Re: IPv4 country of origin

[alex () yuriev com]

> > 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.

Right, that's the point! Amazon, Double-Click and others that care about
where the *user* is have ability to correlate the IP addresses to the
location of the user rather closely, even if at *that* point the user is not
interacting with the system where he or she is forced to give up his/hers
address, *however* if over the period of 3 years Amazon determined that
majority of the people whose orders were placed from IP 207.106.66.0/24 got
those orders shipped somewhere in Philadelphia, and no one shipped anything
to San Francisco, it can deduce that *geographically* 207.106.66.0/24 is
likely to be in Philadelphia and not in San Francisco even if the hop before
it resolves into .sfo.

Does it mean that such database would be useful for the load-balancing
purposes? I personally think it would not, since the geographical location
is not linked to the location IP-wise, since IP does not really really on
geography.

> > > 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.

I totally agree with you. However, it seems that for the majority of the
businesses that could be interested in such data right now would not really
have a business care for the need the guarantee of data accuracy. 

> > 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.

Actually, they do. They get charged less to clear a credit card transaction
that looks squeaky clean compared to the one which is somewhat clean.

Thanks,
Alex