Really? - You want RIRs to now perpetuate an application of IPs they are not designed for? The activities of MaxMind and similar need to be exposed so people understand the problem. No matter how Geo IP businesses might back peddle and say they never intended their services to be considered as authoritative etc the fact is people including law enforcement and presumably General Hayden and friends are buying into the fallacy that IP addresses are fit for the purpose of geo location. Let's put this another way. How many LIRs accounting systems use IPs as billing / account identifiers? No? I wonder why not..... C Todd Crane <mailto:todd.crane@n5tech.com>
13 April 2016 at 06:57 I like (sarcasm) how everybody here either wants to point fingers at MaxMind or offer up coordinates to random places knowing that it will never happen. What ever happened to holding people responsible for being stupid. When did it start becoming ((fill in the blank)) coffee shop’s for you burning your tongue on your coffee, etc. I’ve seen/used all sorts of geolocation solutions and never once thought to myself that when a map pin was in the middle of a political boundary, that the software was telling me anything other than the place was somewhere within the boundary. Furthermore, most geolocation services will also show a zoomed-out/in map based on certainty. So if you can see more than a few hundred miles in the map that only measures 200x200 pixels, then it probably isn’t that accurate.
As to a solution, why don’t we just register the locations (more or less) with ARIN? Hell, with the amount of money we all pay them in annual fees, I can’t imagine it would be too hard for them to maintain. They could offer it as part of their public whois service or even just make raw data files public.
Just a though
—Todd
Jean-Francois Mezei <mailto:jfmezei_nanog@vaxination.ca> 13 April 2016 at 01:17 All GeoIP services would be forced to document their default lat/long values so that users know that when these values, they know it is a generic one for that country. (or supply +181.0000 +91.00000 which is an invalid value indicating that there is no lat/long, look at country code given).
-- Christian de Larrinaga FBCS, CITP, ------------------------- @ FirstHand ------------------------- +44 7989 386778 cdel@firsthand.net -------------------------