Comment by incolumitas
2 years ago
Big fan of what articles? On https://incolumitas.com/ or on https://ipapi.is/?
Great idea with latency triangulation, I used latency information for a lot of things, especially VPN and Proxy detection.
But I didn't assume you can obtain that accurate location. I am honestly impressed. But latency triangulation with 600 servers gives some very good approximation. Nice man!
Some questions:
- ICMP traffic is penalised/degraded by some ISP's. How do you deal with that?
- In order to geolocate every IPv4 address, you need to constantly ping billions of IPv4's, how do you do that? You only ping an arbitrary IP of each allocated inetnum/NetRange?
- Most IP addresses do not respond to ICMP packets. Only some servers do. How do you deal with that? Do you find the router in front of the target IP and you geolocate the closest router to the target IP (traceroute)?
https://incolumitas.com/
This is my all-time favorite article: https://incolumitas.com/2021/11/03/so-you-want-to-scrape-lik...
I used to do freelance web scraping, and that article felt like some kind of forbidden knowledge. After reading the article, I went down the rabbit hole and actually found a Discord server that provided carrier-grade traffic relay from a van which contained dozens of phones.
For the questions..... we have to kinda wait a bit, someone from our engineering team might come here and reply.
By the way, as I have you here have you considered converting the CSV files to MMDB format? I was planning to do that with our mmdbctl tool later today.
https://github.com/ipinfo/mmdbctl
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I'm very curious why you'd do VPN/proxy detection...
But at a previous company I worked at that ran a very large chunk of the internet, we did indexing of nearly the entire internet (even large portions of the dark web) approximately every two weeks. There were about 500 servers doing that non-stop. So, I think it is relatively reasonable if you have 600 servers to do that.
In the business of media streaming, rightholder will require that you check for vpn and proxies in addition to countries when deciding if a given viewer will be able to stream a given media.
Does that actually work? That could explain an issue with a particular streaming service I use. There are currently some ongoing routing issues in BGP land and my ISP. When trying to stream, it says I’m using a proxy, so due to the incredible route my packets are taking, that might be it. What’s funny is that the only way to watch this service is to use a vpn right now.
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You can guess pretty well how IP's are related by BGP announcements, so as long as a few per block and if small, ASN. You can use that logic.