<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;">If you don’t like the MaxMind services or the services of those who use MaxMind data, then don’t use them and go elsewhere. No-one is forcing you to use MaxMind or their clients…<div> </div><div>I’m pretty sure I already theorised about your new IP address range in a previous message:</div><div> </div><div><blockquote type="cite">Without knowing the intimate details of how MaxMind work, I would guess that they have marked your company as a provider of open proxy servers due to detecting sufficient number of what they believe to be open proxy servers across IP address space allocated to you. Therefore, instead of marking individual IP addresses in their database as open proxy servers, they are applying this classification to all IP addresses allocated to your LIR, whether or not they have actually seen traffic consistent with what they believe to be an open proxy server originating from that space. That’s certainly what I would do if I ran any kind of IP address classification service, be it GeoIP and anti-fraud like MaxMind or anti-spam like Spamhaus etc. </blockquote><div> </div><div>This is similar to how many anti-spam RBLs work - if you get enough instances in a /24, then you mark the whole /24. If you get enough /24s from the same allocation, then you mark the whole allocation or even the whole provider. Obviously it’s up to each list operator to determine their own thresholds based on what provides the desired level of accuracy for them.</div><div> </div><div>The RIPE allocations list is freely available at <a href="ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/stats/membership/alloclist.txt">ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/stats/membership/alloclist.txt</a> and the other RIRs publish similar lists.</div><div> <div apple-content-edited="true"> <div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Edward Dore Freethought Internet </div></div></div></div><div><div>On 28 May 2014, at 11:35, <a href="mailto:admin@intl-alliance.com">admin@intl-alliance.com</a> wrote:</div> <blockquote type="cite"><div style="font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">Halle-fuckin-lujah!!! Thats my point exactly. The company causing the disruption is a for-profit company. Its to Maxmind's benefit to do as they please and profit off it. Fuck the smaller companies out there. They get trampled by companies like Maxmind. In my case, when I enter my network and want to trace my ip address on a site like <a href="http://www.whatismyipaddress.com/">www.whatismyipaddress.com</a> (yes, they utilize Maxmind), I want to see my network information up there. Not some half-assed bullshit proxy information put out there by Maxmind using whatever horse-shit algorithm they cooked up. There is no reliable method that Maxmind can use to determine where our end-users are physically located. So I don't buy into their story about their fancy algorithm or traffic patterns. Again as I said, this is another example of corporate greed. They can't determine shit about my clients, so just mark it as an anonymous proxy because we can't prove it seems to be their game. The only reason they even know that I'm a vpn provider is because I've had to contact them so many times over the years to correct their faulty databases that they probably know me on a first name basis now. Its ridiculous that we have to submit updates to them at all. And even more ludicrous when they claim to analyze traffic patterns and deploy various algorithms, but at the same time for years they couldn't even keep their own databases up to date. They bill their Geoip2 database as an "intelligent" product, but I see nothing intelligent about it. Especially when they mark brand new ip ranges just issued by RIPE as proxies before I've even implemented routing the damned things in our data center. How in the fuck can you justify marking ip ranges as anonymous proxies before the ip addresses are even slapped on a server? Justify that Edward! On 2014-05-28 11:16, Sinan Özşekerci wrote: <blockquote type="cite">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: <a href="mailto:members-discuss-bounces@ripe.net">members-discuss-bounces@ripe.net</a> [<a href="mailto:members-discuss-bounces@ripe.net">mailto:members-discuss-bounces@ripe.net</a>] ON BEHALF OF Edward Dore SENT: Wednesday, May 28, 2014 12:41 PM TO: <a href="mailto:admin@intl-alliance.com">admin@intl-alliance.com</a> CC: <a href="mailto:members-discuss@ripe.net">members-discuss@ripe.net</a> 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: <blockquote type="cite">"It has not been specified what this country means. It cannot therefore be used in any reliable way to map IP addresses to countries" </blockquote>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, <a href="mailto:admin@intl-alliance.com">admin@intl-alliance.com</a> 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 <a href="http://stat.ripe.net/">stat.ripe.net</a> [1] team as there for Geolocation we are using data from MaxMind. <a href="https://stat.ripe.net/193.0.20.0#tabId=geo">https://stat.ripe.net/193.0.20.0#tabId=geo</a> [2] 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: <blockquote type="cite">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. </blockquote> 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. ---- If you don't want to receive emails from the RIPE NCC members-discuss mailing list, please log in to your LIR Portal account and go to the general page: <a href="https://lirportal.ripe.net/general/">https://lirportal.ripe.net/general/</a> [3] Click on "Edit my LIR details", under "Subscribed Mailing Lists". From here, you can add or remove addresses. Links: ------ [1] <a href="http://stat.ripe.net/">http://stat.ripe.net</a> [2] <a href="https://stat.ripe.net/193.0.20.0#tabId=geo">https://stat.ripe.net/193.0.20.0#tabId=geo</a> [3] <a href="https://lirportal.ripe.net/general/">https://lirportal.ripe.net/general/</a></blockquote></div></blockquote></div> </div></div></body></html>