[members-discuss] My Question To All LIR Members

hi,

this has become a problem for us recently. Customers reporting sites 
such as netflix and spotify declaring that they are in a different country.

The least this does is change their web pages to the language making it 
near impossible to use, the worst is a complete denial of service due to 
being outside the service coverage area.

We have had to ask customers of these services to pressure the content 
providers to resolve their location database issues as the likes of 
Maxmind are near impossible to gain any action out of from our experience.

It seems if paying customers of the content providers growl at them then 
the problem gets fixed a lot faster than an ISP contacting Maxmind etc..

Surely it isn't hard for the likes of Maxmind to use the top level 
country data from RIPE at least, before bolting on their localising data?

I am sure there are malicious entities out there feeding these databases 
with junk for the fun of it too..

-- 
Bill Lewis
Kijoma Broadband



On 28/05/2014 11:16, Sinan Özs,ekerci 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 ÖZS,EKERCI.
>
> *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, admin at intl-alliance.com 
> <mailto: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
> stat.ripe.net <http://stat.ripe.net> team as there for Geolocation we 
> are using data from
> MaxMind.
> 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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