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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.
maxmind.com seems to pioneer GeoIP information, I suggest contacting them.
Download anything and everything. The MPAA will think your in Canada and look for someone else to sue.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
You'll need the cheap meds after your fill of cheap women.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
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.
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".
By "wedding cake" he presumably means "online porn"
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Try going to some other country-specific google url, or going to www.google.com/ncr (No Country Redirect).
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.