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Ask Slashdot: Getting Around Terrible Geolocation?
First time accepted submitter AvitarX writes W3C has the IP address where I work as showing up in Ireland (we are in the USA). This is a nuisance for a lot of reasons (many dates now display in European format, prices are listed in euros, search results redirect to google.ie). Some of these issues can be worked around, but it's frustrating. I have searched as best as I can, and only can find information on the geolocation API in HTML5. The office is on a static IP address from Comcast. When I visit whatismyipaddress.com all info is correct except for W3C's result. I have submitted that it is inaccurate; is there anything else I can do? Googling, I have only managed to find usage examples for web developers/designers.
You could subscribe to a VPN or Proxy service that is based in the U.S. Bit galling to (I assume) pay for a service to fix the issue of course.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
Hi,
I own https://wonderproxy.com/ and the primary thing we sell our customers is "a server where we say it is so you can test your localization", and we have problems _all the time_. So I've been where you are, with the added bonus of having customers yelling at me because Google thinks my Madrid server is in France.
There's no real good options here, different people use different databases of different ages with different procedures to update (if they have one at all). MaxMind (http://maxmind.com) is pretty good at updates, as are most of the free options (like ip2location http://www.ip2location.com/). Google (which powers a lot of ads, and their own country redirect) has a form (https://support.google.com/websearch/contact/ip) which seems to pipe directly into /dev/null.
Most GeoIP providers want to handle things in large blocks, not one IP at a time. If you can convince your ISP (generally by pointing them at a few forms) to send in corrections they'll be able to correct their entire IP space all at once, which may be handled faster, or at least cover you now and next time your IP changes. Once these are submitted expect a delay of 2weeks -> before anything starts to get better.
Beyond trying to correct people, buying a cheap server from Linode and VPNing through should be a decent work around. If you set up an OpenVPN server, several routers are capable of connecting and routing all their data through them automatically, so you wont need to configure each device individually. Linode is a decent option as their servers are fast, stable, and you'll effectively only pay for half your symmetric bandwidth as inbound is free.
good luck :(
paul reinheimer
Yeah, I was thinking this guy's got it all backwards. If MaxMind et al are already showing the right position, then the problem is the location returned by the W3C API call in his unspecified browser which depends on which location service his browser uses (possibly not the default), and whether his device is GPS-equipped.
In the absence of GPS, Firefox defaults to using Google Location Service (according to https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/... ), which is not one of the 4 "providers" listed at http://whatismyipaddress.com/ and could easily be the one database that's wrong, causing his confusion. I expect Chrome to do the same. IE may use a Microsoft-provided IP database, again separate from the four above -- I couldn't find confirmation of this.
For servers that don't rely on W3C javascript calls to get your location, it all entirely depends on which service they subscribe to, which you may not be able to find out. Short of submitting corrections to "all of them", you're just out of luck.
Every day is a bad day at comcast. It is usually a bad day for comcast customers too.
Comcast has the worst customer service for a reason. they just don't care.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Note, in the first link, everything except W3C is listed as correct, which is even more baffling for me, because somewhere the wrong information is being received, and it happened everywhere in the shop at once, across platforms.
You've got it all wrong as to where the problem lies.
First, there are two ways being used to calculate your geolocation. One of them uses online providers who have databases mapping IP addresses to locations. This is what you're seeing in the "Provider X" columns, which you state are indeed showing your correct location.
W3C doesn't provide a geolocation service. Instead, what the results of this (admittedly badly named) column indicate are what YOUR COMPUTER reports its location as being, using the W3C Geolocation API. The first link you provided above describes this succinctly in the text immediately above the map, where it states "The W3C Geolocation service determins location by the browser providing GPS location (if available) and signal strengths of visible WiFi annoucements" [sic]. Thus, the web page is asking your browser to report where it is located, and your browser is responding that you're somewhere in Ireland.
The question for you then becomes: where is my browser getting this bad data from? On Mac OS X, browsers get this from the Core Location Framework. While Core Location Framework can conceivably use a number of different factors to determine your location, typically it uses the detectable WiFi beacons in your area, mapping their SSIDs and MAC addresses, and their relative strengths to triangulate your location. On Windows it uses the Sensor and Location Platform to do much the same thing.
I don't know much in the way of details of the databases Apple and Microsoft are using on the backend to map your triangulated location based on SSIDs/MACs of visible WiFi access points, however there are a few ways the system can go wrong:
The fact that all your systems had this problem at the same time indicate it's probably one of the above. You can try to fix the situation by changing the SSID of your access point. Depending on the size of your facility, this may be more or less difficult, however it should hopefully make the incorrect results from your OSs' location services either report the correct location, or simply that your location is unknown. You may also need to change the MAC address of your access point(s), but I'd save that as a last resort. Note than making these changes should fix the issue with your systems reporting themselves as being in Ireland, but it may not result in them reporting the correct location (they might report they don't know their location at all). That's okay -- for Apple devices at least, you can fix this by simply having someone with an iPhone with Location Service enabled in the vicinity (Apple's data is crowd sourced automatically through the use of GPS co-ordinates and relative WiFi access point signal strengths (I'm not sure how Microsoft collects the information for their database, so I can't help you there -- a Google search might provide some answers).
HTH!
Yaz