North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: IPv4 country of origin
Thus spake <[email protected]> > > Say I have about 10 /16's reachable through firewalls in SJC, RDU, SYD, and AMS. > > No traceroutes or pings can make it past these firewalls, nor do the hostnames > > indicate any particular location. How exactly do you plan on mapping these to a > > zip code, when I can tell you those addresses are fairly randomly spread, in /24 > > increments, to sites all over the world? > > It is very easy. Anyone would care about it only when users from those > addreses interact with whatever the software that ends up creating those > databases. If those users never buy stuff from Amazon.com, Amazon.com does > not care where they are. But eh moment they do, somewhere someone is > cruniching the data that says "Of 10 sites that I saw this IP address access > and provide a clearing for the credit card transaction, 9 ended up being > within 3 miles radius of ZZZZ. Lets put a tag on that" But Amazon already knows where I live, so why do they need an IP-to-address database? My physical location is irrelevant for load-balancing purposes -- topological location is what matters. If they want to sell me "local" products, they can do that by looking at the zip code on file for my shipping address. > > The neat thing about selling databases like that is nobody can ever prove how > > incredibly inaccurate they are. Just come up with a reasonable-sounding > > collection methodology and claim any counterexamples are just flukes, then > > collect money from the saps who believe you... > > The really neat things about talking to computer geeks is that they all > operate with the lots of absolutes. They will explain to you why in a > specific case it does not work and forget that those specific cases are > usually exceptions. That's because we've dealt with too many business types who hype how well the general case works but ignore the exception cases that crash or corrupt your systems. > P.S. So, ever bought stuff from Amazon from one of those IP addresses and > sent it to some non-related location *just* to confuse the mapping > systems? Not intentionally, but I work from a dozen different IPs, including ones from a pool "located" in a different state that is shared by 30k VPN users worldwide. I've also ordered stuff from IPs all over the world and shipped to various locations inside the US. I wonder where Amazon thinks I actually live, if they care. S
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