GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

Wed Apr 13 05:57:42 UTC 2016

I like (sarcasm) how everybody here either wants to point fingers at MaxMind or offer up coordinates to random places knowing that it will never happen. What ever happened to holding people responsible for being stupid. When did it start becoming ((fill in the blank)) coffee shop’s for you burning your tongue on your coffee, etc. I’ve seen/used all sorts of geolocation solutions and never once thought to myself that when a map pin was in the middle of a political boundary, that the software was telling me anything other than the place was somewhere within the boundary. Furthermore, most geolocation services will also show a zoomed-out/in map based on certainty. So if you can see more than a few hundred miles in the map that only measures 200x200 pixels, then it probably isn’t that accurate.

As to a solution, why don’t we just register the locations (more or less) with ARIN? Hell, with the amount of money we all pay them in annual fees, I can’t imagine it would be too hard for them to maintain. They could offer it as part of their public whois service or even just make raw data files public.

Just a though

—Todd

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