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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."
Adult Friend Finder would like to know too
it's silly when they show many hot looking ladies from Morrisville VT (pop. 2000).
I don't know how to fix it, but I know that some ads (before I got adblock plus) thought I lived in a town about 25 miles from here but it was later fixed. I don't know what happened but it was weird seeing "Find sexy ladies in xxxxxx, oh" and it not being my current location.
You might have to track down a proxy to surf from.
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
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.
Hey! Cheap meds!
maxmind.com seems to pioneer GeoIP information, I suggest contacting them.
It's amazing how many people rely on geo-IP information when it's so unreliable. Denying potential customers use of your services because of tenuous assumptions you're making about them seems like bad business.
We'd use geo-IP data at my old job, but it was just in non-critical, stop-gap places, trying to provide a better experience to users that we knew nothing about. Denying some customers use of our site would have been costly.
Download anything and everything. The MPAA will think your in Canada and look for someone else to sue.
Jebus. Creede> .
What's the difference... Why it's mostly the vowels. One has O's and the other has A's. Seems obvious actually.
Even if you do get the address corrected, it will take years before these companies update their databases and work correctly. About a year ago, the US Post Office changed the zip code in the area that I just moved into, and it has been a hassle left and right.
The electric company claimed they didn't offer service to a house that they were currently providing electricity to. My health insurance was changed to an 'out of area' plan even though my dad already had the right provider in the same zip code. Sears wouldn't deliver until I gave them the old, incorrect zip code. Even Google still has it wrong on some maps, but not others (and I filed the bug months ago, but no fix).
Welcome to another series of problems created by software developers who made bad assumptions.
You may not get anywhere with it, but it might be worth it to try and contact Yahoo's ad department about this. After all, its pretty worthless to be dumping a French ad to an American, and as a result a waste (however small) of the money the advertiser spent getting the ad to you in the first place. I'm suggesting Yahoo because you mention specifically their ads showing up, but if there are any others that do the same thing, it might be worth contacting them as well.
Yes, it does seem rather counterintuitive to most of us here who block ads, but they are a source of revenue for the likes of Yahoo, and if they can chip in some effort to more effectively target you, you've gone a ways towards solving the problem with the other sites.
The actual problem may be that your ISP is outsourcing the proxy to a datacentre in Canada thus it may be stuffing up the GEO_LOC software on some retail servers. Try using another proxy (within your area obviously).
As you may have been aware, the US economy has been in a rut. I'm not quite sure how "connected" you folks are out there in them sticks of Colorado.. but Bush decided he needed a new war to boost the economy and get cash flowing again.
The Russians weren't interested.. so we picked a fight with neighboring Canada. As is usual with US military operations lately, we failed.
Your part of the country actually IS Canada now dude. Good luck.. better than living in the States.
Move to Canada.
My IP address is 127.0.0.1 and none of the geo-location companies can find me.
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.
My advice is to go the route Ares suggests, by contacting Yahoo about the problem, but in addition, I would emphasize in my communications with them that as a customer, they aren't getting full value for the money they pay their geolocation service. This may be more effective for actually motivating Yahoo to contact its geolocation service about it, rather than just complaining about bad ads.
Desole, mais je ne comprend pas. S'il vous plait, ecrit en francais.
Merci,
Jean-Guy de Tabernac
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!
Ah, you're complaining about the utility of ads that you see on Yahoo...? This must be a first.
Three Squirrels
Does this new small ISP have a Pringles can on its roof, pointed North?
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.
Or perhaps you should just move out of Quebec???
Have your ISP contact Akamai. As an ISP who was also misidentified as "being outside of the USA" by Akamai's geolocation, our customers suffered from the exact same kinds of problems with region protection on network streaming. We didn't get it resolved until we were able to shake the tree properly at Akamai.
AFAIK, Akamai has the most utilized geolocation service out there.
Article summary says "Certain sites won't sell me goods or services because they don't do business in Canada."
That's a lot worse than inline ads.
i am a soviet space shuttle
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.
Don't you mean "insensitive Claude"?
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.
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.
this is all wrong. whois is also used to query the arin database. as the OP stated, this whois information from ARIN is correct.
reverse DNS can not be modified by anyone. only the authoritative nameserver for a region of IP address space (your isp's isp) can delegate that role to another party. this is the essence of the in-addr.arpa domain. most ISPs will not even allow customers with static IP addresses to control the reverse DNS for their addresses.
if you perform reverse dns lookups on the IP addresses appearing near the end of a traceroute you can find useful information for geolocation of the target address. networks generally provide reverse dns for router IP addresses, and those are likely to reveal where the router lives.
Or www.google.com/ncr ... this sets a cookie that prevents further redirects to country-specific sites.
Oh, come on.... When I visit Google for the first time, I get it in German. You know what I do? Yeah, there is a small link on the bottom of the page named "Google in English" (and it's really written in English!) It's to the right, just above © 2008 Google. Click it and you will be in English nirvana. A cookie is set and it never asks you again.
I checked, http://www.google.com.mx/ has it too...
most ISPs will not even allow customers with static IP addresses to control the reverse DNS for their addresses.
Dunno what you mean by most or control, but for ATT DSL customers, a call to DNS Provisioning and a day's wait is all that's required. For their part, they basically just create a CNAME record and let you take care of the rest. Unless, of course, you choose to have them take of the rest.
Sure, it's on an extension cable running from here to Canada.
Dear movielink, nvidia, {insert website here},
...
Your website is broken. I live in Colorado and my IP is 1.2.3.4. If you don't believe me, my ISP is Joe's ISP and Tire Shack, Inc, just perform a quick whois on the information. I would suggest you contact whomever you use for geolocation information to have them correct it.
Same information, not sent to Slashdot. If the people running the service don't respond to you, maybe they'll respond to a dozen companies who own the websites you go to. Remember, you're *their* customer, it's in their best interest to have your info correct.
I used to work as a SysAdmin for an ISP, we acquired a new block of IPs which previously were owned by a nefarious spammer. I had to jump through hoops trying to convince some blacklists to remove us. Finally, when there was one list with zero contact information and it seemed to no longer have any management behind it, I called our customers (there were only about two) having issues emailing a particular state office. I called the state office and explained the situation, they whitelisted just the IP of our particular mail server.
Think about solving the problem in a different way.
FLR
I googled this myself out of curiosity, but could find none.
I was surprised to see, however, that they seem relatively legitimate. They have 8,000 of their own weather monitors, and even the National Weather Service has signed on to use some of Weatherbug's weather tracking data in some fashion.
For those who want to try it, here's a link to the demo page http://www.maxmind.com/app/lookup_city. (And note the link to check your own IP in the bottom right :)