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Proof of location for online polls

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Re: Proof of location for online polls

#71

Post by dheera »

Larrikin wrote: post #68
dheera wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and also, I'd argue that anonymizing your location is a sacred feature of the internet that anytime someone builds a better mousetrap we WILL build a better mouse. The internet is not a place where requiring proof of location is welcome. For online polls, it should never be necessary, either: My rights to vote somewhere should depend only on my membership status to that somewhere, and not my current physical loc…

This is similar to the argument the failed experiment 4Chan showed the internet. Being fully anonymous, the best arguments don't rise to the top, bad actors lie and lie and when confronted with their lies, they just pretend to be someone else and lie some more. All completely anonymous online polls are effectively useless. It's nice to have some research in helping them be a little less useless.

Anonymity should still be a choice. Especially location anonymity.

While I don't mind 7 billion people knowing what I intentionally said publicly, I don't want 7 billion people knowing where I sleep or where I am at this exact moment.

Re: Proof of location for online polls

#72

Post by reincoder »

Well, it is not just "can" be done, but we at IPinfo actively measure the internet and produce IP geolocation data. Sure, there are some limitations with satellite, microwave, and certain WAN-based connections, but it is the best solution for IP geolocation available right now, and we are seriously committed to it. Currently, we operate nearly 900 servers running ping, traceroute, and network measurement activity. Literally yesterday, we hit a milestone of having a server across 300 ASNs. We base our servers across diverse locations and networks. I think at this moment we have very few ASN where we do not have sub 10MS ping times.

If you have a question let me know.

Re: Proof of location for online polls

#73

Post by reincoder »

anilr wrote: post #4

Has this been tested, or is it just an idea. I imagine it would have some very serious limitations. Perhaps it could tell if you are likely in the US or Europe, but I doubt could get much more granular than that. Starlink internet customers, and users of Apple's private relay (vpn-like service) would all be excluded?

We (IPinfo) run active measurements through our 900 servers and produce a standard IP geolocation data product. However, to my knowledge, we haven’t partnered with any organizations or institutes to support a project like this, although we certainly have the potential capacity to do so.

Re: Proof of location for online polls

#74

Post by kvdveer »

ranger_danger wrote: post #70
kvdveer wrote: post #35

There are a lot of valid critiques already, but here's another: This technique will have to allow for over-all slow connections. This connection latency could be caused by over-provisioned office connections, torrents, bad gsm reception, cheap internet or a cheap device. What prevents a client from strategically delaying specific requests, to simulate a slow device in the target geography. AFAIT, this would be indist…

> This technique will have to allow for over-all slow connections I don't think the technique can accommodate that. But I would love to be proven wrong.

If only people with fast internet can vote, this is becomes a curious tool for voter suppression.

Re: Proof of location for online polls

#75

Post by jampekka »

ranger_danger wrote: post #69
mac3n wrote: post #14

having worked on IP geolocation in the past, I don't think this works. Though it can do a pretty good job of getting you in the right continent. * Not all traffic goes through fiber - there are microwave links operating closer to the speed of light, though these are mostly reserved for high-speed trading. There's also satellite connections, but as long as they don't do satellite-staellite, they're slower. * There are…

I don't think microwave is "closer to the speed of light" than.. light.

Electromagnetic radiation is about 1.5 times faster in air than in glass (depending on wavelength a bit).

Re: Proof of location for online polls

#76

Post by reincoder »

mac3n wrote: post #14

having worked on IP geolocation in the past, I don't think this works. Though it can do a pretty good job of getting you in the right continent. * Not all traffic goes through fiber - there are microwave links operating closer to the speed of light, though these are mostly reserved for high-speed trading. There's also satellite connections, but as long as they don't do satellite-staellite, they're slower. * There are…

I work for IPinfo, and we run active measurements through hundreds of servers. Allow me to highlight the fantastic points you made.

> Not all traffic goes through fiber - there are microwave links operating closer to the speed of light, though these are mostly reserved for high-speed trading. There's also satellite connections, but as long as they don't do satellite-staellite, they're slower.

That is a valid point. In that case, we have to fall back on the geofeed, WHOIS, or other methods of geolocation information. We are actively researching this area, though.

> There are middleboxes messing with traffic, especially TCP, which add delay.

This accounts for some problems but not all of them, as we have multiple servers running active measurements on individual IP addresses.

> If you rent servers in datacenters, you might not really know where they are. We had VMs relocated without our knowledge.

That is normal. At the scale at which we operate, server location validity is extremely important. We run daily checks and actively flag these issues. If things don't add up, we communicate with our vendors and try to understand whether it is a network-related issue or something else.

> Anycast prefixes have IPs in multiple locations.

Yes. With anycast IPs, we have hints of all their available locations, but when it comes to picking one, we default to the ASN-reported location.

> My experience was that with a lot of observation points, you could get within 10ms, 1000km in most places.

We have been significantly reducing the number of ASNs where we have high RTT by getting a server "networkly" close to them.

---

I understand that this is not the absolute best location system possible, but within the scope of our industry, we are miles ahead of everyone else. We are continuously investing in research and infrastructure to improve our data even further.

Re: Proof of location for online polls

#77

Post by Habgdnv »

More than a decade ago I wanted to revenge my brother (something childish) and at that time he played online games. As packet loss would be too obvious and the games usually require low bandwidth the most viable fun option was to add some latency. You won't see this option in your usual router.

  tc qdisc add dev eth0 root netem delay 250ms

Re: Proof of location for online polls

#78

Post by falcor84 »

mac3n wrote: post #14

having worked on IP geolocation in the past, I don't think this works. Though it can do a pretty good job of getting you in the right continent. * Not all traffic goes through fiber - there are microwave links operating closer to the speed of light, though these are mostly reserved for high-speed trading. There's also satellite connections, but as long as they don't do satellite-staellite, they're slower. * There are…

Are you sure it'd only be accurate up to 1000km? I'm not as experienced but would have assumed that by sampling a dozen times, you would have at least 95% likelihood of a 100km radius

Re: Proof of location for online polls

#80

Post by KaoruAoiShiho »

kvdveer wrote: post #33
KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #8

Fantastic, solves the issue of bots from foreign adversaries. Everyone complaining doesn't seem to get it, it doesn't need to solve all usecases, but solving this one usecase is great. Conversely, can this be used to show that someone is NOT a chinese/russian bot? I've had enough with people accusing me lol.

Yesterday I fought off someone/something doing Chinese language crypto-blogspam on my website. Ip-addresses were all unique (mixed ipv4&ipv6), but all were 'located' within 100km of my server in central Europe. If crypto-scammers can bypass geo-restrictions for blogspam, I'm confident that state-level actors can do that even better for geopolitics.

Did you read the article? It's not about using IP addresses...
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