We have ipinfo at home or how to geolocate IPs in your CLI using latency • Hacker News Board

Re: We have ipinfo at home or how to geolocate IPs in your CLI using latency

#61

Post by reincoder » Sun, Feb 01, 2026, 9:50 AM UTC

toast0 wrote: post #60

reincoder wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for IPinfo. We are launching a collaborative project with IXPs and major internet organizations to share raw measurement for routing and peering data for this purpose. Latency variability is a huge issue. We run both traceroute and ping data, and we observe that there are entire countries that peer with IXP thousands of miles away in a different continent. We bought a server from the oldest telecom company in…

What is your path towards 'resolving' these issues? I've done some mapping while comparing turn servers my org hosted on cloud vms vs a commercial offering, and it's pretty easy to find very different routing from point A to point B, but sometimes it's pretty clearly that not every transit network has access to every submarine cable, so traffic from say Brazil to South Africa might go from Brazil directly to Africa,…

From our data side, we focus on network diversity and conduct continuous measurements. Due to the nature of our measurements and our knowledge of the precise locations of all 1330 servers, we understand how network packets travel across the internet. We simplify this information into algorithms and know how to accommodate detours that packets may take. There are specific patterns that we can identify and map, like some African servers route their traffic through LINX or a French IXP. If you are not connecting to private networks or even major telecoms on EU-based IXPs.

To help the system, we are reaching out to IXPs, major telecoms and peering agencies to advise them on how to peer and make critical internet routing decisions. We want to tell them on how to engage in data-focused peering, how their IXP is perceived from a broader internet data perspective, and how their packets from the IXP travel across the internet. We hope this colloboration will bring much needed efficiency in internet routing.

Re: We have ipinfo at home or how to geolocate IPs in your CLI using latency

#62

Post by tylervigen » Sun, Feb 01, 2026, 2:43 PM UTC

lopoc wrote: post #53

Nice work! I presented similar research at DEFCON 31 - 'You Can't Cheat Time: Finding foes and yourself with latency trilateration' https://youtu.be/_iAffzWxexA though with some key differences that address the limitations mentioned in the thread. The main issue with pure ping-based geolocation is that: IPs are already geolocated in databases (as you note) Routing asymmetries break the distance model Anycast/CDNs mak…

I suppose if your goal was to not be found, you could "cheat time" by implementing a random delay on all outgoing packets. The second iteration of this would be to spoof latency based on where you want to appear to be, by creating rules for intentional latency based on the source of the ping.

Re: We have ipinfo at home or how to geolocate IPs in your CLI using latency

#63

Post by rixed » Sun, Feb 01, 2026, 9:00 PM UTC

lopoc wrote: post #53

Nice work! I presented similar research at DEFCON 31 - 'You Can't Cheat Time: Finding foes and yourself with latency trilateration' https://youtu.be/_iAffzWxexA though with some key differences that address the limitations mentioned in the thread. The main issue with pure ping-based geolocation is that: IPs are already geolocated in databases (as you note) Routing asymmetries break the distance model Anycast/CDNs mak…

FYI, speed of light in fiber is much less than 300Mm/s.

  a simple rule of thumb is that a signal using optical fiber for communication will travel at around 200,000 kilometers per second

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_fiber

Re: We have ipinfo at home or how to geolocate IPs in your CLI using latency

#64

Post by direwolf20 » Mon, Feb 02, 2026, 8:21 AM UTC

coffeeri wrote: post #30

direwolf20 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Packets don't travel in straight lines.

This is/was also my take. I’m skeptical that a probe-based network can be granular enough to reliably pinpoint a city, especially when some paths are much better connected than others (fewer hops, uncongested fiber, no throttling). However, ipinfo still appears to rely on active probing to triangulate geolocation data, which suggests they believe these routing asymmetries can be modeled or averaged out in practice. h…

I think the idea is that if you have enough probes, one of them will be in the right location and network.

Tier 2 ISPs have the right incentives to peer with every network in every peering point, so you are likely to get a correct result from a different ISP. Tier 1 ISPs avoid peering, so if your probe or target is on Deutsche Telekom or Cogent, your packet takes a circuitous route, passing only through networks that paid the extortion money.

Friends don't let friends get internet service from Deutsche Telekom or Cogent.

Re: We have ipinfo at home or how to geolocate IPs in your CLI using latency

#65

Post by lopoc » Mon, Feb 02, 2026, 3:22 PM UTC

tylervigen wrote: post #62

lopoc wrote: post #53

Nice work! I presented similar research at DEFCON 31 - 'You Can't Cheat Time: Finding foes and yourself with latency trilateration' https://youtu.be/_iAffzWxexA though with some key differences that address the limitations mentioned in the thread. The main issue with pure ping-based geolocation is that: IPs are already geolocated in databases (as you note) Routing asymmetries break the distance model Anycast/CDNs mak…

I suppose if your goal was to not be found, you could "cheat time" by implementing a random delay on all outgoing packets. The second iteration of this would be to spoof latency based on where you want to appear to be, by creating rules for intentional latency based on the source of the ping.

yes but you cannot appear nearer than where you actually are!

it's the law!

TLDR latency tell you where someone for sure is not!