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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).
Download anything and everything. The MPAA will think your in Canada and look for someone else to sue.
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.
Maybe it was trying to tell you that the closest sexy ladies were 25 miles away :P
(I'm trying really hard to not make Ohio jokes since I live here lol)
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
Desole, mais je ne comprend pas. S'il vous plait, ecrit en francais.
Merci,
Jean-Guy de Tabernac
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!
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.
Who need's speling and grammar?
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.
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.
Or www.google.com/ncr ... this sets a cookie that prevents further redirects to country-specific sites.
I'm about to DoS your router in 3...2...1...[NO CARRIER]
Lock the wife and the dog in the boot of the car.
Return one hour later.
Who's happy to see you?
Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll sit in a boat and drink beer all day.