Source of so many problems
IP Geolocation Is Twenty-Five Years Old
31–40 of 70 posts
Re: IP Geolocation Is Twenty-Five Years Old
#32Source of so many problems
Agreed. But also the source of so many new possibilities. Like most things, the bad comes with the good.
Re: IP Geolocation Is Twenty-Five Years Old
#33https://www.ripe.net/publications/docs/ripe-181/ October 1994. which is 28 years ago. Contains the inetnum: object as follows The information in the old inetnum object inetnum: 192.87.45.0 netname: RIPE-NCC descr: RIPE Network Coordination Centre descr: Amsterdam, Netherlands country: NL So.. I hesitate to be snitty, what exactly about IP geolocation did you invent given that by 1994 we already had a formalism to rep…
we did some early geolocation work at CAIDA/stanford a little later, around 1996 https://graphics.stanford.edu/videos/mbone/
CAIDA had some awesome stuff back in those days. There was also an outfit that generated poster maps of the Internet backbones too. I wish I had bought one back then because I don't know of anyone making things like this anymore. Our data was used by a number of companies to create visualizations too. One even appeared on a 60 Minutes story (I think it was that show).
Re: IP Geolocation Is Twenty-Five Years Old
#3425 years old and still constantly misused by tech companies to assume my language preferences while traveling even though my browser explicitly communicates my language and locale preferences. Spotify and Google are particularly notorious offenders.
MDN doesn't like it
> Browsers set required values for this header according to their active user interface language. Users rarely change it, and such changes are not recommended because they may lead to fingerprinting.
> The content of Accept-Language is often out of a user's control (when traveling, for instance). A user may also want to visit a page in a language different from the user interface language.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ac...
:shrug:
Re: IP Geolocation Is Twenty-Five Years Old
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand your article was about the tech. But you did mention the motivation of geoip for detecting location for selecting a language, and given that's what people still do these days despite Accept-Language headers being available for most clients, I think it's worth a call out.
Oh, I agree with you. I don't really understand why sites don't use language headers which obviously specify the user's preference. I've never been on the implementation side for sites that were clients - I just explained the tech, showed how they could use it, and then they used it in those ways and many times more. Maybe it was just easy rather than having to use multiple variables? Maybe they don't know about this…
> I don't really understand why sites don't use language headers which obviously specify the user's preference.
Accept-Language headers aren't obviously the user's preference, though. There's the four users that manually set it, and for them it is their preference. Mostly everyone else is getting a default based on their OS language, which often isn't really something they set either.
There's also the problem where the country appropriate website for where you are may not have a language you understand.
Re: IP Geolocation Is Twenty-Five Years Old
#3625 years old and still constantly misused by tech companies to assume my language preferences while traveling even though my browser explicitly communicates my language and locale preferences. Spotify and Google are particularly notorious offenders.
MDN doesn't like it > Browsers set required values for this header according to their active user interface language. Users rarely change it, and such changes are not recommended because they may lead to fingerprinting. > The content of Accept-Language is often out of a user's control (when traveling, for instance). A user may also want to visit a page in a language different from the user interface language. https:/…
There are a million metrics that can be used for fingerprinting, the notion of avoiding language detection because fingerprinting seems a bit weak - it’s pretty hard to fingerprint me if I’m not willing to fumble your site to configure my language, and I assume for non English speakers hard locking browser resolution to 1920x1080 to prevent resolution fingerprinting would presumably be a more usable limitation.
Edit: and ‘a user might not be the owner of the computer and therefore the accept language might be wrong‘ sounds like a UI problem that a ‘file -> set language’ workflow would solve.
Re: IP Geolocation Is Twenty-Five Years Old
#37Very cool read! I wasn’t working during your time, but I recently have been working on maxmind db datasets. How different was it to what was offered in the past? I used to think this data was sourced from ISPs and could not be deduced from how you mentioned in your post
This is a great question. So when I came up with IP location back in 1999, there was nothing for location-based targeting. Any advertising that happened would be because a user shared a location (ZIP code, etc.) and then got cookie'd and that information was brokered between sites. This obviously doesn't work for more secure uses (content control, fraud detection, etc.), so some of these uses were made possible once…
I was doing legit music downloads and streams for the major labels in late 1999/early 2000 and I was using some sort of paid IP database to determine which of the 34 countries we covered the user was connecting from, so I could pay the right royalties.
Was the market really that small for IP geolocation 25 years ago? I don't remember it being a problem to source the data...
Re: IP Geolocation Is Twenty-Five Years Old
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a great question. So when I came up with IP location back in 1999, there was nothing for location-based targeting. Any advertising that happened would be because a user shared a location (ZIP code, etc.) and then got cookie'd and that information was brokered between sites. This obviously doesn't work for more secure uses (content control, fraud detection, etc.), so some of these uses were made possible once…
I was doing legit music downloads and streams for the major labels in late 1999/early 2000 and I was using some sort of paid IP database to determine which of the 34 countries we covered the user was connecting from, so I could pay the right royalties. Was the market really that small for IP geolocation 25 years ago? I don't remember it being a problem to source the data...
I think a lot of people are confusing access to some kind of IP location data with access to high(er) accuracy data. Yes, you could scrape whois data to create a IP location database but even country level would be in the mid-80s and then dramatically drop off from there. In the early dot-com boom, that was good enough since there was nothing really better.
Re: IP Geolocation Is Twenty-Five Years Old
#3925 years old and still constantly misused by tech companies to assume my language preferences while traveling even though my browser explicitly communicates my language and locale preferences. Spotify and Google are particularly notorious offenders.
MDN doesn't like it > Browsers set required values for this header according to their active user interface language. Users rarely change it, and such changes are not recommended because they may lead to fingerprinting. > The content of Accept-Language is often out of a user's control (when traveling, for instance). A user may also want to visit a page in a language different from the user interface language. https:/…
Accept-Language is far more under my control while traveling than my IP address. Especially for services that actively block VPNs.
Re: IP Geolocation Is Twenty-Five Years Old
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was doing legit music downloads and streams for the major labels in late 1999/early 2000 and I was using some sort of paid IP database to determine which of the 34 countries we covered the user was connecting from, so I could pay the right royalties. Was the market really that small for IP geolocation 25 years ago? I don't remember it being a problem to source the data...
I think a lot of people are confusing access to some kind of IP location data with access to high(er) accuracy data. Yes, you could scrape whois data to create a IP location database but even country level would be in the mid-80s and then dramatically drop off from there. In the early dot-com boom, that was good enough since there was nothing really better.
Got you. I can't remember how accurate the database was. I think as long as you were "in" one of the 34 countries then the app worked fine, even if it had you pegged in the wrong place.