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Show HN: Improved passive TCP/IP geolocation

sheerun.gitlab.io

31–40 of 43 posts

Re: Show HN: Improved passive TCP/IP geolocation

#31

Ran this about 10 times, it never once entered the correct hemisphere. Hint: I don't live in the northern one.

Keeps putting me in the middle of the indian ocean with high confidence. I'm in eastern Australia.

Sydney, same result here

(has HN ever had a Sydney meetup?)

Re: Show HN: Improved passive TCP/IP geolocation

#33

Will get a heck of a lot easier once the people at FaceBook, Google, Apple, NSA, et all get their way with IPv6. And please don't try to tell me more about "privacy extensions". When I swim in a see of 4.3 billion address, I'm forced to share, leaving an undeniable possibility that I could be another person. While 3.4×10^38 identifiers could be so huge I never have the same address twice, the implementation does not…

There are IPv6 VPN services :)

Re: Show HN: Improved passive TCP/IP geolocation

#34
Hi, the author of original submission here.

I like your idea, especially the number of servers you used. I'm only concerned that using a full HTTP GET to measure the latency (function request_image() in src/ping.js) makes the results possibly way more random than measuring the TCP/IP RTT server-side. That is, your method seems to measure the latency in higher net layer than TCP. Anyway, nice idea :)

Re: Show HN: Improved passive TCP/IP geolocation

#35

Will get a heck of a lot easier once the people at FaceBook, Google, Apple, NSA, et all get their way with IPv6. And please don't try to tell me more about "privacy extensions". When I swim in a see of 4.3 billion address, I'm forced to share, leaving an undeniable possibility that I could be another person. While 3.4×10^38 identifiers could be so huge I never have the same address twice, the implementation does not…

it's far easier and more accurate to track someone based on browser fingerprinting and a few other features than any IP address -- period. IPv6 in no way makes this worse or better than IPv4.

Re: Show HN: Improved passive TCP/IP geolocation

#36
post #4

Feels a bit overconfident - it was much better than the previous approach, and it got better over the iterations, getting very close - but however, 100% of the time my actual location was outside the circle. I.e., the center points seem reasonable, but the size of circle is unreasonably small because it's obviously smaller than your actual precision.

The circle isn't confidency indicator but merely a visualization of latency to the closest server

Re: Show HN: Improved passive TCP/IP geolocation

#37
post #3
post #2

Can I assume this was meant to show my own location? If so, I can assure you I'm not in India, Pakistan or Oman (or the middle of the Indian Ocean) as it suggested.

I have to agree with this. I'm pretty sure that the middle of the Atlantic Ocean isn't quite the same as the U.S. East Coast...

Ha. It's probably because transatlantic fiber latency is better than Comcast's to the nearest city

Re: Show HN: Improved passive TCP/IP geolocation

#40

I wonder if it connected to various servers using websockets and did some in/out message timing. I think it needs to have some knowledge of backbones or something like. Wonder if you had a bunch of signals, like telco, and timing informations, you could throw it into an ML tool and it could learn the backbone topology implicitly....

No fancy timing. Just 404 requests on on random 3rd party proxy servers. You might fork and improve it :)
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