I
can’t understand why I have to spend time end effort to
correct a private company’s database and helping them to
earn more money where they don’t mind to harm buissness of
other ones with distributing false information about them.
This
comes to me like some kind of blackmailing, harming you in
first place and forcing you to help them serve better and
make more money.
In
our case , maximind is showing the location of our IP
subnets in a “Village” which of the name is the same as our
company just by coincidence, and is hundreds of km away from
our HQ, in a totally different city.
So
all these algorithms and fancy ways they use to retrieve
these “more specific” data is crap for me.
As
a LIR , I only know RIPE, and since RIPE is the Authority, I
expect them to rely on their own database which has the
information that I have control on, and not to some 3th
party moneymakers.
Regards
Sinan
ÖZŞEKERCİ
The RIPE database is not primarily
concerned with GeoIP data, it is a registry of who specific IP
address blocks are allocated to and how they can be contacted.
MaxMind may draw some of their GeoIP data
from the the RIR databases, but they also get a lot of it
from elsewhere, which allows them to be more specific than
just the country code contained in the RIPE database.
Additionally, the RIPE database manual
states the following for the “country” field in the
“inetnum” object:
"It has not been specified what this
country means. It cannot therefore be used in any reliable
way to map IP addresses to countries"
As a customer of MaxMind, I depend on
them providing me with accurate, useful information about
the location and use of IP addresses for fraud screening
etc. If MaxMind were to draw that information only from
the RIPE database, then not only would MaxMind be
pointless (as I could just get the information directly
from RIPE) but the accuracy would be significantly reduced
(country level instead of city level) and it would be easy
for people to game the system simply by changing their
objects in the RIPE database to contain false information.
MaxMind do not “make up” their
information, they calculate it from multiple sources and
this is what MaxMind customers are buying - data derived
from multiple sources and processed by MaxMind’s
algorithms.
Obviously these algorithms are never
going to be 100% accurate, which is why if people believe
that the data contained in the MaxMind database is
inaccurate then they can submit suggestions for
corrections which MaxMind will then evaluate. MixMind are
under no obligation to use any corrections submitted and
are quite right to reject them if they believe that they
are inaccurate or misleading for any reason.
Accuracy of their database is important
to MaxMinds’ customers and thus to MaxMind. If their
database is largely inaccurate, then it is useless to
their customers and MaxMind will lose business as a
result. Obviously it is therefore in MaxMind’s best
interest to keep their database as accurate and up to date
as possible.
As for the open proxy vs VPN, I can
completely understand why MaxMind could detect VPNs as
open proxy servers and as a user of their minFraud service
I would expect to treat the two in exactly the same way
because they are providing an identical function - to
obscure the location and details of the end user.
Edward
Dore
Freethought Internet
I depend on Maxmind using data
obtained from a central registry. If all
ip tracing websites created their own databases with
information they
made up, we wouldn't bother with the RIPE database any
more because it
would become obsolete. We depend on ip tracing websites
to gather their
information from authority sites, not the garbage they
produce on their
own. And I'm only interested, as well as my end-users,
of seeing ip
information that I've registered in the appropriate
places. Simply
stating that "we're only interested in end-user
locations" rather than
ip registration data, sits badly in my mind. And it has
also caught the
attention of the RIPE NCC itself, which just sent me the
following email
regarding this situation:
Dear Jared,
Thank you for your email.
We value your concern about correct registration details
for internet
resources.
However the RIPE NCC has no authority on how private
companies compile
their data and how much they take information from the
RIPE database in
account.
Did you contacted MaxMind directly and informed them
about the
mismatching information they provide? Because finally if
information are
incorrect then this is not only damaging companies like
yours but also
the reputation of the providers of this data.
And I will forward your observation to my colleagues
from the
stat.ripe.net
team as there for Geolocation we are using data from
MaxMind.
https://stat.ripe.net/193.0.20.0#tabId=geo
Then my colleagues will check if there could be any
conflicting
information in our own tools.
--
Thank you again for bring up this topic.
Kind regards,
Marco Schmidt
RIPE NCC
On 2014-05-28 09:52, Alfredo Sola wrote:
That thought was kind of pointless
after they refused to help. I've
spent hours on their site manually updating all of
their inaccuracies
over the past few years. From one month to the next
they can screw up
entire ranges with their monthly updates. My networks
do not run
proxies
period. I run vpn services and remote desktops, but
never proxies. And
vpn services cannot be classified the same as open
proxies as they are
totally different.
I think
your issue is more a business model problem than a
registry
or IP problem.
What
you are saying is that you depend on Maxmind providing
the
location of your VPN servers / remote desktop servers
rather than the
location of users computers connected to them. Maxmind,
on the other
hand, is saying that they provide the location of users
if they can,
or will mark the location as unknown.
So your
business model depends on Maxmind agreeing to provide to
their customers something which is not what they pay to
obtain. And
they refuse. I personally don't think they can be blamed
for that, but
that's something between your company and Maxmind. And
nothing in this
has to do with RIPE.
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