the other wrinkle in all these "we're banning porn for UK users!" and "bluesky isn't available in mississippi" stories that no one seems to be talking about: geo-ip is inaccurate as shit, even before VPNs get involved. you can't just detect where people are with any kind of consistency
its already had an effect bsky.app/profile/brad...
now it's time for IPv8, with government ID enforced identity verification and point-of-origin encoding per connection
the wrinkle is that if these stupid and evil governments weren't doing this shit no one would have to use such imperfect measures
It's always a nuisance when Avast Antivirus pops up their little scare-tactic upsell saying "Your location is exposed!" with a little map showing "where I am" except it's NEVER right and sometimes even puts me in Quebec (I'm not in Quebec) since that's where my ISP is originally from. :P
your computer is BROADCASTING AN IP ADDRESS 🚨‼️
Oh no whatever will I do this is the most terrible thing ever the whole world is going to fall apart unless this most heinous of circumstances is rectified also better tell Google because their IP address is broadcasting too... XP
I recall there being instances of users in eastern Illinois getting swept up when Indiana instituted their age verification laws. Apparently not totally a geo-ip thing, though, partially a "out-of-state hub" type thing.
As a Canadian I've lost track of how many times I've had websites go "oh, you're in Quebec, we're going to default to French now" despite having never lived in Quebec.
as a french canadian, im so sorry for you
On a tangentially related topic, it annoys me that software is in general built around the assumption that people speak only one language. I don't need translations between Russian, German and English, just serve me the content in the original language ffs.
Same in Sweden, none of us needs English to be translated. Being offered a suggestion is one thing, having it pushed by default is annoying, not being offered the original language at all is offensive
I have to use the browser to re-translate it back to English because the websites won't do it, so it's two translations on top of one another
also assuming that your one language is the language of the country you're at
Feels especially good if you travel a lot.
or websites force-Spanishing themselves in Brazil, where no one speaks Spanish, and refusing to switch to any other language
good luck I'm behind 7 proxies
IDK if it’s related to the Mississippi thing at all but Google changed my account settings to “safe search on” and refuses to change it without age verification. I live in Massachusetts. I think my account is almost 18 years old. 18 years ago I was prepping for my 21st birthday by binge drinking.
As a layperson, this thread has always been understanding. The internet is built this way. I’ve heard people talk about “The Great Chinese Firewall” as if it is meaningfully different, and I’ve always been curious if it actually is, or if it’s just people not fully knowing what they’re talking about
Ive seen a few people who have been locked out because Bsky thinks theyre in Mississippi, even though they arent, ergo proving your point
I haven't looked into it at all but I'm assuming this is how nextdns is doing their age verification bypass (which is available on their free tier)
Sometimes sites think I'm like 5 states away and I have no idea what determines that.
People are gonna get locked out that shouldn't while others are gonna hit the lottery and not be affected at al.
The UK government wasting everyone’s time and resources for something that helps no one and only causes harm feels very on par.
Yep, I can't tell you how many times I get flagged for being in a state that has these ID laws while using my home Internet despite being 100s of miles away from them.
The frustration of feeling around in the dark with a gun pointed at your head…Can anyone sense the disaster ?
You can surely detect if someone is in some country or not. Dictatorian regimes are on the way across the Europe.
There was a site I tried to enter and instead of blocking me it said 'due to UK [yada yada] if you are in the UK you won't be able to access the site. However, we can't reliably tell where you are. Please confirm whether you you are in the UK' 😂
Case in point - someone hid an AirTag in their artwork at a large show I helped hang. The cell tower crew was outside and fired up a new temporary tower, which was set to an address 10 miles away. AirTag goes off and says “I’m 10 miles from where I should be” and the artist called the cops.
(don’t AirTags only use the GPS signals of nearby Apple devices, therefore being immune to this?)
All I know is I literally gave the cop a step by step instruction on how to get to the painting which was hanging exactly where I left it so 🤷♂️🤷♂️🤷♂️🤷♂️🤷♂️
They use the location heuristics of nearby Apple devices, which rely on a combination of GPS, cell towers, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to make a guess at where they are located
If you are indoors they are going to default to cell towers and wifi because they can't get GPS signal
The airtags only send a basic beacon signal. The devices around it will wrap that beacon signal with their own general location data and send it to the Apple servers. If GPS isn't accurate, it may rely on GeoIP
AirTags use nothing: they broadcast their id, hoping an Apple device will pick it up, add its location (as seen in Maps) and upload it to an Apple server.
lol, especially with all the CGNAT now.
Our computer is located in Surrey but I'm actually in Burnaby. Working on a computer hooked up to Surrey.
Sorta similar thing happened when a "push this button to summon the entire police department" box we had for a very expensive, temporary museum exhibition went back to the PD. Few months after the exhibit ended, a SWAT team and 15 cop cars show up, code 3, armed to take down God.
We didn't know why they were there, but they said they were alerted by The Box. Anyway, that box was like 20 miles away, and someone was testing it. Still had the location of our museum set as where it was. Couple phone calls sorted things out, dunno if anyone got fired over it.
Just checked mine, sort of in a different country, Wales not England, 200 miles away.
I think movies and TV has oversold the public om how accurate this is. Tracking down someone's exact location using the IP address? Not happening. The most accurate you'll get with some consistency is what city they're in.
Retroactivelly, they can ask the ISP for the address of the customer who had specific IP assigned at the specific point in time. But that's not the same as tracking in real time.
This is not geo-ip tracking though
Yup. Because geo-ip is a joke and you just gotta dismiss it entirely if you want to get anything of value.
here you'll literally never get even that lol never has it happened every website that displays "my location" to me is in some random city vaguely, probably in the same state, and a different city every time
Try living on the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland (which is part of UK). All kinds of fun, especially since UK left the European Union.
oh good lord, I can only imagine how much that'd break.
Yup. Never a dull moment.
See also: Ohio weed stores advertising in Kentucky
I’m literally using some 3rd party app to be on here right now because even though I live in CA and have never been to Mississippi in my life, somewhere my internet access is going through MS. Found out 10 min ago when the bsky app wouldn’t let me on 😭
I got around it by briefly getting on my City's wifi and I think that gave them location data that let me on again? I have no idea. I hope when I get home I don't have the same issue again
I tried a few hours later rn and now it’s letting me! But I’m also traveling (within CA) so hopefully this won’t still be a problem when I go back home tomorrow (ideally it wouldn’t have to be a problem for anyone, if MS would stop tipping 😮💨)
That’s what makes this fun
Remembering the time when I got geo fenced for trying to access a site in Texas... ...while living in Puerto Rico
Yeah but it’s usually a legal safe harbor which is good enough for compliance purposes.
except a recent batch of bounty laws don't allow any sort of good harbor. they require perfect implementations with extortive penalties per violation.
I am constantly receiving ads on Pandora that assume I'm in a different county or part of the county. And it's not a consistent assumption. Even if I don't reboot my router and my actual IP remains the same.
So it's not that weird that my phone always seems to think I'm an hour away/a county over? Good to know cuz that was always mildly alarming.
I've had a friend who wanted to access a casino app while in NJ and the app said he was in PA. He had to call their tech support to see what was going on for the incorrect location tag.
I believe it, I heard of people in Sweden getting affected by the whole UK age verification thing when it was just starting.
Eventually there will be a legal onus on companies to have an estimate of where each user is from. Tiktok knew who is from which country which is why VPNs wouldn't have worked for the tiktok ban. Soon such sort of user tracking will be government-mandated.
Yep, I work at an MSSP where many clients want geo IP alerting and it results in so much noise. A regular fixed place geo IP is really inaccurate but it gets basically unusable with mobile internet between IPv6 and NATing.
Yeah, I live in Baltimore and almost never leave Maryland, yet my cell phone's IP address always shows my location as Virginia. It gets very annoying sometimes when I get security emails saying "Did you just sign into your account from Virginia?".
oh it worst tho , at&t users are just blocked because major center line runs in mississippi
My favourite "geo-ip is shit" story is me sitting at the office of a local ISP I worked for at the time, trying to watch the 2010 fifa world cup live but being unable to do so because the Finnish national broadcasting company thought I was in another country.
Yes, you were in Sweden
I live in Colorado but half the time my Android phone thinks I live in Dallas.
Mine thinks I'm in DC... lol
I got blocked from a porn site and the site said it was because I was from Virginia, which is nowhere near where I am in
Coming to an Australia near you. Thanks government 🤬 #rulesy
The previous UK government wanted to, and I kid ye not one jot, put a backdoor into TLS. And after that they wanted to create some sort of register of everyone's private keys. So as stupid as the OSA is, it's not as inept as those terrifying ideas
YESSSSS every online service that polls my location (on the off chance that i allow it to, that is) either thinks i live 3 hours away from my actual location or a few states north
C'mon. The law can't concern itself with trivial details like "reality". Big stick!
True. For my location it misses the mark by 100-300km more often than not.
It's annoying also that I live in Louisiana but my closest cell tower is in MS, so now when I get on data for my phone I get hit with the no service in MS screen.
I used to work for the US government running a weather site and for a long time we had stupid rules around not charging americans but charging anyone else, and it was a disaster. we had to have multiple people answering phones for people complaining they can't get their free files
Oh wow, that's insane
because the system couldn't be sure they were in the US, so it'd charge them non-US prices. we only "fixed" that by making it free for everyone
Just recently had some minor* issues when traveling because my eSIM provider gives users Singaporean IPs and some local websites took that as suspicious. *minor in the sense that I could understand what was happening
a lot of it is because the internet is not routed by political borders, it's routed by what would make the connection cheaper or (if you're lucky) faster.
suddenly reminded of the multiple years when Comcast's cheapest exit point into the rest of the internet was somehow in NYC despite me being in Utah
like I remember that at the time I was working on that site, my home IP in North Carolina would show up as Georgia, because our regional ISP routed everything through Atlanta
Often times it's not even so much as routed through as just like, Comcast adds a new whatever and has to move a bunch of IPs from Georgia to Philadelphia. And all the 3rd party companies doing the geoip update it when they get around to it. When I worked at Comcast I had a lab week project to...
...try and improve that by feeding more accurate IP ranges to the geoip providers, but it never went anywhere.
I used to work customer service for an ISP and I got so many calls from people in San Diego complaining that their home IP was showing up as LA and how it was preventing them from getting their local stations through the IPTV service they used
I lived in western NC for a long time. Being in the mountains, all ISPs used a single chain of servers. I discovered it when diagnosing some cell connection issues. Traceroutes for both cell and cable internet showed they ran through the same servers in SC, then GA before branching out to the site.
and it's not like this is a fixable problem, either. you can't easily fix IP allocation, because we ran out of ipv4 addresses over a decade ago. it's also a tiered routing system, where it's built around how things are routed, not how they are geographically located
to make this Actually Work you'd need a massive redesign of how the internet works, and all I can say is Good Fucking Luck With That
Honestly I think elites are over the internet as it currently exists anyway. They would much prefer a series of private walled gardens with a bare bones back end inaccessible to normal users. Basically like Facebooks “free internet” in the third world everywhere.
That’s right. It’s time to switch to IPv6 for real!
the internet is so big and complicated and running on so much different hardware and software that making any changes, even relatively minor ones, is very difficult and takes decades... and that's for uncontroversial changes everyone wants!
I’m curious what the government would even do about something like the Gemini protocol or gopher? Could ISPs block a protocol from being utilized? Idk anything about computers so sorry if that’s a stupid question
Protocols which are distinguishable by looking at the traffic can be blocked. That's why many protocols mimic HTTPS to be indistinguishable
you try to change the internet at a protocol level to make it easier to determine where people are so you can decide if they're allowed to see porn? yeah sure boss, should be done by 2070 unless someone trips over a cable
Also most people involved in that actively hate that and don’t want it to happen so good fucking luck
the only way to do this that has any amount of accuracy would be to do it at the country level. and even then: 1. that can still be inaccurate, it's just less so 2. VPNs exist and people already know how to use them
Fun fact: In the European Union IPs are not always accurate even on a country level! My ISP, Digi, is romanian, and routes some connections in Spain through there. It's not uncommon sites think I'm in Romania
It would have to be the ISP in the end ,wouldn't it ?
people use VPNs for their work and people use VPNs because of services like netflix being restricted by borders.
MaxMind GeoIP free edition claims something like 99.9% accurate for country, which… isn’t that great
I hear they have the internet on computers now
I'm in WV, but my IP is (without a VPN) is usually in Ohio, and sometimes in Tyler, TX.
Still better than being geolocated underwater because your ISP routes everything through Atlantis. (I'll show myself out)
Not the same issue, but Potwin, Kansas has entered the chat.
UK ISPs check traffic against a secret government block list which they've used to block Wikipedia in the past. Wouldn't surprise if they started putting "non-compliant" sites on there. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interne...
📌
You can vaguely triangulate where a user's externally facing gateway is with distance bounding protocols (timing from multiple directions) but a VPN breaks that trivially and it's not very accurate where backbone infrastructure is weird and asymmetric. Near a border it's very very difficult
For real like I'm nowhere near Mississippi but I'm getting "bluesky is banned in Mississippi" splash screens
I frequently get geolocated in Ontario despite being thousands of km away in BC because that’s where my ISP’s headquarters is.
Lots of websites (and mostly Google) still assume I'm in western Sydney for some reason when I'm in Canberra. I never feel like correcting them because it feels like a victory against digital surveillance and that sort of thing.
Fun doing tech support for Apple stuff because one of the most common calls was people freaked out because the little map that says confirm you are the one accessing your account was 100 miles away and you had to explain yeah that's where your ISP accesses the main internet. I did have fun during
Training telling the rest of the class about the farm that became the default location for unknown IP addresses and the years of police search warrants that followed arstechnica.com/tech-policy/... if you're ever setting a location for null results make sure it's not someone's house.
every service that detects our location and shows us it (which is almost every website these days) always gives us a wildly wrong city, often places I've never even heard of. But it's a big country so there's no hopes of it landing in another country
Yeah, I still remember the story of the folks in... I think it was Kansas or Missouri or something who constantly got letters and visits from the local police because some geoIP company had set their default location for "American IP we don't recognize" to the geographic center of the US...
...which just so happened to be in the middle of their back yard.