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How to Get a North Korea / Antarctica VPS

a-ve

I've wanted to try something like this before, but I was under the impression that providers like MaxMind might use other techniques to figure out the "real" location of a server.

ipinfo.io uses a probe network for this[1], but even then a server physically located in the Netherlands with an IP announced as being from, say, Seychelles would still respond to pings faster from a European location than from somewhere like Singapore (unless you go out of your way to induce latency to ICMP responses).

[1] https://ipinfo.io/blog/probe-network-how-we-make-sure-our-da...

parallax_error

> Now test your VPS’s IPv4 geolocation using Cloudflare’s /cdn-cgi/trace endpoint (available on any site behind CF)

Interesting, this really does seem to work on any site behind CF. Are there any other endpoints like this?

tonyhart7

Yeah Geo-IP is "fake" when I look at this deeper, idk why people use this as source of truth

also important point when you using Starlink and got totally different "relay" station sometimes can be thousand miles away, I think we need to "upgrade" our internet infrastructure for interplanetary system

basilikum

It's the best there is and good enough for most business purposes. Regulations may require you not to do business with people in certain countries so you have to do a good faith effort not to provide your services to those people. GeoIP, despite just being an indicator or correlation rather than objective truth, just happens to be that good faith effort.

calvinmorrison

> tl;dr it requires owning your own IP blocks and then lying.

If this was the case, and theres tons of financial incentive to do so, wouldnt cloudflare,etc, block not based on the reported 'country' but some fuzzy heuristic that knows what country it comes from? hops?

ranger_danger

tl;dr it requires owning your own IP blocks and then lying.

> In reality, the “location” of an IP is inherently fuzzy. For instance, my 2a14:7c0:4d00::/40 block was originally allocated to Israel. But later, I bought parts of this range and announced them via BGP in Germany, the US, and Singapore (see previous article on Anycast networks). Meanwhile, I’m physically located in mainland China. As the owner of this IP block, I can also freely edit the country field in the WHOIS database — and I set it to KP (North Korea).

> Because of this ambiguity, it’s nearly impossible to precisely determine an IP’s location using any single technical method. As a result, almost all geolocation databases accept public/user-submitted correction requests.

I would not be surprised if this practice is technically against most terms of service.

ronsor

> I would not be surprised if this practice is technically against most terms of service.

It doesn't really matter. RIPE and other RIRs let you put whatever metadata you want for an IP range into the database, and you can serve whatever you want from your own geolocation feed. If the geolocation providers don't like it, it's up to them to stop fetching your data.

Sanzig

And here I was hoping someone had a Proxmox node running at McMurdo and was renting out VMs for the novelty factor.

tonyhart7

isn't this possible with tech like starlink????

I bet they didnt to buy cooling system /s

throwaway808081

IIRC the country code RFC does not specify physical location, nationality of entity, or other.