GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

Wed Apr 13 09:50:38 UTC 2016

Really? - You want RIRs to now perpetuate an application of IPs they are
not designed for?

The activities of MaxMind and similar need to be exposed so people
understand the problem. No matter how Geo IP businesses might back
peddle and say they never intended their services to be considered as
authoritative etc the fact is people including law enforcement and
presumably General Hayden and friends are buying into the fallacy that
IP addresses are fit for the purpose of geo location.

Let's put this another way.

How many LIRs accounting systems use IPs as billing / account
identifiers? No? I wonder why not.....

C

Todd Crane <mailto:todd.crane at n5tech.com>
> 13 April 2016 at 06:57
> 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
>
>
> Jean-Francois Mezei <mailto:jfmezei_nanog at vaxination.ca>
> 13 April 2016 at 01:17
> All GeoIP services would be forced to document their default lat/long
> values so that users know that when these values, they know it is a
> generic one for that country. (or supply +181.0000 +91.00000 which is an
> invalid value indicating that there is no lat/long, look at country code
> given).

-- 
Christian de Larrinaga  FBCS, CITP,
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@ FirstHand
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+44 7989 386778
cdel at firsthand.net
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