in the US, I was never aware of this behavior because I never previously ran into it.
Hulu was particularly bad because they only display video for "US" IPs. This guy is legitimately living in the US, but with his IP coming up as Canada, he wouldn't be able to access that website.
In emails in Greek the word "kai" is ubiquitous, as it translates to "and". Yahoo happily serves ads about Kai Fragrances or the Napili Kai Beach Resort -- in Maui. How much bang are these sponsors getting for their buck?!
I live in Hong Kong, and my IP matches that. But I don't read Chinese. Many websites thoughtfully redirect me to a Chinese language site, and have NO FUCKING WAY to override their language choice. Google.com is automatically converted to Google.com.hk. Assholes. If I wanted Google.com.hk I WOULD HAVE TYPED IT MYSELF. Yes, I know, now, how to fix that on my PC, but Google still does that whenever I use it from someone else's PC.
And it was always good for a laugh to see the Adult Friend Finder ads, with buxom corn-fed blondes spreading their legs under the heading "Girls in Hong Kong want to meet you for sex".
I have the exact opposite problem... plugging my IP address into Maxmind, I get my EXACT town (and it's a small one, believe me). Yet, any other address in my ISPs range just says the capital city of my state. Can I convince Maxmind to like.. you know.. MAKE MY DAMN STATIC IP NOT POINT RIGHT AT ME!? And how'd it get like that in the first place?
You may see an upstream location that appears to be in Canada. Maybe the reverse lookup domain name is misleading, and these geo services are making an assumption (like router5-ontario-ca.someisp.com being in Ontario Canada, and not Ontario California).