Comment by ggm
2 years ago
https://www.ripe.net/publications/docs/ripe-181/
October 1994. which is 28 years ago. Contains the inetnum: object as follows
The information in the old inetnum object
inetnum: 192.87.45.0
netname: RIPE-NCC
descr: RIPE Network Coordination Centre
descr: Amsterdam, Netherlands
country: NL
So.. I hesitate to be snitty, what exactly about IP geolocation did you invent given that by 1994 we already had a formalism to represent IP economy in the records?
I had the same kind of thought, but I think the 'invention' is really figuring out an application of ip geolocation, and a market for that application.
IMHO, it wasn't hard to figure out roughly where servers or peers were in the real world based on their IP address and network routes to them, but it was non obvious why someone would want to pay for a service...
If you read the patent it's clear it's not even that. He filed a patent for an idea, where you would build a database based on geo information provided by the user.
And even before the existence of data privacy laws, this simply would not have worked.
Instead companies like Maxmind implemented the much better idea of sourcing location data from Whois databases and ISPs server-side.
That's what everybody understands when you use the term "IP Geolocation".
"I worked out how to monetize it"
is very different to
"I invented it"
To clarify, yes whois registries have existed since the start of the Internet. However the location provided by those registries does not equate to the users' location. For example, back in the day, IBM (IIRC) ran a worldwide network of dial-ins and all of their IPs were registered back to their headquarters in Schenectady, NY. So yes, we figured out how to monetize it and maybe in the extreme "invented" is a stretch - maybe I should have said "invented a way for it to be accurate to a city level". In case you're wondering, 94% accurate to a city level, worldwide when I was there.
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I can accept that he invented it in the same sense that I invented recursion. I called it the "ouroboros" function and was really quite pleased with myself for thinking of the pattern.
Now, the fact that I called it by an ancient reference should probably have been the first clue that I didn't get there first, and sure enough later I found out that actually no, it's a very old idea in computer programming.
For the record, I can place back reliably to about 2001 the first time I was introduced to someone showing me an actual free application of searching/displaying ip lookups and laying it out on a visual map because it was about the only thing of value I took away from my first year information systems course, and although I can't remember the name of the application or program used, i've never heard of the blog writers company or his competitor: free software that did it must have already been available and mature for doing it and was being passed around during that time because it was already freely available by the time lowly old me turned up.
And given that the theory of doing so probably worked out long before that I think "invented" might be a liiiiiiiitle bit of a stretch...
All I can say is when I first met Vint Cerf, he was pretty enthusiastic about the invention. But maybe he didn't really understand the Internet either. You can see the fireside chat I had with him here (to be clear, we weren't sitting next to a fire either): https://vimeo.com/124048978
It takes some self confidence to share a video where Vint Cerf calls you a nincompoop -- even if jokingly. Thanks for sharing it anyway. I enjoyed watching.
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we did some early geolocation work at CAIDA/stanford a little later, around 1996
https://graphics.stanford.edu/videos/mbone/
CAIDA had some awesome stuff back in those days. There was also an outfit that generated poster maps of the Internet backbones too. I wish I had bought one back then because I don't know of anyone making things like this anymore. Our data was used by a number of companies to create visualizations too. One even appeared on a 60 Minutes story (I think it was that show).