Looking at IPinfo website, the database seems to be shared under CC-BY-SA, no matter if you’re a commercial or free user. Not sure if this can be considered an advertisement. Some good stuff shared for free!
I wish we had some coarse-grained reverse mapping for geolocation of IP addresses, as we do for reverse mapping IP addresses to canonical domain names. My current ISP gives fairly meaningless domain names to IPs (the reverse mapping does tell you the owner but the rest is just an encoding of the IP address as text), but a previous one put the city name in there. If we had a similar namespace for geolocation then we could go from IP to city (or some other coarse-grained unit) and rely on the owners of the IP address to update them when they’re transferred. If a geolocation of my IP is wrong, I could then complain to my ISP to get it fixed.
Without that, we have people relying on inaccurate geolocation info. When I last logged into my Apple account, it told me that a login was happening from a completely different city. I suspected a MITM attack on the device, so I tried from a different device and got the same city (I tried a few days later and got a totally different wrong city, in spite of my IP address not having changed). Looking at the Apple support forums, a lot of other people have the same problem and Apple’s official line is to ignore the location if you recognise the device and time.
To some degree, the article feels like an advertisement
Looking at IPinfo website, the database seems to be shared under CC-BY-SA, no matter if you’re a commercial or free user. Not sure if this can be considered an advertisement. Some good stuff shared for free!
Am I missing something on mobile? All I see is a page about $1k/month or custom quotes?
I didn’t know about ipinfo.
ipinfo.io has definitely been useful for, say, troubleshooting VPNs - what interface am I on?
curl ipinfo.iowill tell you your IP, ISP, city, etc.I wish we had some coarse-grained reverse mapping for geolocation of IP addresses, as we do for reverse mapping IP addresses to canonical domain names. My current ISP gives fairly meaningless domain names to IPs (the reverse mapping does tell you the owner but the rest is just an encoding of the IP address as text), but a previous one put the city name in there. If we had a similar namespace for geolocation then we could go from IP to city (or some other coarse-grained unit) and rely on the owners of the IP address to update them when they’re transferred. If a geolocation of my IP is wrong, I could then complain to my ISP to get it fixed.
Without that, we have people relying on inaccurate geolocation info. When I last logged into my Apple account, it told me that a login was happening from a completely different city. I suspected a MITM attack on the device, so I tried from a different device and got the same city (I tried a few days later and got a totally different wrong city, in spite of my IP address not having changed). Looking at the Apple support forums, a lot of other people have the same problem and Apple’s official line is to ignore the location if you recognise the device and time.