GeoIP2 for retrieving city and region ?

[Joel Goldstick]

On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 7:04 PM, Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed at ix.netcom.com>wrote:

> On Sat, 13 Jul 2013 02:47:38 +1000, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com>
> declaimed the following:
>
> >
> >Oh, and just for laughs, I tried a few of my recent mobile IP
> >addresses in the GeoIP lookup. All of them quoted Melbourne someplace,
> >some in the CBD and some out in the suburbs, but all vastly wrong, and
> >places I haven't been. But I'd never expect it to be accurate on
> >those.
> >
>         Well... the MaxMind demo of "my IP" did get the proper metropolitan
> area... But they list the ISP as "AT&T"... My real ISP is Earthlink
> (piggybacking on AT&T DSL service).
>
>         The Lat/Long, however shows as
>
> 42.9634 -85.6681
> whereas a recent GPS readout shows
> 42.9159 -85.5541
>
> or 2m50s too far north, and 6m50s too far west.
>
>         Same website, accessed from my Blackberry phone, gave a result of
> "United States, NA" and location 38 -97
> --
>         Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
>     wlfraed at ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/
>
> --
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>

Speaking more from a political perspective, an important aspect of the
internet is that if you are a publisher who doesn't require registration to
read what you post, your readers are free to be more or less anonymous.
This is a good thing in many ways.  If you have a service that requires
some sort of sign up, then you can require knowing things about them
(location, etc).  If you want to know where your readers are, you need to
make arrangements with their ISPs to get that information, since in many
cases the ISP has a physical link to your machine.  But why should they
provide that to you?  After all you are not their customer.

It might be fun to know, but the repercussions are serious.


-- 
Joel Goldstick
http://joelgoldstick.com
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