IP location…

…close enough for comfort.

Having been located so far off with the old Sat-Link based internet service that nothing requiring geopositioning worked as intended, it is good to see that the new fiber-optic based service points the location quite a bit closer.

Now the found location is only a few kilo­meters off from my actual location. This is more than close enough for comfort – have no wish to be followed all the way to my doorstep.

In an ideal world of global information exchange, an end‐user's location should not matter. But, since the internet has developed to something that is further from ideal than most of us could possibly imagine a decade or so ago, extracting and manipulating locations via IP addresses is by now exploited for all it is worth and then some.

IP locating is highly unreliable.

We, the end‐users, when trying to get access to stuff on the internett, often get a pass or are locked out based on where we are located relative to the area each chunk of information is aimed at, all based on our IP addresses.

That IP addresses are not always mapped correctly and completely all the way to end‐users actual locations, doesn't stop big and small information and service providers from relying entirely on the method. Thus, we can not trust them to get locations right every time, or even bother to correct things when the method fails.

The best we can hope for is to get located in the right country, and in my own experience not even that kind of rough accuracy can be guaranteed.

For six years I had to live with lock‐outs from sites and services aimed solely at end‐users located inside Norwegian borders, because my IP were mapped to another European country and the flaw apparently could not be corrected.

Pretty irritating to say the least, and all those years I for the most part relied on VPN servers to work around the problem and get access to important sites in my own country and be addressed in my own language.

minimal problem these days.

I am pretty happy with my new services, but new services also mean that new obstacles will pop up. Those that prevent access to sites that matters, must be handled one way or another.

VPN servers still come to the rescue when, for whatever reason, I get locked out from sites and services I need access to to get a job done.

Changing DNS server address is another option worth testing when problems occur. Often that's all it takes to get access.

Apart from the very small percentage of sites I really, really, need access to, I tend to ignore sites that block access. Always another web site to check up on, so no reason to waste time on sites and services that complicate matters.

sincerely  georg; sign

Hageland 04.jan.2014
08.jan.2014 - included a "bad example" in sidecolumn.
09.jan.2014 - minor revision.
last rev: 09.jan.2014



www.gunlaug.com advice upgrade advice upgrade navigation