Direct access to geo-location of an IP

[Dimitri]

Hi

Talking about GeoIP in the Adsense's GDPR topic , I was wondering if there is a way to get "directly" the location associated to a given IP. I mean, we all know about Maxmind, IP2Location, etc... which are providing free and paid GeoIP databases. But where do they take this information?

It's possible to know the owner of an IP Range, but how to determine the location of these IP? Where is it "stored"? Is there something like being able to query the ICANN or Regional Internet registries, to get this information? Or some kind of raw database centralizing all of this ?

[Leosghost]

If you mean to an individual IP address, I think that windows has something similar to tracepath..( command line ) on linux..you could write a serverside script to trace and then use the results to set in motion other scripts processes on server, might slow your server some though, or not , depends on it's specs.

[Leosghost]

ICAAN or regional internet registeries would tell you who where the sites owners were ( officially ) when they registered sites..but not where visitors come from in real time.

[Leosghost]

Some "block" owners use those "blocks" acroos more than one GEO location, ..1&1 comes to mind, OVH is another, Softlayer a third etc etc there are many others..including very many large corps , not only those who are ISPs or Hosting companies.

[TorontoBoy]

I don't think this is possible. There are just too many variables to accurately pin down who is from which continent. Maybe in the past, when IP blocks were segregated by continent, but that has splintered now.

[Dimitri]

Yes, it's too bad that public IP addressing was not built like a phone number, with a prefix specifying a country / region.

[keyplyr]

There are lots of services that do this.

Example: [ip-api.com...]

For free, you can use a script to append a query for individual IPs and get geo-location and other related info.

Read the docs at the bottom by clicking "API" or "PRO"

[edited by: keyplyr at 8:53 am (utc) on Jul 15, 2018]

[Dimitri]

Yes keyplyr, but in fact, I was curious to know how these services are identifying the location of an IP or IP Range. If they are just looking by hand for each ISP, or buying from ISP their GeoIP database. For example, Maxmind anothers can tell my exact address, whereas nothing in my IP's reverse DNS is delivering information. But this was juts by curiosity, this is not going to change my life to know or ignore how this works :)

[keyplyr]

Can't you get enough info in the docs?

There's a lot of info not usually made public about an IP address. It can pinpoint the exact machine in a room of other machines. Your ISP will have this info and law enforcement also has access.

[Leosghost]

It can pinpoint the exact machine in a room of other machines.

Depends on how the routing is set up..you can just show one address to the outside world..I have ten machines set up here, 4 of which are connected via the router, they only show one IP address to "outside"..My ISP includes the town code in the info that it sends as all of our DSLAMs each have their own ID code, it also send a country identifier, here we now all have fixed IPs and could ( if we so wished ) host sites "at home" or in "the office" ( bad idea for so many reasons that I won't go into here ) first one being we have a lot of fast bandwidth, unmetered, but not as good as a DC..

Maxmind's very detailed info is based upon all their subscribers sending their own postal addresses during sign up to their services, of course you can use a different billing address to the one you use their service from but they do get a physical address from the IP that does the sign up so that helps them narrow down a bit..Google get a lot of detailed address info from androids and maps , and from their war driving during street view, MS get a lot from win10 installations snooping and also from the back porting they did of the snoopy parts to win 8 and win 7 ( if you allowed certain "upgrades" )

Google is accurate to about 2000 meters as to where they think my router lives ( and so what is my physical address ) , if you use their maps on android whilst on your home wi-fi, they have you down to about 10 metres, and of course if you allow GPS tracking whilst mobile then they have you to about 5 metres ( they claim better, but you wouldn't want to depend on that when choosing to go down many roads, especially not those next to rivers or cliff tops ) ..The NSA ( and others ) know how close to my hand my coffee mug is while I'm typing this, I'm in the garden..and it is sunny with clear skies..

[Leosghost]

I would also presume that the various boxen with speakers ( such as alexa ) that people are buying putting into their homes , now means that for those foolish enough to install them, Amazon, Google and Apple ( and a whole host of US 3 letter agencies ) now know exactly where you are ( and what you are doing and saying ) in each room of where you live.

[keyplyr]

Those foolish enough to presume without experience will never know.

[Dimitri]

Just one question (suddenly, I have a doubt).

I know you don't give legal advises here, but just to be sure that I understood things correctly, the MaxMind Geo"Lite" [dev.maxmind.com...] database, it's really free to use for anyone, isn't it? The only requirement is to mention that we use the GeoLite2 by MaxMind etc,... right ?

What confuses me is the "share-a-like" part of the license. I 'd like to be sure that, when I use the database (not even the API) at my sites, I don't have to publish the PHP code source of my CMS.

[Leosghost]

Phone and ask, there are no such restrictions on the paid versions.
BTW..friends who have installed "boxen" ( Amazon and Google ) do know ( their experience shows them ) that my presumptions are / were correct..

[Leosghost]

ps..those of us who either lived in or visited countries that we re behind "the wall" such as East Germany when the STASI were everywhere, find the idea that people would be willing to pay to install eavesdroppers in their own homes amazing.."shiny trinkets will get you in most anywhere" still works apparently..Erich Honecker would have loved to achieve what Eric Schmidt, Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos and the 3 letter agencies have.

[Dimitri]

Just noticed that RIR are providing country information. May not be accurate for sub net, but good enough for me.

[csdude55]

All of my sites are localized, and I've done a ton of research on this. But all I can find are very general ideas, nothing specific.

Every program I've tried thinks that I'm anywhere from 120-400 miles from where I actually am.