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

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

#101
I love a good free service where the data quality is improved. I have played around with maxmind's service a bit but the data for India is far from accurate. I have been hunting for a local database (no service) since I run a IP lookup service http://ipof.in where I want the service subsumed in. This is a free service for anybody who uses it. It supports XML/JSON and plain text.

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

#102
post #65

honest opinion: I hate geoip. I think judging your visitors from their geolocation is more and more becoming a problem. It goes against the fundamental value of the Internet being a global network. I don't want Netflix to sell a sub-standard product in some countries because some licensing foo. I want everyone on this planet to have access to the same Internet. If I could I would redesign internet routing in a way th…

> If I could I would redesign internet routing in a way that the webpage doesn't know where a request comes from.

The internet already has that - it's called spoofing a packet.

But in all seriousness - this is an extremely bad idea. Having a unknown source would make it extremely easy for horrible people to do bad things to good people.

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

#106
Two considerations that help avoid the IP issue, but require user permission and so have a big obvious disadvantage:

1) We can prompt mobile users to enable location/gps and get their location that way.

2) We can prompt modern browsers to allow location services and get their location that way.

This is if a user wants to have their location 'auto-set' instead of via pulldowns.

3) A hard problem to solve is - mapping a unified set of city names to timezones, and updating the timezones as per Daylight Savings Time and general timezone updates.

Anyone have references for 3) ?

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

#108
post #29

Id be interested, especially if it used same file format as Maxmind's binary dat file ... so it can be a drop in replacement.

Added to the list! ;)

Another MaxMind employee here ...

Please don't try to use the dat file format. The binary files ending in ".dat" are the Legacy format, which has never been documented. Use the MMDB format linked by oalders in the top comment.

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

#109
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please confirm that the free versions are not 'good enough'? http://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/geoip2/geolite2/

If you want to compare the accuracy of different products, you can do so on this page: https://www.maxmind.com/en/geoip2-city-database-accuracy To get the actual product comparisons, you'll need to enter a country in the input box. For instance: https://www.maxmind.com/en/geoip2-city-database-accuracy?cou... You can try refining the distances to see how the different products compare. If you fiddle with it a bit, you…

It's accuracy but not free

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

#110
post #20

(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 http…

we have used the free version of MaxMind for several years and upgraded to the paid version two years ago (the additional coverage provided by the paid version was the driver for us). I can highly recommend MaxMind.
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