[members-discuss] My Question To All LIR Members

I think that this is an issue to brought up through an Internet Governance Forum which also deals with cooperation amongst various stakeholders and entities.

I have found the reading quite interesting but it would be nice to maintain a certain amount of etiquette (for some people) when writing emails (especially on an open list like this one) by curbing the language a bit.



-----Original Message-----
From: members-discuss-bounces at ripe.net [mailto:members-discuss-bounces at ripe.net] On Behalf Of Lu Heng
Sent: 28 May 2014 15:24
To: Bill Lewis
Cc: members-discuss at ripe.net
Subject: Re: [members-discuss] My Question To All LIR Members

it's like blacklist for spammers...even though a lot of spammer claim they are obeying the can-spam law, they still can not sue spamhuis for blacklisting them, because end of the day, spamhuis are only express their opinion and they do not force anyone to use their opinion.

same for the location thing, they only express their opinion and they are not forcing anyone to believe in them...so aside from contact each content provider or maxmind their self, i really don't see much we can do about it.

but really...i don't think ripe member mailing list is something for this kind of discussion about private business...

On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 12:37 PM, Bill Lewis <Bill.lewis at kijoma.co.uk> wrote:
> hi,
>
> this has become a problem for us recently. Customers reporting sites 
> such as netflix and spotify declaring that they are in a different country.
>
> The least this does is change their web pages to the language making 
> it near impossible to use, the worst is a complete denial of service 
> due to being outside the service coverage area.
>
> We have had to ask customers of these services to pressure the content 
> providers to resolve their location database issues as the likes of 
> Maxmind are near impossible to gain any action out of from our experience.
>
> It seems if paying customers of the content providers growl at them 
> then the problem gets fixed a lot faster than an ISP contacting Maxmind etc..
>
> Surely it isn't hard for the likes of Maxmind to use the top level 
> country data from RIPE at least, before bolting on their localising data?
>
> I am sure there are malicious entities out there feeding these 
> databases with junk for the fun of it too..
>
> --
> Bill Lewis
> Kijoma Broadband
>
>
>
> On 28/05/2014 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 at ripe.net 
> [mailto:members-discuss-bounces at ripe.net] On Behalf Of Edward Dore
> Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2014 12:41 PM
> To: admin at intl-alliance.com
> Cc: members-discuss at 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 at 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 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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