[members-discuss] My Question To All LIR Members

Of course they do not contact us directly and claim something. The point is,
when they distribute false information about you and causing harm to you,
they do not need to contact you directly.

As the harmed side, you feel obliged to contact them and persuade them to
fix this. Eventually you will be the one who spends time and effort, but
they will be the profiting side.

 

That why I used the word blackmailing as a metaphor.

 

 

I respect the freedom of people to create such databases and I'm not against
it. But there is no freedom to distribute content about some others, that
cannot  be verified to at least some degree, which means totally fabricated.

 

If maximind wants to get on some correct data about our subnets, it easy for
them, they only need to look at the RIPE database, since our subnets have
the geoloc attributes set for months.

 

 

Regards

 

Sinan Özşekerci

 

 

 

From: Edward Dore [mailto:ripe at freethought-internet.co.uk] 
Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2014 1:38 PM
To: Sinan Özşekerci
Cc: admin at intl-alliance.com; members-discuss at ripe.net
Subject: Re: [members-discuss] My Question To All LIR Members

 

You don't "have to" do anything. They aren't "forcing" you to correct their
data. I certainly can't see how you can equate it to blackmail - they aren't
trying to extort money from you or threatening you in any way.

 

This claim of somehow being blackmailed by a third party who have never even
got in touch with you is essentially the same argument as put forward by
people who don't like being listed on spam RBLs.

 

People are free to create databases of IP addresses and associated
attributes based on their opinion and other people are free to use that
database if they wish. There is no blackmail/extortion/defamation happening.

 

We use the MaxMind GeoIP database and minFraud service and on the whole find
it to be sufficiently accurate for our needs. If the level of accuracy of
these services drops such that it starts to causes us problems, then we will
stop using these services and MaxMind will have lost a customer, therefore
it is in their best interests to keep the data as accurate as possible.
Simple free market economics.

 

Perhaps in your case MaxMind don't have much/any data about your IP
addresses and so are trying to guess the location based on the only data
available to them - the RIPE database?

 

It sounds like RIPE are using the MaxMind GeoIP database and API for their
RIPEstat service and indeed they clearly state this next to the geographic
data on the page. The RIPEstat service is completely separate to the RIPE
database and can be used to view details about any IP address from any of
the RIRs, not just those administered by RIPE.

 

Edward Dore 
Freethought Internet 

On 28 May 2014, at 11:16, Sinan Özşekerci <sozsekerci at esertelekom.com>
wrote:





I can't understand why I have to spend time end effort to correct a private
company's database and helping them to  earn more money where they don't
mind to harm buissness of other ones with distributing false information
about them.

 

This comes to me like some kind of blackmailing, harming you in first place
and forcing you to help them serve better and make more money.

 

In our case , maximind is showing the location of  our IP subnets in a
"Village" which of the  name is the same as our company just by coincidence,
and is hundreds of km away from our HQ, in a totally different city.

 

So all these algorithms and fancy ways they use to retrieve these "more
specific" data is crap for me.

 

 

As a LIR , I only know RIPE, and since RIPE is the Authority, I expect them
to rely on their own database which has the information that I have control
on, and not to some 3th party moneymakers.

 

 

Regards

 

Sinan ÖZŞEKERCİ

 

 

 

From: members-discuss-bounces at ripe.net
[mailto:members-discuss-bounces at ripe.net] On Behalf Of Edward Dore
Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2014 12:41 PM
To: admin at intl-alliance.com
Cc: members-discuss at ripe.net
Subject: Re: [members-discuss] My Question To All LIR Members

 

The RIPE database is not primarily concerned with GeoIP data, it is a
registry of who specific IP address blocks are allocated to and how they can
be contacted.

 

MaxMind may draw some of their GeoIP data from the the RIR databases, but
they also get a lot of it from elsewhere, which allows them to be more
specific than just the country code contained in the RIPE database.

 

Additionally, the RIPE database manual states the following for the
"country" field in the "inetnum" object:

 

"It has not been specified what this country means. It cannot therefore be
used in any reliable way to map IP addresses to countries"

 

As a customer of MaxMind, I depend on them providing me with accurate,
useful information about the location and use of IP addresses for fraud
screening etc. If MaxMind were to draw that information only from the RIPE
database, then not only would MaxMind be pointless (as I could just get the
information directly from RIPE) but the accuracy would be significantly
reduced (country level instead of city level) and it would be easy for
people to game the system simply by changing their objects in the RIPE
database to contain false information.

 

MaxMind do not "make up" their information, they calculate it from multiple
sources and this is what MaxMind customers are buying - data derived from
multiple sources and processed by MaxMind's algorithms.

 

Obviously these algorithms are never going to be 100% accurate, which is why
if people believe that the data contained in the MaxMind database is
inaccurate then they can submit suggestions for corrections which MaxMind
will then evaluate. MixMind are under no obligation to use any corrections
submitted and are quite right to reject them if they believe that they are
inaccurate or misleading for any reason.

 

Accuracy of their database is important to MaxMinds' customers and thus to
MaxMind. If their database is largely inaccurate, then it is useless to
their customers and MaxMind will lose business as a result. Obviously it is
therefore in MaxMind's best interest to keep their database as accurate and
up to date as possible.

 

As for the open proxy vs VPN, I can completely understand why MaxMind could
detect VPNs as open proxy servers and as a user of their minFraud service I
would expect to treat the two in exactly the same way because they are
providing an identical function - to obscure the location and details of the
end user.

 

Edward Dore 
Freethought Internet 

On 28 May 2014, at 10:02,  <mailto:admin at intl-alliance.com>
admin at intl-alliance.com wrote:






I depend on Maxmind using data obtained from a central registry. If all 
ip tracing websites created their own databases with information they 
made up, we wouldn't bother with the RIPE database any more because it 
would become obsolete. We depend on ip tracing websites to gather their 
information from authority sites, not the garbage they produce on their 
own. And I'm only interested, as well as my end-users, of seeing ip 
information that I've registered in the appropriate places. Simply 
stating that "we're only interested in end-user locations" rather than 
ip registration data, sits badly in my mind. And it has also caught the 
attention of the RIPE NCC itself, which just sent me the following email 
regarding this situation:

Dear Jared,

Thank you for your email.

We value your concern about correct registration details for internet 
resources.

However the RIPE NCC has no authority on how private companies compile 
their data and how much they take information from the RIPE database in 
account.
Did you contacted MaxMind directly and informed them about the 
mismatching information they provide? Because finally if information are 
incorrect then this is not only damaging companies like yours but also 
the reputation of the providers of this data.

And I will forward your observation to my colleagues from the 
 <http://stat.ripe.net/> stat.ripe.net team as there for Geolocation we are
using data from 
MaxMind.
 <https://stat.ripe.net/193.0.20.0#tabId=geo>
https://stat.ripe.net/193.0.20.0#tabId=geo

Then my colleagues will check if there could be any conflicting 
information in our own tools.

-- 
Thank you again for bring up this topic.

Kind regards,

Marco Schmidt
RIPE NCC


On 2014-05-28 09:52, Alfredo Sola wrote:




That thought was kind of pointless after they refused to help. I've
spent hours on their site manually updating all of their inaccuracies
over the past few years. From one month to the next they can screw up
entire ranges with their monthly updates. My networks do not run 
proxies
period. I run vpn services and remote desktops, but never proxies. And
vpn services cannot be classified the same as open proxies as they are
totally different.


            I think your issue is more a business model problem than a
registry
or IP problem.

            What you are saying is that you depend on Maxmind providing the
location of your VPN servers / remote desktop servers rather than the
location of users computers connected to them. Maxmind, on the other
hand, is saying that they provide the location of users if they can,
or will mark the location as unknown.

            So your business model depends on Maxmind agreeing to provide to
their customers something which is not what they pay to obtain. And
they refuse. I personally don't think they can be blamed for that, but
that's something between your company and Maxmind. And nothing in this
has to do with RIPE.


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