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by tecleandor 920 days ago
Free geoip database is very so-so, at least for residential addresses. For example, my ISP is of Romanian ownership (Digi), and although I'm Spanish, located in Spain, and using a Spanish contract (not roaming at all) for years (not a recently arrived ISP), I'm still very frequently shown Romanian versions of ecommerce sites I visit from my phone or home connection.

But I wonder: shouldn't at least intermediate router/exchanges locations be better pinpointed through their who is information? Isn't that database updated?

I wonder how reliable is JA4L once you start adding hops in the middle of the trace, I guess it takes in account the timing of the intermediate points.

A little time ago (1 month? 2? I'm so bad with dates) somebody showed their IP location service that was built using a similar technique, but measuring from multiple different locations, and I think they had a free version of the database. I'll try to find it later.

1 comments

I think I might've mixed a bunch of different stuff in my comment, but the provider I was talking about was IPInfo. They do distributed JA4L-like location guessing and have a free IP-to-country DB:

https://ipinfo.io/blog/verifying-ip-address-accuracy/

That looks great, seems like they've raised the bar for GeoIp accuracy, kudos to them.

It looks like they provide mmdb files (for a fee) which should be compatible with Trippy. I'd love to be able to test it out, the sample [0] they provide is rather limited but I guess enough to test compatibility.

[0] https://github.com/ipinfo/sample-database/blob/main/IP%20Geo...

What a coincidence! I am the DevRel of IPinfo, and I was just about to reach out to you. My teammate (Shoutout to Max) has already mentioned your project on our team Slack, and I was thinking about a polite way to pitch our free IPinfo Country ASN dataset to your project. I will open a Github Issue right now.
Thanks! I’ll take a look
Reach out to them, they’re awesome folk and were willing to sponsor a 501(c)3 I worked on.