IPv4 country of origin

Thu Oct 3 19:28:39 UTC 2002

>>> "alex" == alex  <alex at yuriev.com> writes:

    alex> Just because  free public dbs  dont have that info  does not
    alex> mean that it does not exist.

i guess the question is, "how to ascertain the accuracy of the data?"

if  you have a  collection of  n known  address to  location mappings,
evenly distributed over the address  space, you'd want to approach one
of the  private db vendors and  say, "do lookups on  these n addresses
and  tell me  the  answers."  if  there's a   good correlation between
the known data and the answers,   then it might make sense to purchase
data [*] from those people. 

but.

it is probably necessary to construct the set of control data by hand,
which might be a big job.

what is a sufficiently large n?

for  n  sufficiently large,  are  the  vendors  likely to  answer  the
question?

i  suspect that,  in real  life,  it will  come down  to trusting  the
vendors' assertion that their data is accurate...

-w

[*] purchase data!?!? doesn't information  want to be free? or is that
passé? oh well...

-- 
William Waites <ww at styx.org>
Idiosyntactix Research Laboratories
http://www.irl.styx.org