Are you in possession of a web browser other than Safari? (yes, this means iDevices do not qualify at all, say sorry) Have you got ten minutes to leave a browser tab idling? Are you physically located somewhere other than Canada, the USA, or Western Europe? (This last not strictly required.)

If you can say yes to some of these questions, you might be able to help me with my research project! Please visit https://research.owlfolio.org/active-geo/ and follow the instructions.

Hey, not bad - y'all managed to get the correct coast that my current VPN endpoints are on ;-)

Yeah, "the correct coast" is often about as accurate as you can hope for.

The project this is part of started with my suspicions that a bunch of commercial VPNs are lying about which country their servers are in, and fortunately they turn out to be really blatant lies, like "it's labeled as Kerbleckistan but really it's in a data center in the USA", so "the correct coast" is good enough.

In my case, I have two geographically diverse endpoints that I route through, so I was kind of curious as to what would happen, given that there's a potential for subsequent requests to route through different tunnels depending on the destination.

I should probably try it again after my next tunnel reconfig and see what happens if I have a tunnel to the east coast and to the west coast.

All data points are useful! Just please make sure you fill out the form at the bottom correctly each time (especially, marking these submissions as "proxy in use").

Heh, the starting map claims that the project is located on the south shore of Millinocket Lake, about 10 miles from here. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that isn't right. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

The pin that shows up on the starting map is your browser's guess of its location, which for desktops is usually about that accurate. I should maybe see if I can make the label clearer.

>The pin that shows up on the starting map is your browser's
>guess of its location, which for desktops is usually about that
>accurate.

Hmm, that's annoying, given that I've turned off every location service I could find on the computer and explicitly told the browser not to tell websites where it is.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>>The pin that shows up on the starting map is your browser's
>>guess of its location
>
>Hmm, that's annoying, given that I've turned off every location
>service I could find on the computer and explicitly told the browser
>not to tell websites where it is.

I was oversimplifying a bit. Was the pin you saw orange, or green? The green pin uses information from the browser, but the orange one is based on looking your IP address up in a database.

>I was oversimplifying a bit. Was the pin you saw orange, or green?
>The green pin uses information from the browser, but the orange one is
>based on looking your IP address up in a database.

Orange. In that case, I'm impressed; that type of lookup usually thinks I'm in Biddeford (where my ISP's office is). "Helpful" retail websites like Home Depot, for instance, are forever pointing me at that store rather than one that's anywhere near me.

(It was also labeled something like "project", which is what led me to interpret it as the system's attempt at indicating where it was.)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

LAST EDITED ON Apr-20-17 AT 04:54 PM (EDT)
 
>that type of lookup usually thinks I'm in Biddeford (where my ISP's
>office is). "Helpful" retail websites like Home Depot, for instance,
>are forever pointing me at that store rather than one that's anywhere
>near me.

It uses https://freegeoip.net/ but I have no reason to think that that's any more accurate on average than any of the other services that do the same thing. Maybe someone at your ISP is buddies with them and has given them more accurate information. *shrug*

>(It was also labeled something like "project", which is what led me to
>interpret it as the system's attempt at indicating where it
>was.)

Thanks for pointing this out; I've revised the legend and hopefully it will be less confusing now.

>It uses https://freegeoip.net/ but I have no reason to think that
>that's any more accurate on average than any of the other services
>that do the same thing. Maybe someone at your ISP is buddies with them
>and has given them more accurate information. *shrug*

It's been a looong time since I worked in that field, and I might be talking out of my ass now, but it seems possible to me that sites like Home Depot are only looking at where the traffic they're receiving got onto the backbone. That would make sense in terms of their assuming that everyone using a given ISP is where that ISP's NOC is.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>>It uses https://freegeoip.net/ but I have no reason to think that
>>that's any more accurate on average than any of the other services
>>that do the same thing. Maybe someone at your ISP is buddies with them
>>and has given them more accurate information. *shrug*
>
>It's been a looong time since I worked in that field, and I might be
>talking out of my ass now, but it seems possible to me that sites like
>Home Depot are only looking at where the traffic they're receiving got
>onto the backbone. That would make sense in terms of their assuming
>that everyone using a given ISP is where that ISP's NOC is.

I do know that a lot of those systems are just able to narrow it down to a geographic region, (e.g. we know you are in Maine), and then return a marker saying "here is the centre of the area it is in."

There are people who have issues with this method. Generally because that geographic centre happens to land on their home.

>There are people who have issues with this method. Generally because
>that geographic centre happens to land on their home.

Yes, one occasionally sees horror stories in the news about hapless randos who are constantly besieged by people who think they've stolen their phones, or distributed porn of their kids, or otherwise done some deeply egregious thing that some online detective has "traced" to their house.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>>There are people who have issues with this method. Generally because
>>that geographic centre happens to land on their home.
>
>Yes, one occasionally sees horror stories in the news about hapless
>randos who are constantly besieged by people who think they've stolen
>their phones, or distributed porn of their kids, or otherwise done
>some deeply egregious thing that some online detective has "traced" to
>their house.

As I recall, the biggest one is that one of the more "untracable" addresses got assigned a random position... that happened to be a house. Last I knew there was a lawsuit trying to get that address assigned to somewhere else like the middle of a damned lake, with a side of "damages for emotional distress/economic damage" on top of it (I forget if it was the landowner or their tenant who filed it).

LAST EDITED ON Apr-22-17 AT 06:59 PM (EDT)
 
>>>There are people who have issues with this method. Generally because
>>>that geographic centre happens to land on their home.
>>
>>Yes, one occasionally sees horror stories in the news about hapless
>>randos who are constantly besieged by people who think they've stolen
>>their phones, or distributed porn of their kids, or otherwise done
>>some deeply egregious thing that some online detective has "traced" to
>>their house.
>
>As I recall, the biggest one is that one of the more "untracable"
>addresses got assigned a random position... that happened to be a
>house.

Yeah, I think I've heard of the one you mean, and IIRC it's one of the "center of region" problems. Like some house that happens to stand at the geographic center of, I forget, the state it's in, or the continental US, or some such. So it's the location that pops up if the best the system can tell is "it's somewhere in Colorado" (or wherever), but those systems don't bother mentioning that the error bars on the fix are 1,750 miles wide.

(I've heard of a similar one in Florida, which is doubly unfortunate for the people that live there because it attracts all the craziness of our craziest state in addition to all the other nonsense you can expect under those conditions.)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

LAST EDITED ON Apr-22-17 AT 07:32 PM (EDT)
 
>some house that happens to stand at the geographic center of,
>I forget, the state it's in, or the continental US, or some such

The one that got a bunch of press last year was a farm in Kansas, at the geographic center of the USA, rounded off a bit. Was being used as the default location for "we know this is in the USA but not where" by MaxMind. (Since changed to a lake.)

I saw this a lot in this project - if the geolocation database thinks the computer is at the geographic center of Russia, and my measurements tell me that it's in Moscow, I should not count that as the measurement being off by several thousand miles.