How To Clean Up Incorrect Geolocation Information? 392
zorro6 writes "I thought this might be an interesting question/topic and it would sure help me to get some kind of answer. I recently got internet service from a small, local wireless ISP in my area (south central Colorado, USA). The strange thing is that many, many web sites think I am in Quebec, Canada when I use the service. Evidently some geolocation service thinks my IP address indicates I am in Canada. I have checked the obvious. The WHOIS information for my IP correctly indicates a location of Durango, CO. So the bad info is coming from some more sophisticated geolocation service. My ISP is at a loss as to how to fix this but it is causing me a lot of grief. Many of the ads I get shown on Yahoo! for instance are in French! Certain sites won't sell me goods or services because they don't do business in Canada. So far I know that Yahoo! (or their ad provider), Nvidia, Movielink, etc. all think I am in Canada. I would sure appreciate any help/info on how to get this corrected."
Proxy (Score:4, Insightful)
maxmind.com (Score:3, Insightful)
Relying on unreliable information (Score:3, Insightful)
We'd use geo-IP data at my old job, but it was just in non-critical, stop-gap places, trying to provide a better experience to users that we knew nothing about. Denying some customers use of our site would have been costly.
Contact Yahoo about it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, it does seem rather counterintuitive to most of us here who block ads, but they are a source of revenue for the likes of Yahoo, and if they can chip in some effort to more effectively target you, you've gone a ways towards solving the problem with the other sites.
Proxy (Score:3, Insightful)
Easy - contact the advertisers (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm not here (Score:5, Insightful)
Increasingly it appears sites are using GeoLocation to route you to a different version of their website, or prevent you from viewing content.
Sometimes it may be useful, such as when Google serving you localised adverts, however when they get it wrong it can becomes a great pain in the arse.
Worse is when sites ban you from viewing content, or just ban you completely, based on your location.
I'm sure some people will rationalise the need for Geolocation for restricting content, but I think it is akin to putting a poster in a public place and then trying to restrict people from viewing it.
Wording: 'Money' makes the geolocation get fixed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:possibly stating the obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
Teach a man to fish, and he'll feed himself for years.
Hackers follow this model when giving support. Even if the asker gave such details, we'd likely show them how to figure out the answer themselves. It's not that we don't care to give a quick solution, it's that we want to share the knowledge so they can help themselves and help others in the future.
And frankly, I wouldn't want to make it immediately obvious what my IP address was to such a large audience. There's inevitably going to be some jackass that sends a botnet at it.
Re:possibly stating the obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
"Don't know what's going on" is different from "we can't resolve the matter"
Re:But you probably *are* a canuck! (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides, that has nothing to do with the problem here, which happens when the web site looks up the IP address in a locator service, and gets wrong information back. The IP address is independent of cookies.
Re:happened to me (Score:5, Insightful)
Geolocation services are just large databases that map IP addresses to physical locations. There's really nothing else to it. Who owns a set of IP addreses can also change quite frequently, and so these databases need constant updating.
As an example, here's the FAQ [geoio.com] provided by a geolocation service I've used in the past:
Basically, it will get fixed when the group maintaining the data updates it, which in my experience can be anywhere from a couple weeks to a year.
Re:possibly stating the obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
People don't ask for help as a lead-in to a lecture about something over their head, they ask for help. Giving them a load of crap they can't use as a substitute speaks to a dearth of social understanding and an unwillingness to be a decent human being to someone who doesn't share the same skillset. That's the true "hacker" mentality.
I say this without malice - I myself dabble in the dark arts of making computers do my will. It's simply the result of many years of observation of the personality types of people who are into computers.
Luckily, I was socialized as a child so I'm a hell of a lot easier to get along with. In real life, that is. Don't care much about here, I don't know any of you and you don't know me, so you're outside of my circle of give-a-shit.
Re:Proxy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:personal sites (Score:4, Insightful)
Still, my favorite has to be this one [thedailywtf.com], and ones like it.
Seriously, one of these days, I have got to get into the porn business. If any idiot with FrontPage can make money, imagine what will happen when you get someone competent... I can see it now: PornDB! Complete with buzzword compliance (social networking! REST!) and a query language!
SELECT videos.* FROM models LEFT JOIN videos ON model_id WHERE bust_size > size('33C') AND bmi 120;
(Nobody mod me insightful!)
Re:happened to me (Score:3, Insightful)