
Show HN: Improved passive TCP/IP geolocation - sheerun
http://sheerun.gitlab.io/ping/
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PeterisP
Feels a bit overconfident - it was much better than the previous approach, and
it got better over the iterations, getting very close - but however, 100% of
the time my actual location was _outside_ the circle.

I.e., the center points seem reasonable, but the size of circle is
unreasonably small because it's obviously smaller than your actual precision.

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tbronchain
Same here, I ended up ~2000kms away (at best) from the circle (from Bangkok)

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stephenr
Can I assume this was meant to show my own location?

If so, I can assure you I'm not in India, Pakistan or Oman (or the middle of
the Indian Ocean) as it suggested.

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mdadm
I have to agree with this. I'm pretty sure that the middle of the Atlantic
Ocean isn't quite the same as the U.S. East Coast...

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sheerun
Ha. It's probably because transatlantic fiber latency is better than Comcast's
to the nearest city

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colinbartlett
I tried with my real IP, and then again tunneled through a VPN 3 times each to
different continents and it got all four 100% correct.

The VPN tests did have lower confidence, IE larger zones, but my end point was
indeed in the circle. Pretty neat.

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grawlinson
Ran this about 10 times, it never once entered the correct hemisphere.

Hint: I don't live in the northern one.

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daurnimator
Keeps putting me in the middle of the indian ocean with high confidence. I'm
in eastern Australia.

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madeofpalk
After jumping between Eastern US, Greenland and Finland, it's finally settled
on Nigeria.

I'm in Sydney, Australia.

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abritinthebay
I'm in San Francisco. It failed to work that out but it at least figuring I
was probably in CA.

Southern CA, for the most part (or at best the central valley).

That's underwhelming and I wouldn't call it "improved" in the slightest.

edit: on refresh it thinks I'm around the Azores or maybe the south coast of
Greenland. Not impressed.

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bhouston
I wonder if it connected to various servers using websockets and did some
in/out message timing.

I think it needs to have some knowledge of backbones or something like.

Wonder if you had a bunch of signals, like telco, and timing informations, you
could throw it into an ML tool and it could learn the backbone topology
implicitly....

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sheerun
No fancy timing. Just 404 requests on on random 3rd party proxy servers. You
might fork and improve it :)

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exabrial
Will get a heck of a lot easier once the people at FaceBook, Google, Apple,
NSA, et all get their way with IPv6.

And please don't try to tell me more about "privacy extensions". When I swim
in a see of 4.3 billion address, I'm _forced_ to share, leaving an undeniable
possibility that I could be another person. While 3.4×10^38 identifiers
_could_ be so huge I never have the same address twice, the implementation
does not guarantee that. Welcome to simplified tracking of users, advocated by
the people that make money on tracking you.

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pyvpx
it's far easier and more accurate to track someone based on browser
fingerprinting and a few other features than any IP address -- period. IPv6 in
no way makes this worse or better than IPv4.

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runin2k1
The ping class likely needs to be scrapped to make this any sort of reliable.

Making a fake image request to these servers introduces a lot of very random
sources of latency over what a typical ping would involve.

~~~
destitude
The other website posted on HN yesterday was much more accurate in that it had
very large error circle and I was within the circle. This one tries to be way
to specific which you simply can't do with this technique.

~~~
runin2k1
It could be "Improved Improved" if they had a central server constantly
polling the nodes in exactly the same fashion as this script does. If you know
the distance from your central server to the nodes, you can use the rolling
response times you're polling for to establish a baseline for the client to
help factor out server load.

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spbookie
Tried 10 times from Victoria (State) Australia and it once got the continent
correct but that was around 2000Km west of my location. The other times were
way wide.

Very interesting project though!

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anc84
Latency is not an indicator for geographic anything. If this is just a fun
hobby project, by all means go for it but don't expect it to be very truthful
ever.

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pjf
Hi, the author of original submission here.

I like your idea, especially the number of servers you used. I'm only
concerned that using a full HTTP GET to measure the latency (function
request_image() in src/ping.js) makes the results possibly way more random
than measuring the TCP/IP RTT server-side. That is, your method seems to
measure the latency in higher net layer than TCP. Anyway, nice idea :)

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codezero
For me it often comes close, but seems to be unable to converge on my actual
location.

It always ends up stuck south east of it. I am in San Francisco.

The other passive geo system put a larger circle right around SF when I tried
it.

My guess is that none of the hosts it pings are to the north or west of me, or
that they stick the hosts on a grid that doesn't wrap around to the nearest
location, so it is biased towards the east/south.

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throwaway2016a
I can say for sure I am not in Chicago. But at least it got the right country.
Incidentally at one point it circled almost my exactly location and then
proceeded to walk elsewhere.

Update: I tried a second time. The second time it actually nailed my location
pretty closely. The circle actually enclosed the state I'm actually in. The
third time it was off again but at least close than the first.

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est
Why not also include TTL field from IP header.

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level3
I ran it 3 times from my iPhone in Tokyo. Results were Iran/Afghanistan,
China/Taiwan, and Saudi Arabia.

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virtuallynathan
The creator of the NLNOG RING did a very good job of this using all ~400
servers around the world, as an experiment. Was pretty accurate.
[http://map.ring.nlnog.net/](http://map.ring.nlnog.net/) (That triangulation
service is now gone, I think)

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zv
Idea is good however needs more refinement. Currently it detects way wrong at
least for me (Europe)

~~~
sheerun
Sometimes running it twice gives better results

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darekdk
It is close. Really nice effect and visual feedback while it is hitting each
location.

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JonRB
This has apparently actually identified my antipode. I also feel like circling
entire continents doesn't count...

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iand675
Not even the right continent for me.

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tmaly
It worked pretty well for me. The center of the circle was about a 45 minute
drive to NYC.

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donw
Apparently Japan is smack in the middle of the Atlantic. Who knew?

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stevewilhelm
A couple million people between me and the geolocation guess.

