If you don’t like the MaxMind services or the services of those who use MaxMind data, then don’t use them and go elsewhere. No-one is forcing you to use MaxMind or their clients…

I’m pretty sure I already theorised about your new IP address range in a previous message:

Without knowing the intimate details of how MaxMind work, I would guess that they have marked your company as a provider of open proxy servers due to detecting sufficient number of what they believe to be open proxy servers across IP address space allocated to you.

Therefore, instead of marking individual IP addresses in their database as open proxy servers, they are applying this classification to all IP addresses allocated to your LIR, whether or not they have actually seen traffic consistent with what they believe to be an open proxy server originating from that space.

That’s certainly what I would do if I ran any kind of IP address classification service, be it GeoIP and anti-fraud like MaxMind or anti-spam like Spamhaus etc.

This is similar to how many anti-spam RBLs work - if you get enough instances in a /24, then you mark the whole /24. If you get enough /24s from the same allocation, then you mark the whole allocation or even the whole provider. Obviously it’s up to each list operator to determine their own thresholds based on what provides the desired level of accuracy for them.

The RIPE allocations list is freely available at ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/stats/membership/alloclist.txt and the other RIRs publish similar lists.

Edward Dore 
Freethought Internet 

On 28 May 2014, at 11:35, admin@intl-alliance.com wrote:

Halle-fuckin-lujah!!! Thats my point exactly. The company causing the disruption is a for-profit company. Its to Maxmind's benefit to do as they please and profit off it. Fuck the smaller companies out there. They get trampled by companies like Maxmind. In my case, when I enter my network and want to trace my ip address on a site like www.whatismyipaddress.com (yes, they utilize Maxmind), I want to see my network information up there. Not some half-assed bullshit proxy information put out there by Maxmind using whatever horse-shit algorithm they cooked up. There is no reliable method that Maxmind can use to determine where our end-users are physically located. So I don't buy into their story about their fancy algorithm or traffic patterns.

Again as I said, this is another example of corporate greed. They can't determine shit about my clients, so just mark it as an anonymous proxy because we can't prove it seems to be their game. The only reason they even know that I'm a vpn provider is because I've had to contact them so many times over the years to correct their faulty databases that they probably know me on a first name basis now. Its ridiculous that we have to submit updates to them at all. And even more ludicrous when they claim to analyze traffic patterns and deploy various algorithms, but at the same time for years they couldn't even keep their own databases up to date. They bill their Geoip2 database as an "intelligent" product, but I see nothing intelligent about it. Especially when they mark brand new ip ranges just issued by RIPE as proxies before I've even implemented routing the damned things in our data center.

How in the fuck can you justify marking ip ranges as anonymous proxies before the ip addresses are even slapped on a server? Justify that Edward!

On 2014-05-28 11:16, Sinan Özşekerci wrote:
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
FROM: members-discuss-bounces@ripe.net
[mailto:members-discuss-bounces@ripe.net] ON BEHALF OF Edward Dore
SENT: Wednesday, May 28, 2014 12:41 PM
TO: admin@intl-alliance.com
CC: members-discuss@ripe.net
SUBJECT: Re: [members-discuss] My Question To All LIR Members
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
On 28 May 2014, at 10:02, admin@intl-alliance.com wrote:
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 [1] team as there for Geolocation we are using data from
MaxMind.
https://stat.ripe.net/193.0.20.0#tabId=geo [2]
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.
----
If you don't want to receive emails from the RIPE NCC members-discuss
mailing list, please log in to your LIR Portal account and go to the
general page:
https://lirportal.ripe.net/general/ [3]
Click on "Edit my LIR details", under "Subscribed Mailing Lists". From
here, you can add or remove addresses.
Links:
------
[1] http://stat.ripe.net
[2] https://stat.ripe.net/193.0.20.0#tabId=geo
[3] https://lirportal.ripe.net/general/