Ask HN: Who here would be interested in a free daily updated GeoIP database?

Very interested, but worried that if it's free, it won't last or be maintained, etc.

But in specific answer to this question, if it's really public and free, why not see about adding it to Amazon's public datasets [1]? S3 is fast, durable, available, and I've enjoyed these other data sets.

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/datasets/

Probably a lot of sources, depends how well connected you are.

The biggest one is just routing information and rDNS hosts which give away a lot of the information required anyway. If you were really thrifty you would make agreements with services (or use services you run yourself) that have users supply their location information and use that to construct a more granular database. I suspect this already happens to a degree, some of the fake information I give out has ended up in at least one IP address database.

I strongly considered doing this at one point but lacked the connections to pull it off properly (not enough sources of data I could get without approaching random people, basically). A secondary concept would just be to crowd source it and have the information freely available, but I was never sure how to deal with people poisoning the database or just honestly supplying conflicting information.

In the EU, the sales tax now (I think, since this year) must be paid to the country, the buyer comes from (before, the sellers country was decisive). Also the height of the tax depends on this. So, at least in Europe there are plenty of small companies that could need such a thing, at least as long they don't have a payment-provider that handles the sales-tax for them.

I myself, could also be interested, but I think, I will leave that to my payment-provider ... (ugly, EU!)

Edit: Ok, I should not, but why the downvote, please? When I wrote something wrong, than please explain!

(Disclaimer: I work for MaxMind)

As far as formats go, if anyone is thinking of putting together a custom database with information keyed on IP address or IP ranges, I'd encourage you to look into our MaxMind DB format:

http://maxmind.github.io/MaxMind-DB/

There are open source file readers available in many languages: https://github.com/maxmind/?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=MaxMind-DB

There's also an open source writer https://metacpan.org/pod/MaxMind::DB::Writer

Our officially supported libraries are actively maintained and pull requests are always welcome.

I'm actually about to begin writing a blog post on how you can create your own custom databases. I'll share it on HN once it's ready.