RE: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Matthew Black]

One toll defeat trick that worked in GTE land in Southern California was to 
call the operator, then silently wait for them to hang up. Rattle the receiver 
hook several times for them to come back on the line and they would not know 
the caller's telephone number.



-Original Message-
From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces+matthew.black=csulb@nanog.org] On Behalf 
Of Larry Sheldon
Sent: Tuesday, April 26, 2016 12:11 PM
To: nanog@nanog.org
Subject: Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world 
consequences



On 4/20/2016 10:15, Owen DeLong wrote:
>
>> On Apr 20, 2016, at 7:59 AM, Jean-Francois Mezei 
>> <jfmezei_na...@vaxination.ca> wrote:
>>
>> On 2016-04-20 10:52, Owen DeLong wrote:
>>
>>> For the most part, “long distance” calls within the US are a thing of the
>>> past and at least one mobile carrier now treats US/CA/MX as a single
>>> local calling area
>>
>>
>> Is this a case of telcos having switched to IP trunks and can reach
>> other carriers for "free"
>>
>> Or are wholesale long distance still billed between carriers but at
>> prices so low that they can afford to offer "free" long distance at
>> retail level ?
>
> I think it boiled down to a recognition that the costs of billing were 
> beginning to account for something like $0.99 of every $1 billed.

I wonder if the costs of avoiding-preventing-investigating toll fraud 
final grow to consume the profit in the product.

I know that long ago there were things that I thought were insanely 
silly.  A few examples:

As an ordinary citizen I was amused and annoyed, in the case where a 
toll charge had been contested (and perforce refunded) there would often 
be several non-revenue calls to the protesting number asking whoever 
answered if they knew anybody in the called city, or if they knew who 
the called number belonged to.   (Proper answer in any case:  Who or 
what I know is none of your business.)  Often there would calls to the 
called number (super irritating because the error was in the 
recording--later learned to be poor handwriting) asking the reciprocal 
questions except that often they had no idea that a call had been made.

I  was a Toll Transmissionman for a number or years back in the last 
iceage and one of the onerous tasks the supervisor had was "verifying 
the phone bill" which might be a stack as much as six inches tall.  The 
evening shift supervisor (or one of them in a large office, like Los 
Angeles 1 Telegraph, where I worked for a while) would go through the 
bill, line by line, page by page, looking at the called number an d if 
he recognized it and placing a check mark next to it,  If he did not 
recognize it, he would search the many lists in the office to see it was 
shown, and adding a check mark if a list showed it for a likely sounding 
legal call.  If that didn't work he would probably have to call the 
number to see who answered (adding a wasted revenue-call path to the 
wreckage).  Most often it would turn out to be the home telephone number 
of a repair supervisor in West Sweatsock, Montana, who had been called 
because a somebody who protested the policy that the repairman going 
fishing meant some problem would not be addressed for several days.  So 
he put a check mark next to the number and moved on.

Which meant the number would show up on the next month's bill.  And it 
would again not be recognized from memory.  And so forth and so on. 
Until eventually, after several months, the number would be recognized, 
check-marked without drama, and disappear forever from the bill.

Lastly, in later years I was assigned to the the Revenue Accounting 
organization (to write programs for printing telephone books) and came 
to realize that there were a LOT of people in RA working with a LOT of 
people in the Chief Special Agents organization using a LOT of computer 
time to analyze Toll records for fraud patterns.

Oops, not quite lastly  Looking back at my Toll Plant days in the 
heyday of Captain Crunch--there were a lot engineering hours redesigning 
Toll equipment, and plant hours modifying or replacing equipment do 
defeat the engineering efforts of the Blue Box Boys.

-- 
"Everybody is a genius.  But if you judge a fish by
its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole
life believing that it is stupid."

--Albert Einstein

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[John Levine]

>> On our VOIP service we include US, Canada and Puerto Rico as "local"
>> calling.

>I would imagine for VOIP that's because all three are country code 1 :)

If you know a VoIP carrier that offers flat rates to 1-473, 1-664, and
1-767, I know some people who'd like to talk to you.  At great length.

R's,
John

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Julien Goodwin]

On 27/04/16 09:16, Owen DeLong wrote:
> One thing I always found particularly amusing was that it used to be a toll 
> call to call from San Jose East (408238) to Sunnyvale (I forget the NPA/NXX), 
> but that there were several prefixes in San Jose West (e.g. 408360 IIRC) 
> where it was free to call from San Jose East and could place a free call to 
> Sunnyvale.
> 
> I also discovered that a single line with call forwarding was relatively 
> cheap per month and could forward many calls into a hunt group.
> 
> So, we used to extend the toll-free reach of BBS systems by finding “friends” 
> with houses in strategic prefixes and having them install a single telephone 
> line with call forwarding. Then, once the line was installed, we’d run over 
> to the location, program the forwarder to go to the BBS hunt lead number and 
> voila… Instant toll free unlimited BBS calling for another 20-30 prefixes for 
> less than $15/month and completely legal.
> 
> At first, we thought we had to hide what we were doing as we were sure that 
> the phone company would object, but we later discovered that absent a PUC 
> proceeding to change the tariff they really didn’t have anything they could 
> say about it. We started showing up on the day of install to dial in the 
> forwarding and confirm functionality while the tech was still on site. You 
> should have seen some of the reactions when we showed up with a butt set, set 
> up call forwarding, told someone to make a test call and waited for positive 
> confirmation. Priceless.

Similar things happened in Australia, with more than one ISP using this
to offer lower-toll dial-in numbers to their customers back in the day.

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Blair Trosper]

I would imagine for VOIP that's because all three are country code 1 :)

On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 7:50 PM, Ray Orsini <r...@orsiniit.com> wrote:

> On our VOIP service we include US, Canada and Puerto Rico as "local"
> calling.
>
> Regards,
>
> Ray Orsini – CEO
> Orsini IT, LLC – Technology Consultants
> VOICE DATA  BANDWIDTH  SECURITY  SUPPORT
> P: 305.967.6756 x1009   E: r...@orsiniit.com   TF: 844.OIT.VOIP
> 7900 NW 155th Street, Suite 103, Miami Lakes, FL 33016
> http://www.orsiniit.com | View My Calendar | View/Pay Your Invoices | View
> Your Tickets
>
>
>
> -Original Message-
> From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces+ray=orsiniit@nanog.org] On Behalf Of
> Larry Sheldon
> Sent: Tuesday, April 26, 2016 3:11 PM
> To: nanog@nanog.org
> Subject: Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world
> consequences
>
>
>
> On 4/20/2016 10:15, Owen DeLong wrote:
> >
> >> On Apr 20, 2016, at 7:59 AM, Jean-Francois Mezei
> >> <jfmezei_na...@vaxination.ca> wrote:
> >>
> >> On 2016-04-20 10:52, Owen DeLong wrote:
> >>
> >>> For the most part, “long distance” calls within the US are a thing
> >>> of the past and at least one mobile carrier now treats US/CA/MX as a
> >>> single local calling area
> >>
> >>
> >> Is this a case of telcos having switched to IP trunks and can reach
> >> other carriers for "free"
> >>
> >> Or are wholesale long distance still billed between carriers but at
> >> prices so low that they can afford to offer "free" long distance at
> >> retail level ?
> >
> > I think it boiled down to a recognition that the costs of billing were
> > beginning to account for something like $0.99 of every $1 billed.
>
> I wonder if the costs of avoiding-preventing-investigating toll fraud final
> grow to consume the profit in the product.
>
> I know that long ago there were things that I thought were insanely silly.
> A few examples:
>
> As an ordinary citizen I was amused and annoyed, in the case where a toll
> charge had been contested (and perforce refunded) there would often be
> several non-revenue calls to the protesting number asking whoever answered
> if they knew anybody in the called city, or if they knew who
> the called number belonged to.   (Proper answer in any case:  Who or
> what I know is none of your business.)  Often there would calls to the
> called number (super irritating because the error was in the
> recording--later learned to be poor handwriting) asking the reciprocal
> questions except that often they had no idea that a call had been made.
>
> I  was a Toll Transmissionman for a number or years back in the last iceage
> and one of the onerous tasks the supervisor had was "verifying the phone
> bill" which might be a stack as much as six inches tall.  The evening shift
> supervisor (or one of them in a large office, like Los Angeles 1 Telegraph,
> where I worked for a while) would go through the bill, line by line, page
> by
> page, looking at the called number an d if he recognized it and placing a
> check mark next to it,  If he did not recognize it, he would search the
> many
> lists in the office to see it was shown, and adding a check mark if a list
> showed it for a likely sounding legal call.  If that didn't work he would
> probably have to call the number to see who answered (adding a wasted
> revenue-call path to the wreckage).  Most often it would turn out to be the
> home telephone number of a repair supervisor in West Sweatsock, Montana,
> who
> had been called because a somebody who protested the policy that the
> repairman going fishing meant some problem would not be addressed for
> several days.  So he put a check mark next to the number and moved on.
>
> Which meant the number would show up on the next month's bill.  And it
> would
> again not be recognized from memory.  And so forth and so on.
> Until eventually, after several months, the number would be recognized,
> check-marked without drama, and disappear forever from the bill.
>
> Lastly, in later years I was assigned to the the Revenue Accounting
> organization (to write programs for printing telephone books) and came to
> realize that there were a LOT of people in RA working with a LOT of people
> in the Chief Special Agents organization using a LOT of computer time to
> analyze Toll records for fraud patterns.
>
> Oops, not quite lastly  Looking back at my Toll Plant days in the
> heyday
> of Captain Crunch--there were a lot engineering hours redesigning Toll
> equipment, and plant hours modifying or replacing equipment do defeat the
> engineering efforts of the Blue Box Boys.
>
> --
> "Everybody is a genius.  But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a
> tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."
>
> --Albert Einstein
>

RE: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Ray Orsini]

On our VOIP service we include US, Canada and Puerto Rico as "local"
calling.

Regards,

Ray Orsini – CEO
Orsini IT, LLC – Technology Consultants
VOICE DATA  BANDWIDTH  SECURITY  SUPPORT
P: 305.967.6756 x1009   E: r...@orsiniit.com   TF: 844.OIT.VOIP
7900 NW 155th Street, Suite 103, Miami Lakes, FL 33016
http://www.orsiniit.com | View My Calendar | View/Pay Your Invoices | View
Your Tickets



-Original Message-
From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces+ray=orsiniit@nanog.org] On Behalf Of
Larry Sheldon
Sent: Tuesday, April 26, 2016 3:11 PM
To: nanog@nanog.org
Subject: Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world
consequences



On 4/20/2016 10:15, Owen DeLong wrote:
>
>> On Apr 20, 2016, at 7:59 AM, Jean-Francois Mezei
>> <jfmezei_na...@vaxination.ca> wrote:
>>
>> On 2016-04-20 10:52, Owen DeLong wrote:
>>
>>> For the most part, “long distance” calls within the US are a thing
>>> of the past and at least one mobile carrier now treats US/CA/MX as a
>>> single local calling area
>>
>>
>> Is this a case of telcos having switched to IP trunks and can reach
>> other carriers for "free"
>>
>> Or are wholesale long distance still billed between carriers but at
>> prices so low that they can afford to offer "free" long distance at
>> retail level ?
>
> I think it boiled down to a recognition that the costs of billing were
> beginning to account for something like $0.99 of every $1 billed.

I wonder if the costs of avoiding-preventing-investigating toll fraud final
grow to consume the profit in the product.

I know that long ago there were things that I thought were insanely silly.
A few examples:

As an ordinary citizen I was amused and annoyed, in the case where a toll
charge had been contested (and perforce refunded) there would often be
several non-revenue calls to the protesting number asking whoever answered
if they knew anybody in the called city, or if they knew who
the called number belonged to.   (Proper answer in any case:  Who or
what I know is none of your business.)  Often there would calls to the
called number (super irritating because the error was in the
recording--later learned to be poor handwriting) asking the reciprocal
questions except that often they had no idea that a call had been made.

I  was a Toll Transmissionman for a number or years back in the last iceage
and one of the onerous tasks the supervisor had was "verifying the phone
bill" which might be a stack as much as six inches tall.  The evening shift
supervisor (or one of them in a large office, like Los Angeles 1 Telegraph,
where I worked for a while) would go through the bill, line by line, page by
page, looking at the called number an d if he recognized it and placing a
check mark next to it,  If he did not recognize it, he would search the many
lists in the office to see it was shown, and adding a check mark if a list
showed it for a likely sounding legal call.  If that didn't work he would
probably have to call the number to see who answered (adding a wasted
revenue-call path to the wreckage).  Most often it would turn out to be the
home telephone number of a repair supervisor in West Sweatsock, Montana, who
had been called because a somebody who protested the policy that the
repairman going fishing meant some problem would not be addressed for
several days.  So he put a check mark next to the number and moved on.

Which meant the number would show up on the next month's bill.  And it would
again not be recognized from memory.  And so forth and so on.
Until eventually, after several months, the number would be recognized,
check-marked without drama, and disappear forever from the bill.

Lastly, in later years I was assigned to the the Revenue Accounting
organization (to write programs for printing telephone books) and came to
realize that there were a LOT of people in RA working with a LOT of people
in the Chief Special Agents organization using a LOT of computer time to
analyze Toll records for fraud patterns.

Oops, not quite lastly  Looking back at my Toll Plant days in the heyday
of Captain Crunch--there were a lot engineering hours redesigning Toll
equipment, and plant hours modifying or replacing equipment do defeat the
engineering efforts of the Blue Box Boys.

--
"Everybody is a genius.  But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a
tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."

--Albert Einstein

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Owen DeLong]

> On Apr 26, 2016, at 12:10 , Larry Sheldon  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 4/20/2016 10:15, Owen DeLong wrote:
>> 
>>> On Apr 20, 2016, at 7:59 AM, Jean-Francois Mezei 
>>>  wrote:
>>> 
>>> On 2016-04-20 10:52, Owen DeLong wrote:
>>> 
 For the most part, “long distance” calls within the US are a thing of the
 past and at least one mobile carrier now treats US/CA/MX as a single
 local calling area
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Is this a case of telcos having switched to IP trunks and can reach
>>> other carriers for "free"
>>> 
>>> Or are wholesale long distance still billed between carriers but at
>>> prices so low that they can afford to offer "free" long distance at
>>> retail level ?
>> 
>> I think it boiled down to a recognition that the costs of billing were 
>> beginning to account for something like $0.99 of every $1 billed.
> 
> I wonder if the costs of avoiding-preventing-investigating toll fraud final 
> grow to consume the profit in the product.

IIRC, mostly it boiled down to the maintenance of the antiquated SMDR equipment 
and its interface to the even more antiquated billing systems was getting 
expensive to keep running and that there was no perceived potential whatsoever 
for ROI on building a new billing system or new SMDR capabilities.

> I know that long ago there were things that I thought were insanely silly.  A 
> few examples:
> 
> As an ordinary citizen I was amused and annoyed, in the case where a toll 
> charge had been contested (and perforce refunded) there would often be 
> several non-revenue calls to the protesting number asking whoever answered if 
> they knew anybody in the called city, or if they knew who the called number 
> belonged to.   (Proper answer in any case:  Who or what I know is none of 
> your business.)  Often there would calls to the called number (super 
> irritating because the error was in the recording--later learned to be poor 
> handwriting) asking the reciprocal questions except that often they had no 
> idea that a call had been made.

ROFLMAO… Yeah. Next time we’re in the same locale, ask me about my 2.5 year 
argument with Pacific Bell about direct dial calls to Vietnam and the 
Philippines from my apartment in Richmond. There should be alcohol involved.

> I  was a Toll Transmissionman for a number or years back in the last iceage 
> and one of the onerous tasks the supervisor had was "verifying the phone 
> bill" which might be a stack as much as six inches tall.  The evening shift 
> supervisor (or one of them in a large office, like Los Angeles 1 Telegraph, 
> where I worked for a while) would go through the bill, line by line, page by 
> page, looking at the called number an d if he recognized it and placing a 
> check mark next to it,  If he did not recognize it, he would search the many 
> lists in the office to see it was shown, and adding a check mark if a list 
> showed it for a likely sounding legal call.  If that didn't work he would 
> probably have to call the number to see who answered (adding a wasted 
> revenue-call path to the wreckage).  Most often it would turn out to be the 
> home telephone number of a repair supervisor in West Sweatsock, Montana, who 
> had been called because a somebody who protested the policy that the 
> repairman going fishing meant some problem would not be addressed for several 
> days.  So he put a check mark next to the number and moved on.
> 
> Which meant the number would show up on the next month's bill.  And it would 
> again not be recognized from memory.  And so forth and so on. Until 
> eventually, after several months, the number would be recognized, 
> check-marked without drama, and disappear forever from the bill.
> 
> Lastly, in later years I was assigned to the the Revenue Accounting 
> organization (to write programs for printing telephone books) and came to 
> realize that there were a LOT of people in RA working with a LOT of people in 
> the Chief Special Agents organization using a LOT of computer time to analyze 
> Toll records for fraud patterns.
> 
> Oops, not quite lastly  Looking back at my Toll Plant days in the heyday 
> of Captain Crunch--there were a lot engineering hours redesigning Toll 
> equipment, and plant hours modifying or replacing equipment do defeat the 
> engineering efforts of the Blue Box Boys.

I really liked it while my Blue Box still worked. lol

For a while, SS7 was the bane of my existence.

Fun times!!

When a minute of long distance from California to New York was $0.35+, there 
was enough money in the billing process to cover the costs of tracking the 
minute. Once it got down to $0.03 and then $0.01, that really took a lot of the 
margin away.

One thing I always found particularly amusing was that it used to be a toll 
call to call from San Jose East (408238) to Sunnyvale (I forget the NPA/NXX), 
but that there were several prefixes in San Jose West (e.g. 408360 IIRC) where 
it was free to call from San 

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Larry Sheldon]

On 4/20/2016 10:15, Owen DeLong wrote:



On Apr 20, 2016, at 7:59 AM, Jean-Francois Mezei  
wrote:

On 2016-04-20 10:52, Owen DeLong wrote:


For the most part, “long distance” calls within the US are a thing of the
past and at least one mobile carrier now treats US/CA/MX as a single
local calling area



Is this a case of telcos having switched to IP trunks and can reach
other carriers for "free"

Or are wholesale long distance still billed between carriers but at
prices so low that they can afford to offer "free" long distance at
retail level ?


I think it boiled down to a recognition that the costs of billing were 
beginning to account for something like $0.99 of every $1 billed.


I wonder if the costs of avoiding-preventing-investigating toll fraud 
final grow to consume the profit in the product.


I know that long ago there were things that I thought were insanely 
silly.  A few examples:


As an ordinary citizen I was amused and annoyed, in the case where a 
toll charge had been contested (and perforce refunded) there would often 
be several non-revenue calls to the protesting number asking whoever 
answered if they knew anybody in the called city, or if they knew who 
the called number belonged to.   (Proper answer in any case:  Who or 
what I know is none of your business.)  Often there would calls to the 
called number (super irritating because the error was in the 
recording--later learned to be poor handwriting) asking the reciprocal 
questions except that often they had no idea that a call had been made.


I  was a Toll Transmissionman for a number or years back in the last 
iceage and one of the onerous tasks the supervisor had was "verifying 
the phone bill" which might be a stack as much as six inches tall.  The 
evening shift supervisor (or one of them in a large office, like Los 
Angeles 1 Telegraph, where I worked for a while) would go through the 
bill, line by line, page by page, looking at the called number an d if 
he recognized it and placing a check mark next to it,  If he did not 
recognize it, he would search the many lists in the office to see it was 
shown, and adding a check mark if a list showed it for a likely sounding 
legal call.  If that didn't work he would probably have to call the 
number to see who answered (adding a wasted revenue-call path to the 
wreckage).  Most often it would turn out to be the home telephone number 
of a repair supervisor in West Sweatsock, Montana, who had been called 
because a somebody who protested the policy that the repairman going 
fishing meant some problem would not be addressed for several days.  So 
he put a check mark next to the number and moved on.


Which meant the number would show up on the next month's bill.  And it 
would again not be recognized from memory.  And so forth and so on. 
Until eventually, after several months, the number would be recognized, 
check-marked without drama, and disappear forever from the bill.


Lastly, in later years I was assigned to the the Revenue Accounting 
organization (to write programs for printing telephone books) and came 
to realize that there were a LOT of people in RA working with a LOT of 
people in the Chief Special Agents organization using a LOT of computer 
time to analyze Toll records for fraud patterns.


Oops, not quite lastly  Looking back at my Toll Plant days in the 
heyday of Captain Crunch--there were a lot engineering hours redesigning 
Toll equipment, and plant hours modifying or replacing equipment do 
defeat the engineering efforts of the Blue Box Boys.


--
"Everybody is a genius.  But if you judge a fish by
its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole
life believing that it is stupid."

--Albert Einstein

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[RT Parrish]

Dan,

 I think that you mean that AT is the 1-800 pound gorilla. I know engineers 
at AT that are bitter about that whole arrangement this many years on.

I miss the glory days of everyone and their uncle spinning up a CLEC in the 
mid-90's. It made the ordering process complicated, especially if you were 
looking for local loop diversity and had to dig into which ILEC circuit things 
wee riding. Of course we were still doing lots of ISDN and the introduction of 
DSL was making life interesting for the smaller regional ISPs as well.

Cheers,
RT

Sent from my PINE emulated client

> On Apr 20, 2016, at 12:02 PM, Dan Lacey  wrote:
> 
> Great explanation!
> 
> Remember that LECs (Local Exchange Carrier, CenturyLink, Verizon, etc.) 
> typically get to decide how this all works...
> ATT is still an 800 pound gorilla and a couple years ago stopped ALL payments 
> to CLECs (Competitive Local Exchange Carrier, buy wholesale from LECs), took 
> them all to court (which for a CLEC, it is almost impossible to find a good 
> lawyer not on retainer to a LEC) and basically just told everyone what they 
> would pay...
> 
> Since all the LECs started offering unlimited long distance, they could not 
> afford the termination fees.
> So... They changed them!!!
> 
> Telco is very different from data, not in the physical aspects, but in the 
> business and political areas.
> 
> On 4/20/16 9:20 AM, John Levine wrote:
 For the most part, “long distance” calls within the US are a thing of the
 past and at least one mobile carrier now treats US/CA/MX as a single
 local calling area
>>> Is this a case of telcos having switched to IP trunks and can reach
>>> other carriers for "free"
>> No, it's because fiber bandwidth is so cheap.  It's equally cheap whether
>> the framing is ATM or IP.
>> 
>>> Or are wholesale long distance still billed between carriers but at
>>> prices so low that they can afford to offer "free" long distance at
>>> retail level ?
>> Some of each.  Some carriers do reciprocal compensation at very low
>> rates, small fractions of a cent per minute, some do bill and keep
>> with no settlements at all.
>> 
>> The history of settlements is closely tied to the history of the
>> Internet.  Before the Bell breakup separations (within Bell) and
>> settlements (between Bell and independents) were uncontentious, moving
>> money around to make the rate of return on invested capital at each
>> carrier come out right.
>> 
>> Then when cell phones were new, the Bell companies observed that
>> traffic was highly imbalanced, far more cell->landline than the other
>> way, so they demanded high reciprocal compensation, and the cellcos
>> were willing to pay since it gave the Bells the incentive to build the
>> interconnecting trunks.  One of Verizon's predecessors famously
>> derided "bilk and keep."
>> 
>> Then the dialup Internet became a big thing, the Bells ignored it as a
>> passing fad (which it was, but not for the reasons they thought), and
>> CLECs realized they could build modem banks and make a lot of money
>> from the incoming calls from Bell customers to the modems.  So the
>> Bells did a pirouette and suddenly discovered that bill and keep was a
>> law of nature and recip comp was a quaint artifact that needed to be
>> snuffed out as fast as possible.
>> 
>> These days the FCC likes to see cost justifications for settlements,
>> and the actual per-minute cost of calls is tiny compared to the fixed
>> costs of the links and equipment.  The main place where you see
>> settlements is to tiny local telcos with very high costs, with the per
>> minute payments a deliberate subsidy to them.  Then some greedy little
>> telcos added conference call lines to pump up their incoming traffic ...
>> 
>> R's,
>> John
> 

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Dan Lacey]

Great explanation!

Remember that LECs (Local Exchange Carrier, CenturyLink, Verizon, etc.) 
typically get to decide how this all works...
ATT is still an 800 pound gorilla and a couple years ago stopped ALL 
payments to CLECs (Competitive Local Exchange Carrier, buy wholesale 
from LECs), took them all to court (which for a CLEC, it is almost 
impossible to find a good lawyer not on retainer to a LEC) and basically 
just told everyone what they would pay...


Since all the LECs started offering unlimited long distance, they could 
not afford the termination fees.

So... They changed them!!!

Telco is very different from data, not in the physical aspects, but in 
the business and political areas.


On 4/20/16 9:20 AM, John Levine wrote:

For the most part, “long distance” calls within the US are a thing of the
past and at least one mobile carrier now treats US/CA/MX as a single
local calling area

Is this a case of telcos having switched to IP trunks and can reach
other carriers for "free"

No, it's because fiber bandwidth is so cheap.  It's equally cheap whether
the framing is ATM or IP.


Or are wholesale long distance still billed between carriers but at
prices so low that they can afford to offer "free" long distance at
retail level ?

Some of each.  Some carriers do reciprocal compensation at very low
rates, small fractions of a cent per minute, some do bill and keep
with no settlements at all.

The history of settlements is closely tied to the history of the
Internet.  Before the Bell breakup separations (within Bell) and
settlements (between Bell and independents) were uncontentious, moving
money around to make the rate of return on invested capital at each
carrier come out right.

Then when cell phones were new, the Bell companies observed that
traffic was highly imbalanced, far more cell->landline than the other
way, so they demanded high reciprocal compensation, and the cellcos
were willing to pay since it gave the Bells the incentive to build the
interconnecting trunks.  One of Verizon's predecessors famously
derided "bilk and keep."

Then the dialup Internet became a big thing, the Bells ignored it as a
passing fad (which it was, but not for the reasons they thought), and
CLECs realized they could build modem banks and make a lot of money
from the incoming calls from Bell customers to the modems.  So the
Bells did a pirouette and suddenly discovered that bill and keep was a
law of nature and recip comp was a quaint artifact that needed to be
snuffed out as fast as possible.

These days the FCC likes to see cost justifications for settlements,
and the actual per-minute cost of calls is tiny compared to the fixed
costs of the links and equipment.  The main place where you see
settlements is to tiny local telcos with very high costs, with the per
minute payments a deliberate subsidy to them.  Then some greedy little
telcos added conference call lines to pump up their incoming traffic ...

R's,
John

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[John Levine]

>> For the most part, “long distance” calls within the US are a thing of the
>> past and at least one mobile carrier now treats US/CA/MX as a single
>> local calling area 
>
>Is this a case of telcos having switched to IP trunks and can reach
>other carriers for "free"

No, it's because fiber bandwidth is so cheap.  It's equally cheap whether
the framing is ATM or IP.

>Or are wholesale long distance still billed between carriers but at
>prices so low that they can afford to offer "free" long distance at
>retail level ?

Some of each.  Some carriers do reciprocal compensation at very low
rates, small fractions of a cent per minute, some do bill and keep
with no settlements at all.

The history of settlements is closely tied to the history of the
Internet.  Before the Bell breakup separations (within Bell) and
settlements (between Bell and independents) were uncontentious, moving
money around to make the rate of return on invested capital at each
carrier come out right.

Then when cell phones were new, the Bell companies observed that
traffic was highly imbalanced, far more cell->landline than the other
way, so they demanded high reciprocal compensation, and the cellcos
were willing to pay since it gave the Bells the incentive to build the
interconnecting trunks.  One of Verizon's predecessors famously
derided "bilk and keep."

Then the dialup Internet became a big thing, the Bells ignored it as a
passing fad (which it was, but not for the reasons they thought), and
CLECs realized they could build modem banks and make a lot of money
from the incoming calls from Bell customers to the modems.  So the
Bells did a pirouette and suddenly discovered that bill and keep was a
law of nature and recip comp was a quaint artifact that needed to be
snuffed out as fast as possible.

These days the FCC likes to see cost justifications for settlements,
and the actual per-minute cost of calls is tiny compared to the fixed
costs of the links and equipment.  The main place where you see
settlements is to tiny local telcos with very high costs, with the per
minute payments a deliberate subsidy to them.  Then some greedy little
telcos added conference call lines to pump up their incoming traffic ...

R's,
John

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Owen DeLong]

> On Apr 20, 2016, at 7:59 AM, Jean-Francois Mezei 
>  wrote:
> 
> On 2016-04-20 10:52, Owen DeLong wrote:
> 
>> For the most part, “long distance” calls within the US are a thing of the
>> past and at least one mobile carrier now treats US/CA/MX as a single
>> local calling area 
> 
> 
> Is this a case of telcos having switched to IP trunks and can reach
> other carriers for "free"
> 
> Or are wholesale long distance still billed between carriers but at
> prices so low that they can afford to offer "free" long distance at
> retail level ?

I think it boiled down to a recognition that the costs of billing were 
beginning to account for something like $0.99 of every $1 billed.

Owen

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Jean-Francois Mezei]

On 2016-04-20 10:52, Owen DeLong wrote:

> For the most part, “long distance” calls within the US are a thing of the
> past and at least one mobile carrier now treats US/CA/MX as a single
> local calling area 


Is this a case of telcos having switched to IP trunks and can reach
other carriers for "free"

Or are wholesale long distance still billed between carriers but at
prices so low that they can afford to offer "free" long distance at
retail level ?

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Owen DeLong]

> On Apr 15, 2016, at 2:21 PM, Mark Andrews  wrote:
> 
> 
> In message , David Barak 
> writes
> :
>>> On Apr 15, 2016, at 3:09 PM, Mark Andrews  wrote:
>>> 
>>> Australia is about the area as the US and has always had caller
>>> pays and seperate area codes for mobiles.
>> 
>> Australia has fewer people than Texas, and is more than an order of
>> magnitude smaller than the US by population.  Effects of scale apply here
>> in terms of path dependence for solutions.
>> 
>> David Barak
>> Sent from mobile device, please excuse autocorrection artifacts
> 
> NA has a 10 digit scheme (3 area code - 7 local) though most of the
> time you end up dialing the 10 digits.

Not an entirely accurate description. In fact, in the US, it’s more of
a 3-tier mechanism… 3 area code, 3 prefix, 4 local.

As a general rule, a prefix exists within a single CO (modulo cutouts
for LNP, etc.). There are usually multiple prefixes per CO since most
COs serve significantly more than 10,000 numbers.

In the US, Area codes do not cross state lines and in most cases do
not cross LATA boundaries, either.

For the most part, “long distance” calls within the US are a thing of the
past and at least one mobile carrier now treats US/CA/MX as a single
local calling area (calls to/from anywhere in those three countries are
the same price (generally included/free) as calls between two phones
standing next to each other.

> 
> Australia has a 9 digit scheme (1 area code - 8 local)
> 
> Yes the area codes are huge (multi-state) and some "local" calls
> are sometimes long distance.  In my lifetime local calls have gone
> from 6 digits to 7 and then 8 digits.  The last change got rid of
> lots of area codes and expanded all the local numbers to 8 digits.
> This allows you to use what was a Canberra number in Sydney as they
> are now all in the same area code.  Canberra and Sydney are a 3
> hour drive apart.
> 
> We are no longer in a age where we need to route calls on a digit
> by digit basis.

While this is true, there are still significant differences in scale and cost
structures between AU and US.

Owen

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[John Levine]

>The other answers address the history here better than I ever good, but
>I wanted to point out one example I hadn't seen mentioned.
>
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_code_917
>
>917 was originally a mobile only area code overlay in New York City.
>For reasons that are unclear to me, after that experiment it was
>decided that the US would never do that again.

The FCC found in 1999 that service-specific overlays are "unreasonably
discriminatory and anti-competitive."  I gather the thinking at the
time was that 917 was full of pagers, voice mail, and car phones,
while "real" phones were in 212.

Times have changed and they're now prepared to approve an overlay in
Connecticut that would cover the whole state, both area codes 203 and
860, with the new area code used for services that are not location
specific, for which they give mobile phones and Onstar as examples.

R's,
John

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Eric Kuhnke]

This makes me wonder what the 'market value' of a 212 DID is. I have seen
them anywhere from $55 to $600 from providers specifically saying "buy this
DID and port it out to your carrier of choice".

On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 7:06 AM, Leo Bicknell  wrote:

> In a message written on Fri, Apr 15, 2016 at 09:49:37AM +0100,
> t...@pelican.org wrote:
> > Out of curiosity, does anyone have a good pointer to the history of how
> / why US mobile ended up in the same numbering plan as fixed-line?
>
> The other answers address the history here better than I ever good, but
> I wanted to point out one example I hadn't seen mentioned.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_code_917
>
> 917 was originally a mobile only area code overlay in New York City.
> For reasons that are unclear to me, after that experiement it was
> decided that the US would never do that again.
>
> --
> Leo Bicknell - bickn...@ufp.org
> PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
>

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Leo Bicknell]

In a message written on Fri, Apr 15, 2016 at 09:49:37AM +0100, t...@pelican.org 
wrote:
> Out of curiosity, does anyone have a good pointer to the history of how / why 
> US mobile ended up in the same numbering plan as fixed-line?

The other answers address the history here better than I ever good, but
I wanted to point out one example I hadn't seen mentioned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_code_917

917 was originally a mobile only area code overlay in New York City.
For reasons that are unclear to me, after that experiement it was
decided that the US would never do that again.

-- 
Leo Bicknell - bickn...@ufp.org
PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/


pgp00UyD7hxZ7.pgp
Description: PGP signature

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Baldur Norddahl]

Where I live (Europe) most plans include a ton of free minutes including
free calls and data in many other countries. Therefore nobody cares who
pays anymore.

While this is not universal yet, it probably will be within a decade. Voice
calls are simply silly small amount of data that it does not make sense to
charge for it and at the same time have gigs of free data included.

Technically it is the receiver that pays the cell tax when accepting SIP
calls. But nobody cares unless roaming in countries where you still pay
data roaming tax at a rate that ought to be illegal.

Regards

Baldur

RE: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[frnkblk]

Note that for E911 purposes we are required to use the MSAG 
(http://netorange.com/nena-reference/index.php?title=Master_Street_Address_Guide_(MSAG))
 to verify street addresses.  From what my co-workers at my $DAYJOB tell me, 
there are many new addresses that are not resolvable.  

Despite those shortcomings, E911 calls are responded to and US postal mail is 
delivered, specifically because a human remains involved in interpreting the 
information.  The same needs to be done with GeoIP results.

Frank

-Original Message-
From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-boun...@nanog.org] On Behalf Of Jeremy Austin
Sent: Tuesday, April 12, 2016 8:55 AM
To: John Levine <jo...@iecc.com>
Cc: niels=na...@bakker.net; NANOG list <nanog@nanog.org>
Subject: Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 3:55 AM, John Levine <jo...@iecc.com> wrote:

>
> Please don't guess (like, you know, MaxMind does.)  USPS has its own
> database of all of the deliverable addresses in the country.  They
> have their problems, but give or take data staleness as buildings
> are built or demolished, that's not one of them.


A qualifier.

USPS has a database of *most* of the deliverable addresses in the country.

I'm in an unorganized borough. The USPS actually has no mandate, funding or
lever that I can pull (that I can find) to keep their database up to date.
Easily 30% of the legitimate addresses in my area are not geocodable nor in
the USPS database.

I suspect that there are areas of my state with an even worse percentage of
unavailable data.

UPS and FedEx rely on the USPS database, but will not lift a finger to fix
this gap.

Even as a municipal body there is no available federal mechanism for
updating the database. I've tried multiple times over 15+ years.



So yeah, USPS' database does have its problems.

-- 
Jeremy Austin

(907) 895-2311
(907) 803-5422
jhaus...@gmail.com

Heritage NetWorks
Whitestone Power & Communications
Vertical Broadband, LLC

Schedule a meeting: http://doodle.com/jermudgeon

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[John Levine]

>NA has a 10 digit scheme (3 area code - 7 local) though most of the
>time you end up dialing the 10 digits.
>
>Australia has a 9 digit scheme (1 area code - 8 local) ...

North America uses en bloc signalling, Australia uses CCITT style
compelled signalling.  That's why you have variable length
numbers and the split between area code and local number can
change.

>We are no longer in a age where we need to route calls on a digit
>by digit basis.

Right.  North America left that age in 1947, the rest of the world
only caught up in the 2000s.

R's,
John

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Jean-Francois Mezei]

On 2016-04-15 17:21, Mark Andrews wrote:

> Yes the area codes are huge (multi-state) and some "local" calls
> are sometimes long distance. 

Until early 1990s, the 819 area code spanned from the US/canada Border
in Québec, around Montréal (514), included the Laurentians and just
about everything north all the way to Grise Fiord on Ellesmere Island
north of the magnetic north pole.

Some exchanges reacheable only via satellite (what is now Nunavut) and
some are near urban centres. And I reemember when one could dial 4
digits to call anyone in the cottage village (omitting the 819-687 prefix).

When bell Canada bought northwestel, it transfered what is now Nunavut
territory to NWTel which moved the 819 telephone numbers to its 867 area
code which now spans from the Yukon/Alaska border to the
Canada/Greenland border.

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Mark Andrews]

In message , David Barak writes
:
> > On Apr 15, 2016, at 3:09 PM, Mark Andrews  wrote:
> >
> > Australia is about the area as the US and has always had caller
> > pays and seperate area codes for mobiles.
>
> Australia has fewer people than Texas, and is more than an order of
> magnitude smaller than the US by population.  Effects of scale apply here
> in terms of path dependence for solutions.
>
> David Barak
> Sent from mobile device, please excuse autocorrection artifacts

NA has a 10 digit scheme (3 area code - 7 local) though most of the
time you end up dialing the 10 digits.

Australia has a 9 digit scheme (1 area code - 8 local)

Yes the area codes are huge (multi-state) and some "local" calls
are sometimes long distance.  In my lifetime local calls have gone
from 6 digits to 7 and then 8 digits.  The last change got rid of
lots of area codes and expanded all the local numbers to 8 digits.
This allows you to use what was a Canberra number in Sydney as they
are now all in the same area code.  Canberra and Sydney are a 3
hour drive apart.

We are no longer in a age where we need to route calls on a digit
by digit basis.

Mark
-- 
Mark Andrews, ISC
1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia
PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742 INTERNET: ma...@isc.org

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[David Barak via NANOG]

> On Apr 15, 2016, at 3:09 PM, Mark Andrews  wrote:
> 
> Australia is about the area as the US and has always had caller
> pays and seperate area codes for mobiles.  

Australia has fewer people than Texas, and is more than an order of magnitude 
smaller than the US by population.  Effects of scale apply here in terms of 
path dependence for solutions.

David Barak
Sent from mobile device, please excuse autocorrection artifacts

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Owen DeLong]

> On Apr 15, 2016, at 12:09, Mark Andrews  wrote:
> 
> 
> In message <571105a6.3040...@nvcube.net>, Nikolay Shopik writes:
>>> On 15/04/16 17:51, John R. Levine wrote:
>>> Putting mobiles into a handful of non-geographic codes as they do in
>>> Europe wouldn't work because the US is a very large country, long
>>> distance costs and charges were important, and they needed to be able
>>> to charge more for a mobile call across the country than across the
>>> street.
>> 
>> I would like to add that Russian mobiles in non-geographic codes and
>> have free incoming calls (it wasn't until 2006) and also very large
>> territory. But that created internal roaming prices within country.
>> 
>> So if you are making call not from your home region you'll pay more also
>> you may pay for incoming call too (unless you pay for such option to
>> make your abroad incoming calls free)
> 
> Australia is about the area as the US and has always had caller
> pays and seperate area codes for mobiles.  Call costs are independent
> of the mobiles location unless you are OS where the callee picks
> up the OS component of the voice call (incoming SMS's are usually
> free even if you are OS, they slug you with replies however).

AU has about the same area, but nowhere near the number/population density, so 
the comparison isn't particularly apt. 

> 
> I've also got a US SIM and had my credit run to zero dollars with
> the phone turned off due to the sillyness of the US system.  No
> calls or SMS being delivered but I'm still getting charged.

If you are going prepaid in the US, most likely you are transient (foreign 
traveler) or impoverished. As such, the companies want to collect something 
from you for the cost of keeping your account in the system. It's a way to 
avoid the costs associated with number abandonment. Usually within three months 
(or less) of your account going to $0, your number will be recycled and likely 
reissued to someone else within 60 days of being marked available. 

It's not so much silliness as a necessity in this market. 

Owen

Re: [lists] Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Peter Beckman]

I highly doubt that your SIM card is depleted due to the US mobile phone
billing structure. Sounds like a bad contract with a carrier that is
billing you for incoming calls even though you aren't on the network, or
bills you a fee each month when your SIM is inactive.

Don't blame a country's mobile telephone billing structure for a carrier's
cell phone billing plan that seems confusing.

That's like blaming the Department of Transportation for your faulty
airbag.

Beckman

On Sat, 16 Apr 2016, Mark Andrews wrote:


I've also got a US SIM and had my credit run to zero dollars with
the phone turned off due to the sillyness of the US system.  No
calls or SMS being delivered but I'm still getting charged.


---
Peter Beckman  Internet Guy
beck...@angryox.com http://www.angryox.com/
---

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Mark Andrews]

In message <571105a6.3040...@nvcube.net>, Nikolay Shopik writes:
> On 15/04/16 17:51, John R. Levine wrote:
> > Putting mobiles into a handful of non-geographic codes as they do in
> > Europe wouldn't work because the US is a very large country, long
> > distance costs and charges were important, and they needed to be able
> > to charge more for a mobile call across the country than across the
> > street. 
> 
> I would like to add that Russian mobiles in non-geographic codes and
> have free incoming calls (it wasn't until 2006) and also very large
> territory. But that created internal roaming prices within country.
> 
> So if you are making call not from your home region you'll pay more also
> you may pay for incoming call too (unless you pay for such option to
> make your abroad incoming calls free)

Australia is about the area as the US and has always had caller
pays and seperate area codes for mobiles.  Call costs are independent
of the mobiles location unless you are OS where the callee picks
up the OS component of the voice call (incoming SMS's are usually
free even if you are OS, they slug you with replies however).

I've also got a US SIM and had my credit run to zero dollars with
the phone turned off due to the sillyness of the US system.  No
calls or SMS being delivered but I'm still getting charged.

Mark
-- 
Mark Andrews, ISC
1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia
PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742 INTERNET: ma...@isc.org

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Nikolay Shopik]

On 15/04/16 17:51, John R. Levine wrote:
> Putting mobiles into a handful of non-geographic codes as they do in
> Europe wouldn't work because the US is a very large country, long
> distance costs and charges were important, and they needed to be able
> to charge more for a mobile call across the country than across the
> street. 

I would like to add that Russian mobiles in non-geographic codes and
have free incoming calls (it wasn't until 2006) and also very large
territory. But that created internal roaming prices within country.

So if you are making call not from your home region you'll pay more also
you may pay for incoming call too (unless you pay for such option to
make your abroad incoming calls free)

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[t...@pelican.org]

On Friday, 15 April, 2016 15:51, "John R. Levine"  said:

> The US and most of the rest of North America have a fixed length
> numbering plan designed in the 1940s by the Bell System.  They offered
> it to the CCITT which for political and technical reasons decided to
> do something else.  (So when anyone complains that the NANP is
> "non-standard", you had your chance.)  Fixed length numbers allowed
> much more sophisticated call routing with mechanical switches than
> variable length did.

[and a bunch more stuff]

Thanks John - no bashing was intended, genuinely interested in the different 
models / histories, and that helps.

Regards,
Tim.

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[John R. Levine]

So maybe 10% of all cell phones are primarly used in the "wrong" area?



Out of curiosity, does anyone have a good pointer to the history of
how / why US mobile ended up in the same numbering plan as fixed-line?


The US and most of the rest of North America have a fixed length
numbering plan designed in the 1940s by the Bell System.  They offered
it to the CCITT which for political and technical reasons decided to
do something else.  (So when anyone complains that the NANP is
"non-standard", you had your chance.)  Fixed length numbers allowed
much more sophisticated call routing with mechanical switches than
variable length did.

For reasons not worth rehashing, there was no possibility whatsoever
of adding digits or otherwise changing the numbering plan.  So if they
were going to do caller pays mobile, they'd need to overlay mobile
area codes on top of existing codes, and there weren't enough spare
codes to do that.

Putting mobiles into a handful of non-geographic codes as they do in
Europe wouldn't work because the US is a very large country, long
distance costs and charges were important, and they needed to be able
to charge more for a mobile call across the country than across the
street.  (The distance from Seattle to Miami or Boston to San
Francisco is greater than Lisbon to Moscow or Paris to Teheran.)  In
the US, mobile long distance charges have mostly gone away, but my
Canadian mobile still charges more for a call to a different province
than one to the same city.

So rather than doing caller-pays as in Europe, North America does
mobile-pays, with the mobile user charged for both incoming and
outgoing calls.  There turn out to be good economic reasons for that
-- European mobile users imagine that incoming calls are "free",
but in fact they are very expensive to the caller because the
caller has no say in choosing the carrier or the price.  For all
its faults, the competition in US mobile service drove down prices
much faster than in Europe, and US users use more minutes/month
than Europeans do.  If you want me to call you in the UK,
I'm happy to call your landline for 1.3c/min, not so happy to
call your mobile at 26c/min.

ObNanog: E.164 and VoIP don't make this any easier.

R's,
John

Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Valdis . Kletnieks]

On Thu, 14 Apr 2016 16:43:00 -0700, Todd Crane said:

> You do realize that this is the exact kind of thing that caused this
> discussion in the first place. I'm well familiar with that case. I was talking
> about my own experiences in the food service industry, but of course you 
> barely
> read a sentence and set on a war path accusing me of not checking my facts

Sorry.  You are *literally* the first person I've seen who's put "hot coffee"
and "responsible for being stupid" in a sentence who was actually familiar with
the case in question, and thought that the case had merit, and was
(apparently) actually talking about the follow-on cases rather than the
original case that made the news.  In addition, you didn't make it very clear
that you weren't talking about the original case.



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Description: PGP signature

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[t...@pelican.org]

On Thursday, 14 April, 2016 16:32, "Leo Bicknell"  said:

> So maybe 10% of all cell phones are primarly used in the "wrong" area?

Out of curiosity, does anyone have a good pointer to the history of how / why 
US mobile ended up in the same numbering plan as fixed-line?

Over here in the UK we had a very different approach where mobile phones went 
into their own area codes from the start, hence no confusion as to what type of 
device you were calling, and it was trivial to put the increased cost of the 
call on the caller.  (It's *incredibly* rare, if not non-existent, here for the 
mobile user to pay for incoming calls or SMS).

Of course, we got our own set of problems once number portability kicked in - a 
lot of operators had set up "free / cheap on the same network" tarrifs, which 
was easy while you knew for sure that 07aaa nn was Orange but 07bbb nn 
was O2.  Once you could take your number with you to another network, it became 
a lot more guesss-work as to how much you were going to be billed for any given 
call...

Regards,
Tim.

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Laurence F. Sheldon, Jr.]

On 4/14/2016 16:01, John Levine wrote:

OK, let us suppose I want to be a law biding, up right American and use
only a cellphone for the "right" area.

I drive a big truck OTR.  I usually know what part of which state I am
in, but I frequently do not know which part of what state I will be in
in 24 hours.

What should I do?


As previous messages have explained, mobile 9-1-1 uses a variety of
GPS and tower info to determine where you are.  Telcos, stupid though
they may be, have figured out that people with mobile phones are
likely to be, you know, mobile.

If you drive a big truck, you're likely to spend a lot of time on
major highways, and many of those highways have signs that tell you
what to dial to contact the appropriate police for that road, e.g.
*MSP on the Mass Pike.


I understand all  that.

I quoted somebody as saying that some percentage of people use a 
cellphone in the wrong area code.


I want never be caught in the wrong area code  in my nomadic life.

I think my best shot is to convince people that telephone numbers are 
not addresses of people and like my SSAN is assigned by somebody, I 
don't care who.

Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Jay Hennigan]

On 4/13/16 6:25 AM, valdis.kletni...@vt.edu wrote:


You *do* realize that the woman in the McDonald's case got *third degree*
burns and required skin grafts, right?  Water at 180F is hot enough to
burn you - we even have a word for it: scalding.  And unlike sipping too-hot
coffee, where you can spit it out quickly, hot water spilled on clothing
continues to burn until the clothing is removed or cooled off - neither of
which is feasible when you're elderly and seated in a car.

And that she originally only sued for the cost of her medical bills, and the
jury increased it with punitive damages when presented evidence that over 700
other people had received burns?

Now go and get informed, and commit this sin no more :)

https://www.caoc.org/?pg=facts - how that lawsuit *actually* played out.


and http://www.stellaawards.com/ lists dozens of other lawsuits spawned 
by that result, as well as commentary on the McDonald's case. Last 
updated 2008 but I'm sure examples are still flooding in to a courtroom 
near you.


--
Jay Hennigan - CCIE #7880 - Network Engineering - j...@impulse.net
Impulse Internet Service  -  http://www.impulse.net/
Your local telephone and internet company - 805 884-6323 - WB6RDV

Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Todd Crane]

You do realize that this is the exact kind of thing that caused this discussion 
in the first place. I'm well familiar with that case. I was talking about my 
own experiences in the food service industry, but of course you barely read a 
sentence and set on a war path accusing me of not checking my facts, quite like 
somebody googling a geolocation for an ip and harnessing/threatening the other 
side.

As to the case, it had its merits, but since then it has spawned a whole bunch 
of people trying to get rich quick. Now every company has to put these warning 
labels to appease their insurance companies. Now we have people that can't 
think for themselves that NEED labels. It's much like the debate about trying 
to legislate common sense.

Todd Crane

> On Apr 13, 2016, at 6:25 AM, valdis.kletni...@vt.edu wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 12 Apr 2016 22:57:42 -0700, Todd Crane said:
>> .What ever happened to holding people responsible for being
>> stupid. When did it start becoming ((fill in the blank)) coffee shop
>> for you burning your tongue on your coffee
> 
> Whatever happened to holding people responsible for fact checking before they
> post? :)
> 
> You *do* realize that the woman in the McDonald's case got *third degree*
> burns and required skin grafts, right?  Water at 180F is hot enough to
> burn you - we even have a word for it: scalding.  And unlike sipping too-hot
> coffee, where you can spit it out quickly, hot water spilled on clothing
> continues to burn until the clothing is removed or cooled off - neither of
> which is feasible when you're elderly and seated in a car.
> 
> And that she originally only sued for the cost of her medical bills, and the
> jury increased it with punitive damages when presented evidence that over 700
> other people had received burns?
> 
> Now go and get informed, and commit this sin no more :)
> 
> https://www.caoc.org/?pg=facts - how that lawsuit *actually* played out.

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Scott Weeks]

--- j...@kyneticwifi.com wrote:
From: Josh Reynolds 

Is NANOG really the best place for this discussion?
--


Filter it out.

scott

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Owen DeLong]

> On Apr 14, 2016, at 14:01 , John Levine  wrote:
> 
>> OK, let us suppose I want to be a law biding, up right American and use 
>> only a cellphone for the "right" area.
>> 
>> I drive a big truck OTR.  I usually know what part of which state I am 
>> in, but I frequently do not know which part of what state I will be in 
>> in 24 hours.
>> 
>> What should I do?
> 
> As previous messages have explained, mobile 9-1-1 uses a variety of
> GPS and tower info to determine where you are.  Telcos, stupid though
> they may be, have figured out that people with mobile phones are
> likely to be, you know, mobile.

Now if they could only figure this out for VOIP clients.

I realize that there are fixed-location VOIP phones and they may be the 
majority,
but I also know that there are quite a few of us with VOIP clients that are as
mobile as our mobile phones, sometimes more so since my VOIP client doesn’t turn
into $2/min. when I enter the wrong country. Amusingly, 128k free data from T-Mo
as a mobile hot spot in many countries is quite adequate for a VOIP client while
making a call on the phone would cost $$.


> If you drive a big truck, you're likely to spend a lot of time on
> major highways, and many of those highways have signs that tell you
> what to dial to contact the appropriate police for that road, e.g.
> *MSP on the Mass Pike.

Depends on where you are. I’ve never seen such a sign anywhere on any major 
highway
in California and mobile 911 calls in this state often get “interesting” 
routing.
Fortunately, I’ve never encountered a dispatcher that required answers to more 
than
one additional question in order to comply with my request that they route to 
the
correct agency (I usually start off with enough information to tell them I know 
why
I want to speak to the agency I am specifying, such as “I’m reporting an 
incident
on {US/Interstate/State Hwy specification, e.g. US 101}, please transfer me to 
CHP”
(CHP = California Highway Patrol, which has dispatch jurisdiction for all state 
and
federal highways within California).

OTOH, I’ve been in parts of Canada where the signs merely specify that there is 
no
911 service beyond that point without offering any alternative. Of course most 
of those
signs were encountered well after my mobile stopped having any service 
whatsoever,
so I always found them mildly amusing. Most of them are a giant picture of a 
motorola
Brick phone from the late ‘80s with the message “Leaving 911 service area”.

I can’t find an appropriate image to reference in a google search, but I assure 
you
that they were common place, at least last time I was in the Yukon.

Owen

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Owen DeLong]

> On Apr 14, 2016, at 13:14 , Larry Sheldon  wrote:
> 
> On 4/14/2016 12:09, Owen DeLong wrote:
>> 
>>> On Apr 14, 2016, at 05:46 , John Levine  wrote:
>>> 
 If they're land lines, the NPA/NXX will be local to the CO so you won't
 have out-of-area numbers other than a rare corner case of a very
 expensive foreign exchange line. If they're VoIP lines, the address is
 *supposed* to be so registered, but softphones and even VoIP handsets
 tend to move around without the user considering 9-1-1.
>>> 
>>> VoIP was dragged kicking and screaming into E911, so now they charge
>>> extra and are quite clear about it.  My VoIP provider regularly
>>> reminds me to update my 9-1-1 address, but since I don't have to pay
>>> the 9-1-1 fee if I lie and say I'm outside North America, that's what
>>> I do.  Since I also have a classic CO-powered copper landline (1/4
>>> mile from the CO, no concentrators or repeaters) and a couple of cell
>>> phones, I think we're covered.
>> 
>> With my VOIP provider, I didn’t quite have to lie.
>> 
>> I generally don’t need my VOIP number when I’m in the US (cell is free here),
>> so I simply told them “I do not intend to use this number or this service
>> within the US”.
>> 
>> The first time I sent them a marked-up contract, they contacted me with
>> questions. The following year, the new version of the contract reflected
>> my changes to their original wording.
>> 
>> Since then, I’ve been pretty much satisfied with my service from callcentric
>> and the price is right.
> 
> Quick question:  What happens (in the purely hypothetical case, I sincerely 
> hope) if the building is on fire and it turns out that the VOIP-phone is the 
> only one that works?

That would be an interesting phenomenon since my VOIP clients are both 
dependent on data services working on one of laptop, iPad, iPhone.

> Do you leave it turned off?

Of course not, but since the building in question is very unlikely to have been 
any address I would have filed on said contract, it’s far better that the 
person at the other end is having to ask me for the address than to have 
emergency workers respond to some location that I’m not at.

If, OTOH, the building in question is my home, I’m more likely to get a faster 
response by banging on a neighbors door than by struggling to get the VOIP 
phone up and running on some alternative connectivity.

Owen

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[John Levine]

>OK, let us suppose I want to be a law biding, up right American and use 
>only a cellphone for the "right" area.
>
>I drive a big truck OTR.  I usually know what part of which state I am 
>in, but I frequently do not know which part of what state I will be in 
>in 24 hours.
>
>What should I do?

As previous messages have explained, mobile 9-1-1 uses a variety of
GPS and tower info to determine where you are.  Telcos, stupid though
they may be, have figured out that people with mobile phones are
likely to be, you know, mobile.

If you drive a big truck, you're likely to spend a lot of time on
major highways, and many of those highways have signs that tell you
what to dial to contact the appropriate police for that road, e.g.
*MSP on the Mass Pike.

R's,
John

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Larry Sheldon]

On 4/14/2016 15:10, Larry Sheldon wrote:


We wrote off a lot of revenue on calls that involved a company (if I
remembered the name I still would not repeat it--ditto its location)
which turn out to be pretty much one man who like to sell and install
mobile radio telephone stations.  And, it turns out, not even slightly
interested in separations, bill and collecting, an other stuff that


I think I meant "settlements", not "separations".  But I'm not sure.


dominates an Operating Company's attentions.


--
sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Juvenal)

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Jean-Francois Mezei]

On 2016-04-14 16:14, Larry Sheldon wrote:

> Quick question:  What happens (in the purely hypothetical case, I 
> sincerely hope) if the building is on fire and it turns out that the 
> VOIP-phone is the only one that works?


VOIP:

Not purely theoretical situation.  911 where I live would take about 10
minutes of repeating my address and spelling it out to different people
as I got passed around until I finally got to fire dept where I could
finally and one last time spell out address.  (I live on Fairwood, there
is a street near here Sherwood). My ISP geolocates to a different down
in south shore of montreal).

What I do now:

I have the actual telephone number for the fire station 3 blocks from
where I live. When appt building alarm rings (we're not directly
connected), I call the actual dept "have you received a call for
, we're on fire". They say "no, we haven't". I say "expect one
in about 10 minutes once I get through the 911 bozos". When you call
911, you first have to select from a gazillion languages.


Cell phone:

Got hit by hit and run, but managed to stay on my bike. Arm hurt like
hell. Was mad as hell. Made mistake of calling 911 who refused to pass
me to Sureté du Québec police (rural area). I was hoping they had a car
that was in area and could intercept that white car as it intersected
with main road a few km down the road. 911 insisted they send an
ambulance, that I was in shock etc etc.

They asked me to spell out the street I was on. Told them I had to get
to the next intersection with a country rd to see the spelling.
(meanwhile, they insist I don't move because they want to send
ambulance, not believing I was still on my bike rolling at low speed).

At no point did they give me ANY indication they had my location from
towers or my iphone.

When I finally go through to the SQ, we arranged to meet at intersection
with main road. They saw my bruised arm, and saw I was quite
mad/nervous/in shock. They told me to bypass 911 alltogether and call
*4141 to get them right away and that they have the same tools to locate
a call.

((in hindsight, drunk young guys accelerated to high speed and passed
right next to me and threw something at me which it my arm at high
speed. Initially though I had hit their mirror but mirror t low to have
hit near shoulder).

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Larry Sheldon]

On 4/14/2016 12:09, Owen DeLong wrote:



On Apr 14, 2016, at 05:46 , John Levine  wrote:


If they're land lines, the NPA/NXX will be local to the CO so you won't
have out-of-area numbers other than a rare corner case of a very
expensive foreign exchange line. If they're VoIP lines, the address is
*supposed* to be so registered, but softphones and even VoIP handsets
tend to move around without the user considering 9-1-1.


VoIP was dragged kicking and screaming into E911, so now they charge
extra and are quite clear about it.  My VoIP provider regularly
reminds me to update my 9-1-1 address, but since I don't have to pay
the 9-1-1 fee if I lie and say I'm outside North America, that's what
I do.  Since I also have a classic CO-powered copper landline (1/4
mile from the CO, no concentrators or repeaters) and a couple of cell
phones, I think we're covered.


With my VOIP provider, I didn’t quite have to lie.

I generally don’t need my VOIP number when I’m in the US (cell is free here),
so I simply told them “I do not intend to use this number or this service
within the US”.

The first time I sent them a marked-up contract, they contacted me with
questions. The following year, the new version of the contract reflected
my changes to their original wording.

Since then, I’ve been pretty much satisfied with my service from callcentric
and the price is right.


Quick question:  What happens (in the purely hypothetical case, I 
sincerely hope) if the building is on fire and it turns out that the 
VOIP-phone is the only one that works?


Do you leave it turned off?


--
sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Juvenal)

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Larry Sheldon]

On 4/14/2016 10:45, Gary Buhrmaster wrote:

On Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 3:32 PM, Leo Bicknell  wrote:
.

So maybe 10% of all cell phones are primarly used in the "wrong" area?


Obligatory xkcd ref:  https://xkcd.com/1129/


I am reminded of incidents many years ago when I worked in a Revenue 
Accounting Office of a Bell System Operating Company.  One of my duties 
involved dealing with the mostly-manually-processed toll calls 
originating or terminating at a Mobile Telephone System station in our 
area (whatever the word "area" turns out to mean).


We wrote off a lot of revenue on calls that involved a company (if I 
remembered the name I still would not repeat it--ditto its location) 
which turn out to be pretty much one man who like to sell and install 
mobile radio telephone stations.  And, it turns out, not even slightly 
interested in separations, bill an collecting, an other stuff that 
dominates an Operating Company's attentions.




--
sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Juvenal)

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Larry Sheldon]

On 4/14/2016 10:32, Leo Bicknell wrote:

In a message written on Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 12:29:39AM -, John Levine 
wrote:

The people on nanog are not typical.  I looked around for statistics
and didn't find much, but it looks like only a few percent of numbers
are ported each month, and it's often the same numbers being ported
repeatedly.


It's a big issue for political pollers, and they have some data:

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/01/05/pew-research-center-will-call-75-cellphones-for-surveys-in-2016/

 "roughly half (47%) of U.S. adults whose only phone is a cellphone."

 "in a recent national poll, 8% of people interviewed by cellphone in
  California had a phone number from a state other than California.
  Similarly, of the people called on a cellphone number associated with
  California, 10% were interviewed in a different state."

So maybe 10% of all cell phones are primarly used in the "wrong" area?


OK, let us suppose I want to be a law biding, up right American and use 
only a cellphone for the "right" area.


I drive a big truck OTR.  I usually know what part of which state I am 
in, but I frequently do not know which part of what state I will be in 
in 24 hours.


What should I do?

Suppose I was, instead, an aircrew member and the only truly stable 
datum is "Planet Earth"?



--
sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Juvenal)

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[John R. Levine]

Since then, I’ve been pretty much satisfied with my service from callcentric
and the price is right.


That's who I use.  Now there's just a box on the web site to say not in 
the US.


R's,
John

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Owen DeLong]

> On Apr 14, 2016, at 05:46 , John Levine  wrote:
> 
>> If they're land lines, the NPA/NXX will be local to the CO so you won't 
>> have out-of-area numbers other than a rare corner case of a very 
>> expensive foreign exchange line. If they're VoIP lines, the address is 
>> *supposed* to be so registered, but softphones and even VoIP handsets 
>> tend to move around without the user considering 9-1-1.
> 
> VoIP was dragged kicking and screaming into E911, so now they charge
> extra and are quite clear about it.  My VoIP provider regularly
> reminds me to update my 9-1-1 address, but since I don't have to pay
> the 9-1-1 fee if I lie and say I'm outside North America, that's what
> I do.  Since I also have a classic CO-powered copper landline (1/4
> mile from the CO, no concentrators or repeaters) and a couple of cell
> phones, I think we're covered.

With my VOIP provider, I didn’t quite have to lie.

I generally don’t need my VOIP number when I’m in the US (cell is free here),
so I simply told them “I do not intend to use this number or this service
within the US”.

The first time I sent them a marked-up contract, they contacted me with
questions. The following year, the new version of the contract reflected
my changes to their original wording.

Since then, I’ve been pretty much satisfied with my service from callcentric
and the price is right.

Owen

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Josh Reynolds]

All,

Is NANOG really the best place for this discussion?

On Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 10:45 AM, Gary Buhrmaster
 wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 3:32 PM, Leo Bicknell  wrote:
> .
>> So maybe 10% of all cell phones are primarly used in the "wrong" area?
>
> Obligatory xkcd ref:  https://xkcd.com/1129/

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Gary Buhrmaster]

On Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 3:32 PM, Leo Bicknell  wrote:
.
> So maybe 10% of all cell phones are primarly used in the "wrong" area?

Obligatory xkcd ref:  https://xkcd.com/1129/

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Leo Bicknell]

In a message written on Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 12:29:39AM -, John Levine 
wrote:
> The people on nanog are not typical.  I looked around for statistics
> and didn't find much, but it looks like only a few percent of numbers
> are ported each month, and it's often the same numbers being ported
> repeatedly.

It's a big issue for political pollers, and they have some data:

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/01/05/pew-research-center-will-call-75-cellphones-for-surveys-in-2016/

"roughly half (47%) of U.S. adults whose only phone is a cellphone."

"in a recent national poll, 8% of people interviewed by cellphone in
 California had a phone number from a state other than California.
 Similarly, of the people called on a cellphone number associated with
 California, 10% were interviewed in a different state."

So maybe 10% of all cell phones are primarly used in the "wrong" area?

-- 
Leo Bicknell - bickn...@ufp.org
PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/


pgpw6JzSDGLKQ.pgp
Description: PGP signature

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Jonathan Smith]

"If they're land lines, the NPA/NXX will be local to the CO so you won't
have out-of-area numbers other than a rare corner case of a very expensive
foreign exchange line."

This hasn't been a true statement since Local Number Portability.  NPA/NXX
is nothing more than 'where the number originally was assigned from', and
that only for the ones issued BEFORE LNP started; since is anyone's guess.
They follow something similiar to what a routed phone call does, but ties
into slightly different information that is 'supposed' to associate the
end-client address with said LNI that is 'supposed' to be populated with
accurate street address information.  Similar to what VoIP has had to deal
with since, most charge a fee, disclaim any responsibility as to the
accuracy of the information that the end user provides.  I am sure
litigation on/around THAT particular issue is just around the corner.

Regards,

Jonathan Smith
On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 11:22 PM, Jay Hennigan  wrote:

> On 4/13/16 8:54 PM, Peter Beckman wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 13 Apr 2016, Jay Hennigan wrote:
>>
>
> When either of those people dial 9-1-1, where does the ambulance show up?
>>>
>>
>>   I suspect your response was sarcastic, but when you dig into what really
>>   happens, it's not nearly as sophisticated as one might hope.
>>
>>   If the numbers are land or VoIP lines, and the address associated with
>> the
>>   numbers are registered with the Automatic Location Information (ALI)
>>   database run by ILECs or 3rd parties to fetch the address keyed on the
>>   calling number, and the 911 PSAP is E911 capable, they operator will see
>>   the ALI address.
>>
>
> If they're land lines, the NPA/NXX will be local to the CO so you won't
> have out-of-area numbers other than a rare corner case of a very expensive
> foreign exchange line. If they're VoIP lines, the address is *supposed* to
> be so registered, but softphones and even VoIP handsets tend to move around
> without the user considering 9-1-1.
>
> VoIP was the scenario to which I was referring. A VoIP phone native to
> 408-land that moves with a remote office worker to Boston without a
> conscious effort on his company and VoIP provider to track it down and
> update ALI will reach a PSAP in San Jose or thereabouts. The PSAPs have
> forwarding capability but generally only to neighboring PSAPs with a single
> button. How quickly will they be able to get the call routed to Boston, if
> at all? And as we saw at the beginning of the thread, forget geo-IP. The
> ambulance goes to the Vogelmans' farm. If a remote office worker, it could
> be VPN back to the VoIP PBX in 408-land anyway.
>
> So, it isn't just IP addresses that aren't easily geo-referenced. It's
> also phone numbers. The number may start as a well-referenced PRI going to
> an IP-PBX after which all bets are off. If the ANI is the company's HQ main
> number where the PRI and IP-PBX are located, then it's just about
> impossible to route 9-1-1 from a worker's IP phone in Boston to the right
> PSAP.
>
>   If they are mobile devices, it depends. Basic gives you nothing (all
>> phones
>>   since 2003 should have GPS, but people hang on to phones a long time..);
>>
>
> Mobile is a separate case where it's expected that the NPA-NXX isn't going
> to be tied to a location. In California, mobile 9-1-1 goes to the CHP and
> not the local PSAP based on the cell tower or GPS for that reason. If not a
> traffic incident, they forward to the appropriate PSAP based on the
> caller's info or perhaps whatever ALI (or estimate) they get from the
> cellular provider.
>
>
> --
> Jay Hennigan - CCIE #7880 - Network Engineering - j...@impulse.net
> Impulse Internet Service  -  http://www.impulse.net/
> Your local telephone and internet company - 805 884-6323 - WB6RDV
>

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[John Levine]

>If they're land lines, the NPA/NXX will be local to the CO so you won't 
>have out-of-area numbers other than a rare corner case of a very 
>expensive foreign exchange line. If they're VoIP lines, the address is 
>*supposed* to be so registered, but softphones and even VoIP handsets 
>tend to move around without the user considering 9-1-1.

VoIP was dragged kicking and screaming into E911, so now they charge
extra and are quite clear about it.  My VoIP provider regularly
reminds me to update my 9-1-1 address, but since I don't have to pay
the 9-1-1 fee if I lie and say I'm outside North America, that's what
I do.  Since I also have a classic CO-powered copper landline (1/4
mile from the CO, no concentrators or repeaters) and a couple of cell
phones, I think we're covered.

R's,
John

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Jay Hennigan]

On 4/13/16 8:54 PM, Peter Beckman wrote:

On Wed, 13 Apr 2016, Jay Hennigan wrote:



When either of those people dial 9-1-1, where does the ambulance show up?


  I suspect your response was sarcastic, but when you dig into what really
  happens, it's not nearly as sophisticated as one might hope.

  If the numbers are land or VoIP lines, and the address associated with
the
  numbers are registered with the Automatic Location Information (ALI)
  database run by ILECs or 3rd parties to fetch the address keyed on the
  calling number, and the 911 PSAP is E911 capable, they operator will see
  the ALI address.


If they're land lines, the NPA/NXX will be local to the CO so you won't 
have out-of-area numbers other than a rare corner case of a very 
expensive foreign exchange line. If they're VoIP lines, the address is 
*supposed* to be so registered, but softphones and even VoIP handsets 
tend to move around without the user considering 9-1-1.


VoIP was the scenario to which I was referring. A VoIP phone native to 
408-land that moves with a remote office worker to Boston without a 
conscious effort on his company and VoIP provider to track it down and 
update ALI will reach a PSAP in San Jose or thereabouts. The PSAPs have 
forwarding capability but generally only to neighboring PSAPs with a 
single button. How quickly will they be able to get the call routed to 
Boston, if at all? And as we saw at the beginning of the thread, forget 
geo-IP. The ambulance goes to the Vogelmans' farm. If a remote office 
worker, it could be VPN back to the VoIP PBX in 408-land anyway.


So, it isn't just IP addresses that aren't easily geo-referenced. It's 
also phone numbers. The number may start as a well-referenced PRI going 
to an IP-PBX after which all bets are off. If the ANI is the company's 
HQ main number where the PRI and IP-PBX are located, then it's just 
about impossible to route 9-1-1 from a worker's IP phone in Boston to 
the right PSAP.



  If they are mobile devices, it depends. Basic gives you nothing (all
phones
  since 2003 should have GPS, but people hang on to phones a long time..);


Mobile is a separate case where it's expected that the NPA-NXX isn't 
going to be tied to a location. In California, mobile 9-1-1 goes to the 
CHP and not the local PSAP based on the cell tower or GPS for that 
reason. If not a traffic incident, they forward to the appropriate PSAP 
based on the caller's info or perhaps whatever ALI (or estimate) they 
get from the cellular provider.


--
Jay Hennigan - CCIE #7880 - Network Engineering - j...@impulse.net
Impulse Internet Service  -  http://www.impulse.net/
Your local telephone and internet company - 805 884-6323 - WB6RDV

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Peter Beckman]

On Wed, 13 Apr 2016, Jay Hennigan wrote:


On 4/13/16 4:28 PM, Larry Sheldon wrote:


I am in frequent contact by a person that has a 917 NNX--numbered
telephone who spends a lot of time with a person that has a 408
NNX--numbered telephone, and they both live in Metropolitan Boston


When either of those people dial 9-1-1, where does the ambulance show up?


 I suspect your response was sarcastic, but when you dig into what really
 happens, it's not nearly as sophisticated as one might hope.

 If the numbers are land or VoIP lines, and the address associated with the
 numbers are registered with the Automatic Location Information (ALI)
 database run by ILECs or 3rd parties to fetch the address keyed on the
 calling number, and the 911 PSAP is E911 capable, they operator will see
 the ALI address.

 If they are mobile devices, it depends. Basic gives you nothing (all phones
 since 2003 should have GPS, but people hang on to phones a long time..);
 Phase I Enhanced gives you the location of the cell site/tower, Phase II
 gives you lat/lon within 50 to 300 meters within 6 minutes of a request by
 the PSAP. Yep, the PSAP has to make a request for the phone location to
 the carrier, in which they have 6 minutes to reply. I assume this is or
 can be automated.

 After 6 minutes, you could be a long way away from where you started the
 call.

 If the phone numbers are not in the ALI, or are not wireless, or the PSAP
 (Public Safety Answering Point, the 911 office) is not set up for e911,
 they probably get nothing, relying solely on the caller to provide
 location information.

Beckman
---
Peter Beckman  Internet Guy
beck...@angryox.com http://www.angryox.com/
---

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Jay Hennigan]

On 4/13/16 4:28 PM, Larry Sheldon wrote:


I am in frequent contact by a person that has a 917 NNX--numbered
telephone who spends a lot of time with a person that has a 408
NNX--numbered telephone, and they both live in Metropolitan Boston


When either of those people dial 9-1-1, where does the ambulance show up?

--
Jay Hennigan - CCIE #7880 - Network Engineering - j...@impulse.net
Impulse Internet Service  -  http://www.impulse.net/
Your local telephone and internet company - 805 884-6323 - WB6RDV

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Matthew Kaufman]

John Levine:
> 
> Bonus question: is there any way to find out whether and where a
> number's been ported without spending telco level amounts of money?
> Free would be nice.

https://www.npac.com/the-npac/access/permitted-uses-of-user-data-contact-list


Matthew Kaufman

(Sent from my iPhone)

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[John Levine]

>I question whether (on a global scale) the odds are above 50-50 that a 
>number (other than a test line) is served by the switch NANPA associates 
>with the number.

The people on nanog are not typical.  I looked around for statistics
and didn't find much, but it looks like only a few percent of numbers
are ported each month, and it's often the same numbers being ported
repeatedly.

I'd also expect to find a lot more porting in the highly competitive
wireless industry than in the monopolistic wireline biz.

R's,
John

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Larry Sheldon]

On 4/13/2016 15:12, Owen DeLong wrote:


I guarantee you that many, if not most at this point, of those
numbers are no longer actually handled by that switch most of the
time.

I suspect that there are more SS7 exceptions than default within that
particular prefix which is why I chose it.


I question whether (on a global scale) the odds are above 50-50 that a 
number (other than a test line) is served by the switch NANPA associates 
with the number.


I am in frequent contact by a person that has a 917 NNX--numbered 
telephone who spends a lot of time with a person that has a 408 
NNX--numbered telephone, and they both live in Metropolitan Boston


The number I offer as my "home" telephone number "belongs" to a CO in a 
town 11 miles south of here and is not switched by the company that 
"owns" it.


Knowing a telephone number or an IP address means that on a good day, 
you know how to make a connection with an instrument associated with it. 
 Which may well be in the possession of Mrs. Calabash.

--
sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Juvenal)

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Larry Sheldon]

On 4/13/2016 14:45, John R. Levine wrote:

NANP geographical numbers can be located to a switch (give
or take number portability within a LATA), but non-geographic numbers
can really go anywhere.  On the third hand, it's still true that the
large majority of them are in the U.S.


Would you agree that 408-921 is a geographic number?


No.  It's a prefix, assigned to the at switch in west San Jose.


I guarantee you that there are phones within that prefix within
US/Calif/LATA-1 and also some well outside of that, probably not even
in the same country.


Who said anything about phones?  Could you describe what "geographic
numbers can be located to a switch" means to you?


Lemmee see, the issue is, whose barn do we burn down, based on the 
telephone number associated with it--the one the with the switch or the 
one with the telephone?


There right answer is predicated on the the facts that the number (IP or 
telephone or serial number plate) is of NO use what ever in locating 
anything, certainly not as a cause for action.  Anybody who acts 
different;y should have painful things done to them.


I don't care what expert tells you different.

A case in point--the other day I had need for the ZIP code for the house 
I lived in at age 10.  So I Binged the address for a ZIP code and got 
one.  Along with a Googlish picture that goes with the address.


When I was 10, the address was for one of four tiny houses on a small 
city lot.  (Which, I discovered in later years was in a barrio, and 
populated by people at of below the poverty line, if anybody had used 
that terminology then.)


The picture was of a KITCHEN! that appeared to be bigger than the house 
I lived in--the Zillow entry for the property now was 3/4 of a million 
dollars.


Knowing the address of a place is not definitive of the place.  Period.

--
sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Juvenal)

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[John Levine]

>Is there the equivalent of BGP for number portability where every telco
>has the full table of who owns each prefix as well as individual routes
>for ported numbers ?

Not really.  There's a switch database used for routing calls, but
that's different from LNP which is a layer sort of above that.

>Or is there a central database that is consulted before a dialed number
>starts to be connected so originating telco knows to send call ?

Often, if the switch can't tell that the number hasn't been ported.

>Or does the originating telco route the call to the original onwer of
>the prefix and lets that original owner figure out how to terminate the
>call ?

That's called Onward Routing.  They do it some places but not in North
America.  See RFC 3482 for a well written overview of number portability.

>From a long distance billing point of view, if Bell Canada connects to a
>number originally onwed by AT but ported to Verizon, with whom would
>Bell share long distance revenues ?

They pay whatever long distance company they use, and that company
pays the owner of the switch to which it's delivered.  The long
distance company also pays a very small amount to Telcordia which runs
the LNP database to tell whether the number's been ported and if so to
which switch.

R's,
John

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[John Levine]

>  And further to that, throw in Local Number Portability (LNP) and you
>  really need to know the full number in order to know which switch the
>  specific number is assigned to. Not all 408-921 prefixed numbers will go
>  to that switch in West San Jose.

Right, like I said three messages ago but that some people seem to
have missed:

 NANP geographical numbers can be located to a switch (give
 or take number portability within a LATA),

>  A phone number, like an IP address, can only imply a physical location. It
>  is not a guarantee, and that hint can range from moderately accurate to
>  wildly wrong.

Quite right.  US mobile carriers let you take your phone number
anywhere in the country, so people do.  There's also a fair amount of
VoIP where again the phone need not be anywhere near the switch -- I
have landline phone numbers in NYC, Santa Cruz, Monreal, and Cambridge
UK, and don't live in any of those places.

Bonus question: is there any way to find out whether and where a
number's been ported without spending telco level amounts of money?
Free would be nice.

R's,
John

Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Ben McGinnes]

On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 08:08:29AM +0300, Hank Nussbacher wrote:
> On 12/04/2016 00:41, Ricky Beam wrote:
> > On Mon, 11 Apr 2016 12:55:11 -0400, Chris Boyd
> >  wrote:
> >> Interesting article.
> >>
> >> http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/
> > ...
> >
> > "Until you reached out to us, we were unaware that there were issues..."
> >
> > Bull! I can dig up dozens (if not hundreds) of emails from coworkers
> > and customers who have complained to MaxMind about their asinine
> > we-don't-have-a-frakin-clue results. They've known for years! They're
> > paid for a definitive answer, not an "unknown", which is why the
> > default answer is the same near-the-center-of-the-country lat/lon. He,
> > personally, may have had no idea, but MaxMind The Company did/does.
> >
> 
> Its called class action lawsuit.

Yep.  It's also effectively the inverse of the Streisand Effect since
the news articles (and hopefully law suit) can only help people in
that situation since it's the only way they'd get wide enough coverage
of the issue to warn amateur sleuths that any trail that leads there
is a dead end.

It really says it all when the local sherriff says that his job now
includes defending the house against all other law enforcement, state
and federal.  It's good that they're doing it, but ridiculous that
they have to.


Regards,
Ben




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Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Carlos M. Martinez]

Or (90S,0), so they get a bit of fresh air and have some time think
during the voyage :-)

On 4/11/16 2:14 PM, Josh Luthman wrote:
> Or 0,0, send the FBI to Africa on a boating trip.  that would probably be
> easier than "unknown" or "null".
> 
> 
> Josh Luthman
> Office: 937-552-2340
> Direct: 937-552-2343
> 1100 Wayne St
> Suite 1337
> Troy, OH 45373
> 
> On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 1:11 PM, Hugo Slabbert  wrote:
> 
>>
>> On Mon 2016-Apr-11 13:02:14 -0400, Ken Chase  wrote:
>>
>> TL;DR: GeoIP put unknown IP location mappings to the 'center of the
>>> country'
>>> but then rounded off the lat long so it points at this farm.
>>>
>>> Cant believe law enforcement is using this kind of info to execute
>>> searches.
>>> Wouldnt that undermine the credibility of any evidence brought up in
>>> trials
>>> for any geoip locates?
>>>
>>> Seems to me locating unknowns somewhere in the middle of a big lake or
>>> park in
>>> the center of the country might be a better idea.
>>>
>>
>> ...how about actually marking an unknown as...oh, I dunno: "unknown"?  Is
>> there no analogue in the GeoIP lookups for a 404?
>>
>>
>>> /kc
>>>
>>
>> --
>> Hugo Slabbert   | email, xmpp/jabber: h...@slabnet.com
>> pgp key: B178313E   | also on Signal
>>
>>
>>
>>> On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 11:55:11AM -0500, Chris Boyd said:
>>>  >
>>>  >Interesting article.
>>>  >
>>>  >http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/
>>>  >
>>>  >An hour???s drive from Wichita, Kansas, in a little town called Potwin,
>>>  >there is a 360-acre piece of land with a very big problem.
>>>  >
>>>  >The plot has been owned by the Vogelman family for more than a hundred
>>>  >years, though the current owner, Joyce Taylor n??e Vogelman, 82, now
>>>  >rents it out. The acreage is quiet and remote: a farm, a pasture, an old
>>>  >orchard, two barns, some hog shacks and a two-story house. It???s the
>>> kind
>>>  >of place you move to if you want to get away from it all. The nearest
>>>  >neighbor is a mile away, and the closest big town has just 13,000
>>>  >people. It is real, rural America; in fact, it???s a two-hour drive from
>>>  >the exact geographical center of the United States.
>>>  >
>>>  >But instead of being a place of respite, the people who live on Joyce
>>>  >Taylor???s land find themselves in a technological horror story.
>>>  >
>>>  >
>>>  >For the last decade, Taylor and her renters have been visited by all
>>>  >kinds of mysterious trouble. They???ve been accused of being identity
>>>  >thieves, spammers, scammers and fraudsters. They???ve gotten visited by
>>>  >FBI agents, federal marshals, IRS collectors, ambulances searching for
>>>  >suicidal veterans, and police officers searching for runaway children.
>>>  >They???ve found people scrounging around in their barn. The renters have
>>>  >been doxxed, their names and addresses posted on the internet by
>>>  >vigilantes. Once, someone left a broken toilet in the driveway as a
>>>  >strange, indefinite threat.
>>>  >
>>>  >--Chris
>>>  >
>>>
>>

Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Jeremy McDermond]

> On Apr 11, 2016, at 10:02 AM, Ken Chase  wrote:
> 
> Cant believe law enforcement is using this kind of info to execute searches.
> Wouldnt that undermine the credibility of any evidence brought up in trials
> for any geoip locates?

What overworked and underpaid public defender is going to know enough to 
challenge the “evidence?”  What judge is going to know enough to call BS on the 
search warrant affidavit?  A good number of the judges in Oregon used to work 
for one of the DA’s offices, you think they question law enforcement affidavits 
very aggressively?

> /kc
--
Jeremy McDermond (NH6Z)
Xenotropic Systems
mcde...@xenotropic.com

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Owen DeLong]

> On Apr 13, 2016, at 13:34 , Jean-Francois Mezei  
> wrote:
> 
> On 2016-04-13 16:18, Peter Beckman wrote:
> 
>>  And further to that, throw in Local Number Portability (LNP) and you
>>  really need to know the full number in order to know which switch the
>>  specific number is assigned to. Not all 408-921 prefixed numbers will go
>>  to that switch in West San Jose.
> 
> 
> Is there the equivalent of BGP for number portability where every telco
> has the full table of who owns each prefix as well as individual routes
> for ported numbers ?

Sort of, but it’s called SS7 and it’s really more like multiple layers
of DNS than like BGP.

> Or is there a central database that is consulted before a dialed number
> starts to be connected so originating telco knows to send call ?

Well, yes and no, but AIUI, the common SS7 database is a lot more like
the DNS root zone.

> Or does the originating telco route the call to the original onwer of
> the prefix and lets that original owner figure out how to terminate the
> call ?

Generally within a country code (NANP is one country code even though it’s
many countries (US, CA, much of the Caribbean), the central SS7 database
will do a longest-match pointed to the correct Telco and possibly the
correct switch at that telco.

However, there are all kinds of different redirects possible within said
telco as well, such as call forwarding (in multiple forms), cellular
registration, VOIP gateways with portable SIP registrations, etc.

>> From a long distance billing point of view, if Bell Canada connects to a
> number originally onwed by AT but ported to Verizon, with whom would
> Bell share long distance revenues ?

Generally, Verizon. AT won’t usually participate in the call process at all.
(see above).

Owen

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Jean-Francois Mezei]

On 2016-04-13 16:18, Peter Beckman wrote:

>   And further to that, throw in Local Number Portability (LNP) and you
>   really need to know the full number in order to know which switch the
>   specific number is assigned to. Not all 408-921 prefixed numbers will go
>   to that switch in West San Jose.


Is there the equivalent of BGP for number portability where every telco
has the full table of who owns each prefix as well as individual routes
for ported numbers ?

Or is there a central database that is consulted before a dialed number
starts to be connected so originating telco knows to send call ?

Or does the originating telco route the call to the original onwer of
the prefix and lets that original owner figure out how to terminate the
call ?


>From a long distance billing point of view, if Bell Canada connects to a
number originally onwed by AT but ported to Verizon, with whom would
Bell share long distance revenues ?

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Owen DeLong]

> On Apr 13, 2016, at 12:45 , John R. Levine  wrote:
> 
>>> NANP geographical numbers can be located to a switch (give
>>> or take number portability within a LATA), but non-geographic numbers
>>> can really go anywhere.  On the third hand, it's still true that the
>>> large majority of them are in the U.S.
>> 
>> Would you agree that 408-921 is a geographic number?
> 
> No.  It's a prefix, assigned to the at switch in west San Jose.
> 
>> I guarantee you that there are phones within that prefix within 
>> US/Calif/LATA-1 and also some well outside of that, probably not even in the 
>> same country.
> 
> Who said anything about phones?  Could you describe what "geographic numbers 
> can be located to a switch" means to you?

I guarantee you that many, if not most at this point, of those numbers are no 
longer actually handled by that switch most of the time.

I suspect that there are more SS7 exceptions than default within that 
particular prefix which is why I chose it.

Owen

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[John R. Levine]

NANP geographical numbers can be located to a switch (give
or take number portability within a LATA), but non-geographic numbers
can really go anywhere.  On the third hand, it's still true that the
large majority of them are in the U.S.


Would you agree that 408-921 is a geographic number?


No.  It's a prefix, assigned to the at switch in west San Jose.

I guarantee you that there are phones within that prefix within 
US/Calif/LATA-1 and also some well outside of that, probably not even in 
the same country.


Who said anything about phones?  Could you describe what "geographic 
numbers can be located to a switch" means to you?


Helpfully,
John

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Owen DeLong]

> On Apr 13, 2016, at 12:15 , John Levine  wrote:
> 
>>> Actually, it's probably both US and Canadian.  When you call an 8xx
>>> toll free number, the switch uses a database to route the call to
>>> whatever carrier handles it, who can then do whatever they want.  The
>>> provider for that number, Callture, is in Ontario but they can
>>> terminate the calls anywhere, and send each call to a different place.
>> 
>> I was careful to pick a number on a Canadian company's website.
> 
> Doesn't matter.  In the NANP, toll free 8xx numbers are routed by
> carrier, not by geography, and it looks like this company handles
> traffic in the US, too.  It's entirely possible that when you call
> that number during the day you get someone in Toronto, and when you
> call it at night, you get an answering service in the Phillipines.
> 
>>> Also, in fairness, the US is about 90% of the NANP, so guessing that
>>> an 8XX number is in the US is usually correct.
>> 
>> That's another way of saying that it's deliberately wrong 10% of the
>> time for pan-NANP prefixes. Better to say "I don't know" than to just
>> guess.
> 
> Really, they're not assigned to locations, they're assigned to
> carriers.  They can even be assigned to different carriers in
> different countries although that's not common.
> 
> More to the point, saying "somewhere in the US", even if it's
> occasionally wrong, will not send nitwits with guns to a particular
> location.  NANP geographical numbers can be located to a switch (give
> or take number portability within a LATA), but non-geographic numbers
> can really go anywhere.  On the third hand, it's still true that the
> large majority of them are in the U.S.

Would you agree that 408-921 is a geographic number?

I guarantee you that there are phones within that prefix within US/Calif/LATA-1 
and also some well outside of that, probably not even in the same country.

I will also guarantee you that those phones move locations quite frequently.

Owen

Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[John Levine]

>> Actually, it's probably both US and Canadian.  When you call an 8xx
>> toll free number, the switch uses a database to route the call to
>> whatever carrier handles it, who can then do whatever they want.  The
>> provider for that number, Callture, is in Ontario but they can
>> terminate the calls anywhere, and send each call to a different place.
>
>I was careful to pick a number on a Canadian company's website.

Doesn't matter.  In the NANP, toll free 8xx numbers are routed by
carrier, not by geography, and it looks like this company handles
traffic in the US, too.  It's entirely possible that when you call
that number during the day you get someone in Toronto, and when you
call it at night, you get an answering service in the Phillipines.

>> Also, in fairness, the US is about 90% of the NANP, so guessing that
>> an 8XX number is in the US is usually correct.
>
>That's another way of saying that it's deliberately wrong 10% of the
>time for pan-NANP prefixes. Better to say "I don't know" than to just
>guess.

Really, they're not assigned to locations, they're assigned to
carriers.  They can even be assigned to different carriers in
different countries although that's not common.

More to the point, saying "somewhere in the US", even if it's
occasionally wrong, will not send nitwits with guns to a particular
location.  NANP geographical numbers can be located to a switch (give
or take number portability within a LATA), but non-geographic numbers
can really go anywhere.  On the third hand, it's still true that the
large majority of them are in the U.S.

R's,
John

Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[David Cantrell]

On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 03:31:47PM -, John Levine wrote:
> >There are similar problems with phone numbers. Google's libphonenumber,
> >for example, will tell you that +1 855 266 7269 is in the US. It's not,
> >it's Canadian ...
> Actually, it's probably both US and Canadian.  When you call an 8xx
> toll free number, the switch uses a database to route the call to
> whatever carrier handles it, who can then do whatever they want.  The
> provider for that number, Callture, is in Ontario but they can
> terminate the calls anywhere, and send each call to a different lace.

I was careful to pick a number on a Canadian company's website.

> Also, in fairness, the US is about 90% of the NANP, so guessing that
> an 8XX number is in the US is usually correct.

That's another way of saying that it's deliberately wrong 10% of the
time for pan-NANP prefixes. Better to say "I don't know" than to just
guess.

-- 
David Cantrell | Official London Perl Mongers Bad Influence

Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Jean-Francois Mezei]

On 2016-04-13 09:11, valdis.kletni...@vt.edu wrote:
> On Tue, 12 Apr 2016 20:17:03 -0400, Jean-Francois Mezei said:
>> All GeoIP services would be forced to
> 
> How?


Fair point. However, considering more and more outfits block content
based on IP geolocation, once has to wonder if an outfit such as the FTC
could mandate certain standards and disclosure of inaccuracy of IP
geolocation.

Or the other way around (shudded) mandate that outfits such as ARIN
ensure IP blocks are accurately configured/registered to provide
accurate geolocation within state/province for instance.

By documenting that IP blocks only resolve to state/province, this would
set the implicit standard that any IP geolocation service that claims
more precise gelocation is bogus.

And mandating IP blocks be limited to state/province would be a big
enough headache-causing undertaking as large number of ISPs and
organisations span this and want to have abilityto move blocks around to
cope with demand increasing more in one state than the other etc.

So that leaves ARIN mandating and documenting that IP blocks be
accurately registered on a country basis within its territory. This
would allow proper geolocation/blocking for outfits like Netflix but be
documented as being unusable to track an IP down to state, city,
street/home.

When ARIN makes IP block database available for download, it should have
an "agree" button to terms and conditions that would prevent the user of
the data from claiming accuracy greater than "countrty".

Just an idea.

Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[John Levine]

>There are similar problems with phone numbers. Google's libphonenumber,
>for example, will tell you that +1 855 266 7269 is in the US. It's not,
>it's Canadian. It appears that for any NANP "area code" that isn't
>assigned to a particular place libphonenumber just says "it's in the US"
>instead of "it's in one of the NANP countries".

Actually, it's probably both US and Canadian.  When you call an 8xx
toll free number, the switch uses a database to route the call to
whatever carrier handles it, who can then do whatever they want.  The
provider for that number, Callture, is in Ontario but they can
terminate the calls anywhere, and send each call to a different lace.

Also, in fairness, the US is about 90% of the NANP, so guessing that
an 8XX number is in the US is usually correct.

R's,
John

Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Valdis . Kletnieks]

On Tue, 12 Apr 2016 22:57:42 -0700, Todd Crane said:
>.What ever happened to holding people responsible for being
> stupid. When did it start becoming ((fill in the blank)) coffee shop
> for you burning your tongue on your coffee

Whatever happened to holding people responsible for fact checking before they
post? :)

You *do* realize that the woman in the McDonald's case got *third degree*
burns and required skin grafts, right?  Water at 180F is hot enough to
burn you - we even have a word for it: scalding.  And unlike sipping too-hot
coffee, where you can spit it out quickly, hot water spilled on clothing
continues to burn until the clothing is removed or cooled off - neither of
which is feasible when you're elderly and seated in a car.

And that she originally only sued for the cost of her medical bills, and the
jury increased it with punitive damages when presented evidence that over 700
other people had received burns?

Now go and get informed, and commit this sin no more :)

https://www.caoc.org/?pg=facts - how that lawsuit *actually* played out.


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Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Valdis . Kletnieks]

On Tue, 12 Apr 2016 20:17:03 -0400, Jean-Francois Mezei said:
> All GeoIP services would be forced to

How?


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Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Laszlo Hanyecz]

On 2016-04-13 05:57, Todd Crane wrote:

As to a solution, why don’t we just register the locations (more or less) with 
ARIN? Hell, with the amount of money we all pay them in annual fees, I can’t 
imagine it would be too hard for them to maintain. They could offer it as part 
of their public whois service or even just make raw data files public.

Just a though

—Todd




Ultimately these services want to locate users, not routers, servers, 
tablets and such.  If you want to answer the question "where is the 
user?" then you have to ask them - only they know the answer - not their 
ISP, not ARIN, not DNS.  If you really insist on using the IP address, 
then maybe you could connect to it and ask it, like an identd scheme.  
This could be built into a web browser and prompt the user asking 
permission.  As long as we're using a static list of number -> location 
we will just be guessing and hoping they stay near the assumed location 
and we're not too wrong.  This whole practice of trying to map network 
numbers is the problem.


Also note that one of the things that wasn't explicitly mentioned in the 
original article but was hinted at was the use of something similar to 
Skyhook, another static list of address -> location. It sounded like the 
'find my phone' services were leading people to an Atlanta home based on 
having a wireless access point that was recorded as being there.  This 
is similarly wrong, but not the same as geolocating IP addresses.  It 
geolocates wireless AP MAC addresses.  You can really see this break 
down when the wireless AP is on a bus.


-Laszlo

RE: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Sven-Haegar Koch]

On Wed, 13 Apr 2016, Nathan Anderson wrote:

> What I do get upset hearing about, though, is law enforcement 
> agencies using that kind of data in order to execute a warrant.  There 
> is nothing actionable there, and yet from the sounds of it, some LEAs 
> are getting search warrants or conducting raids on houses where they 
> believe they have a solid 1-to-1 mapping of IP address to physical 
> address.  Which is absolutely inexcusable.

Just watch any more or less recent CSI / crime TV show.

They have "an IP", enter it into some gizmo, and it spits out the 
address, mostly shown on a nice sat image.

That is so "normal" in TV that for Bully Policeman it just has to exist, 
and the reaction to a webform where you can enter an IP and get an 
address will just be "great, now I also have this" - no further 
thinking to be expected.

And finding a Judge signing off nearly any warrant put in front of them 
is also not new.

c'ya
sven-haegar

-- 
Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.
- Ben F.

Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[David Cantrell]

On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 07:14:15PM -0500, Theodore Baschak wrote:
> > On Apr 12, 2016, at 7:10 PM, Jean-Francois Mezei wrote:
> > On 2016-04-11 13:22, Ken Chase wrote:
> >> Well they DO know the IP location is within the USA - 
> > A friend in Australia was with an ISP onwed by a US firm and his IP
> > address often geolocated to the USA.
> Similarly, IPv6 space thats been originated by a Canadian org, in Canada for 
> 4 or 5 years is still shown as in the USA. 

There are similar problems with phone numbers. Google's libphonenumber,
for example, will tell you that +1 855 266 7269 is in the US. It's not,
it's Canadian. It appears that for any NANP "area code" that isn't
assigned to a particular place libphonenumber just says "it's in the US"
instead of "it's in one of the NANP countries".

They appear to have a similar bug with Russia/Kazakhstan.

-- 
David Cantrell

Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Christian de Larrinaga]

Really? - You want RIRs to now perpetuate an application of IPs they are
not designed for?

The activities of MaxMind and similar need to be exposed so people
understand the problem. No matter how Geo IP businesses might back
peddle and say they never intended their services to be considered as
authoritative etc the fact is people including law enforcement and
presumably General Hayden and friends are buying into the fallacy that
IP addresses are fit for the purpose of geo location.

Let's put this another way.

How many LIRs accounting systems use IPs as billing / account
identifiers? No? I wonder why not.


C
 


Todd Crane 
> 13 April 2016 at 06:57
> I like (sarcasm) how everybody here either wants to point fingers at
> MaxMind or offer up coordinates to random places knowing that it will
> never happen. What ever happened to holding people responsible for
> being stupid. When did it start becoming ((fill in the blank)) coffee
> shop’s for you burning your tongue on your coffee, etc. I’ve seen/used
> all sorts of geolocation solutions and never once thought to myself
> that when a map pin was in the middle of a political boundary, that
> the software was telling me anything other than the place was
> somewhere within the boundary. Furthermore, most geolocation services
> will also show a zoomed-out/in map based on certainty. So if you can
> see more than a few hundred miles in the map that only measures
> 200x200 pixels, then it probably isn’t that accurate.
>
> As to a solution, why don’t we just register the locations (more or
> less) with ARIN? Hell, with the amount of money we all pay them in
> annual fees, I can’t imagine it would be too hard for them to
> maintain. They could offer it as part of their public whois service or
> even just make raw data files public.
>
> Just a though
>
> —Todd
>
>
> Jean-Francois Mezei 
> 13 April 2016 at 01:17
> All GeoIP services would be forced to document their default lat/long
> values so that users know that when these values, they know it is a
> generic one for that country. (or supply +181. +91.0 which is an
> invalid value indicating that there is no lat/long, look at country code
> given).

-- 
Christian de Larrinaga  FBCS, CITP,
-
@ FirstHand
-
+44 7989 386778
c...@firsthand.net
-

RE: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Nathan Anderson]

+1; had similar thoughts, even when reading the article.  However, I don't 
really get especially angry/frustrated with the individual idiots who 
ignorantly used some sort of geolocation service to try to hunt down and exact 
revenge on somebody whom they *thought* they were being victimized by.  I'm not 
saying what they did was acceptable, but I fully expect that kind of behavior 
from the average joe.

What I do get upset hearing about, though, is law enforcement agencies using 
that kind of data in order to execute a warrant.  There is nothing actionable 
there, and yet from the sounds of it, some LEAs are getting search warrants or 
conducting raids on houses where they believe they have a solid 1-to-1 mapping 
of IP address to physical address.  Which is absolutely inexcusable.

The one area where a company like MaxMind might have some potential blame to 
shoulder is their marketing.  I know next-to-nothing about them and their 
product, having only heard about them for the first time in the context of this 
story, so I have no idea how they represent their solutions to prospective 
users.  And maybe it wasn't even them exaggerating what is technically 
possible, but some other front-end service that uses their APIs and their data. 
 But one has to wonder how someone in law enforcement might have gotten the 
idea that you can plug an IP address into a service like this and get back a 
lat/long that accurately represents to within a few meters where that traffic 
originated.

-- Nathan

-Original Message-
From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-boun...@nanog.org] On Behalf Of Todd Crane
Sent: Tuesday, April 12, 2016 10:58 PM
To: Jean-Francois Mezei
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Subject: Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

I like (sarcasm) how everybody here either wants to point fingers at MaxMind or 
offer up coordinates to random places knowing that it will never happen. What 
ever happened to holding people responsible for being stupid. When did it start 
becoming ((fill in the blank)) coffee shop’s for you burning your tongue on 
your coffee, etc. I’ve seen/used all sorts of geolocation solutions and never 
once thought to myself that when a map pin was in the middle of a political 
boundary, that the software was telling me anything other than the place was 
somewhere within the boundary. Furthermore, most geolocation services will also 
show a zoomed-out/in map based on certainty. So if you can see more than a few 
hundred miles in the map that only measures 200x200 pixels, then it probably 
isn’t that accurate.

As to a solution, why don’t we just register the locations (more or less) with 
ARIN? Hell, with the amount of money we all pay them in annual fees, I can’t 
imagine it would be too hard for them to maintain. They could offer it as part 
of their public whois service or even just make raw data files public.

Just a though

—Todd

Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Todd Crane]

I like (sarcasm) how everybody here either wants to point fingers at MaxMind or 
offer up coordinates to random places knowing that it will never happen. What 
ever happened to holding people responsible for being stupid. When did it start 
becoming ((fill in the blank)) coffee shop’s for you burning your tongue on 
your coffee, etc. I’ve seen/used all sorts of geolocation solutions and never 
once thought to myself that when a map pin was in the middle of a political 
boundary, that the software was telling me anything other than the place was 
somewhere within the boundary. Furthermore, most geolocation services will also 
show a zoomed-out/in map based on certainty. So if you can see more than a few 
hundred miles in the map that only measures 200x200 pixels, then it probably 
isn’t that accurate.

As to a solution, why don’t we just register the locations (more or less) with 
ARIN? Hell, with the amount of money we all pay them in annual fees, I can’t 
imagine it would be too hard for them to maintain. They could offer it as part 
of their public whois service or even just make raw data files public.

Just a though

—Todd




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Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Jean-Francois Mezei]

All GeoIP services would be forced to  document their default lat/long
values so that users know that when these values, they know it is a
generic one for that country. (or supply +181. +91.0 which is an
invalid value indicating that there is no lat/long, look at country code
given).

Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Theodore Baschak]

> On Apr 12, 2016, at 7:10 PM, Jean-Francois Mezei wrote:
> 
> On 2016-04-11 13:22, Ken Chase wrote:
>> Well they DO know the IP location is within the USA - 
> 
> 
> A friend in Australia was with an ISP onwed by a US firm and his IP
> address often geolocated to the USA.
> 

Similarly, IPv6 space thats been originated by a Canadian org, in Canada for 4 
or 5 years is still shown as in the USA. 

Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Jean-Francois Mezei]

Re: Sending police to middle of a lake..


Puts new meaning to a fishing expedition for police :-)

Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Jean-Francois Mezei]

On 2016-04-11 13:34, Steve Mikulasik wrote:
> Mather says they’re going to change them. They are picking new default 
> locations for the U.S. and Ashburn, Virginia that are in the middle of bodies 
> of water, 

Why not the White House or Wahington Monument ?

Or better yet, some large office complex in Fort Meade MD  :-)

Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Larry Sheldon]

On 4/12/2016 08:31, Leo Bicknell wrote:

In a message written on Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 03:10:44PM -0400, Sean Donelan 
wrote:

If GeoIP insists on giving a specific lon/lat, instead of an uncertaintity
how about using locations such as the followign as the "default I don't
know where it is"

United States: 38.8899 N, 77.0091 W (U.S. Capital Building)
Missouri: 38.5792 N, 92.1729 W (Missouri State Capital Building)

After the legislators get tired of the police raiding the capital
buildings, they will probably do something to fix it.


Massachusetts: 42.376702 N, 71.239076 W (MaxMind Corporate HQ)

Maybe after seeing what it's like to be on the receiving end of their
own inaccuracy they will be a bit more motivated to fix it.



BINGO!!!
--
sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Juvenal)

Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Jeremy Austin]

On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 3:55 AM, John Levine  wrote:

>
> Please don't guess (like, you know, MaxMind does.)  USPS has its own
> database of all of the deliverable addresses in the country.  They
> have their problems, but give or take data staleness as buildings
> are built or demolished, that's not one of them.


A qualifier.

USPS has a database of *most* of the deliverable addresses in the country.

I'm in an unorganized borough. The USPS actually has no mandate, funding or
lever that I can pull (that I can find) to keep their database up to date.
Easily 30% of the legitimate addresses in my area are not geocodable nor in
the USPS database.

I suspect that there are areas of my state with an even worse percentage of
unavailable data.

UPS and FedEx rely on the USPS database, but will not lift a finger to fix
this gap.

Even as a municipal body there is no available federal mechanism for
updating the database. I've tried multiple times over 15+ years.



So yeah, USPS' database does have its problems.

-- 
Jeremy Austin

(907) 895-2311
(907) 803-5422
jhaus...@gmail.com

Heritage NetWorks
Whitestone Power & Communications
Vertical Broadband, LLC

Schedule a meeting: http://doodle.com/jermudgeon

Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Leo Bicknell]

In a message written on Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 03:10:44PM -0400, Sean Donelan 
wrote:
> If GeoIP insists on giving a specific lon/lat, instead of an uncertaintity 
> how about using locations such as the followign as the "default I don't 
> know where it is"
> 
> United States: 38.8899 N, 77.0091 W (U.S. Capital Building)
> Missouri: 38.5792 N, 92.1729 W (Missouri State Capital Building)
> 
> After the legislators get tired of the police raiding the capital 
> buildings, they will probably do something to fix it.

Massachusetts: 42.376702 N, 71.239076 W (MaxMind Corporate HQ)

Maybe after seeing what it's like to be on the receiving end of their
own inaccuracy they will be a bit more motivated to fix it.

-- 
Leo Bicknell - bickn...@ufp.org
PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/


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Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[John Levine]

In article <20160411191347.gc4...@excession.tpb.net> you write:
>* baldur.nordd...@gmail.com (Baldur Norddahl) [Mon 11 Apr 2016, 21:02 CEST]:
>>They should stop giving out coordinates on houses period. Move the
>>coordinate to the nearest street intersection if you need to be that
>>precise (I would prefer nearest town square). Anything more than that
>>should be illegal.
>
>That's going to make USPS's and FedEx's lives a lot harder.

Please don't guess (like, you know, MaxMind does.)  USPS has its own
database of all of the deliverable addresses in the country.  They
have their problems, but give or take data staleness as buildings
are built or demolished, that's not one of them.

R's,
John

Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Wayne Bouchard]

On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 06:15:08PM -, John Levine wrote:
> 
> >The problem with MaxMind (and other geoip databases I've seen that do 
> >Lat/Long as well as Country / State / Town) is that the
> >data doesn't include uncertainty, so it returns "38.0/-97.0" rather than 
> >"somewhere in a 3000 mile radius circle centered on
> >38.0/-97.0".
> >
> >Someone should show them RFC 1876 as an example of better practice.
> 
> Oh, heck, you know better than that.  You can put in all the flags and
> warnings you want, but if it returns an address, nitwits will show up
> at the address with guns.
> 
> Bodies of water probably are the least bad alternative.  I wonder if
> they're going to hydrolocate all of the unknown addresses, or only the
> ones where they get publically shamed.

I personal favor setting the generic location as a certain set of
roundish holes in the ground up in the northern plains. Let the
government raid itself for once.

---
Wayne Bouchard
w...@typo.org
Network Dude
http://www.typo.org/~web/

Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Hank Nussbacher]

On 12/04/2016 00:41, Ricky Beam wrote:
> On Mon, 11 Apr 2016 12:55:11 -0400, Chris Boyd
>  wrote:
>> Interesting article.
>>
>> http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/
> ...
>
> "Until you reached out to us, we were unaware that there were issues..."
>
> Bull! I can dig up dozens (if not hundreds) of emails from coworkers
> and customers who have complained to MaxMind about their asinine
> we-don't-have-a-frakin-clue results. They've known for years! They're
> paid for a definitive answer, not an "unknown", which is why the
> default answer is the same near-the-center-of-the-country lat/lon. He,
> personally, may have had no idea, but MaxMind The Company did/does.
>

Its called class action lawsuit.

-Hank

Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Joel Maslak]

On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 3:09 PM, Owen DeLong  wrote:


> So really, what is needed is two additional fields for the lat/lon of
> laterr/lonerr so that, for example, instead of just 38.0/-97.0, you would
> get 38.0±2/-97.0±10 or something like that.
>

It does seem needed to the geo location companies too, at least several of
them provide this - and it's been this way for a long time.

I didn't remember if Maxmind does or not, so I just checked.  From some of
their documentation, the field "accuracy_radius" is returned which is "The
radius in kilometers around the specified location where the IP address is
likely to be." See
http://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/geoip2/web-services/#location .  I don't think
it's in their free stuff (you get what you pay for, it seems).

It doesn't show up on their web interface to "try" the service nor does it
give a warning that these things can be wrong, but IMHO probably wouldn't
be a bad idea to say "Don't go show up at this address - it might not be
right!"

Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Stephen Frost]

Owne,

* Owen DeLong (o...@delong.com) wrote:
> However, my home address has been published in multiple whois databases since 
> I moved here in 1993.
> 
> Not once has a nitwit with a gun shown up on my doorstep as a result. (I have 
> had visits from nitwits with guns,
> but they were the results of various local oddities unrelated to the 
> internet).

I'm glad to hear you've not had the joy of such an experience.

I nearly had one, but I managed to convince the nitwit to not to show
up, but it took a few hours on the phone.

He had seen my email address fly across while Linux was booting (thanks
to a Netfilter module I had written which had been included) on some
device he had he wasn't technical, so it wasn't easy for me to work out
what he was talking about, except that it was very clearly something he
was trying to "fix" to get his internet working again.

From that, he looked up my domain via whois and got my phone number and
address and called me and accused me of being with various three-letter
government organizations, said he had found proof that he was being
spied on and a litany of similar concerns.

Ultimately, I got him to believe (or at least, it seemed so) that I was
just some technical guy that wrote some code for a company that built
the device and got off the phone with him hours later.

On the plus side of this particular story, a few Airbus planes were
built with a version of Linux which displayed the boot messages during
startup on the in-seat displays and my name and email have shown up for
the reason on those devices, leading to emails from a few strangers
around the world with pictures of the boot process showing my email.

I'm not quite sure that the up-side out-weighs the down in this
particular story, but there it is.

Thanks!

Stephen


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Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Larry Sheldon]

On 4/11/2016 11:55, Chris Boyd wrote:


Interesting article.

http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/

An hour’s drive from Wichita, Kansas, in a little town called Potwin,
there is a 360-acre piece of land with a very big problem.

The plot has been owned by the Vogelman family for more than a hundred
years, though the current owner, Joyce Taylor née Vogelman, 82, now
rents it out. The acreage is quiet and remote: a farm, a pasture, an old
orchard, two barns, some hog shacks and a two-story house. It’s the kind
of place you move to if you want to get away from it all. The nearest
neighbor is a mile away, and the closest big town has just 13,000
people. It is real, rural America; in fact, it’s a two-hour drive from
the exact geographical center of the United States.

But instead of being a place of respite, the people who live on Joyce
Taylor’s land find themselves in a technological horror story.


And not even slightly funny.

What happened to Truth.  If you do not know, say "I don't know."

Or be silent.





For the last decade, Taylor and her renters have been visited by all
kinds of mysterious trouble. They’ve been accused of being identity
thieves, spammers, scammers and fraudsters. They’ve gotten visited by
FBI agents, federal marshals, IRS collectors, ambulances searching for
suicidal veterans, and police officers searching for runaway children.
They’ve found people scrounging around in their barn. The renters have
been doxxed, their names and addresses posted on the internet by
vigilantes. Once, someone left a broken toilet in the driveway as a
strange, indefinite threat.

--Chris





--
sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Juvenal)

Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Owen DeLong]

> On Apr 11, 2016, at 15:23 , Niels Bakker 

Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Niels Bakker]

Oh, heck, you know better than that.  You can put in all the flags 
and warnings you want, but if it returns an address, nitwits will 
show up at the address with guns.


* o...@delong.com (Owen DeLong) [Tue 12 Apr 2016, 00:02 CEST]:

I hear this argument about various things over and over and over again.

However, my home address has been published in multiple whois 
databases since I moved here in 1993.


Not once has a nitwit with a gun shown up on my doorstep as a result.


I think you miss the point.  Your geocoordinates were not mistakenly 
associated with nigh infinite amounts of internet abuse.  This thread 
has (mostly) been about wrong information being published, not 
information being published at all.



-- Niels.

Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Owen DeLong]

> On Apr 11, 2016, at 12:01 , Baldur Norddahl  wrote:
> 
> On 11 April 2016 at 20:15, John Levine  wrote:
> 
>> Oh, heck, you know better than that.  You can put in all the flags and
>> warnings you want, but if it returns an address, nitwits will show up
>> at the address with guns.
>> 
>> Bodies of water probably are the least bad alternative.  I wonder if
>> they're going to hydrolocate all of the unknown addresses, or only the
>> ones where they get publically shamed.
>> 
> 
> They should stop giving out coordinates on houses period. Move the
> coordinate to the nearest street intersection if you need to be that
> precise (I would prefer nearest town square). Anything more than that
> should be illegal.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Baldur

The thing I find particularly amusing having just looked up my own IP addresses 
is the following:

1.  My addresses are tied to my actual address in whois.
2.  That is not the address linked to in any of the GeoIP databases I know 
how to check.
3.  The address is only a few blocks away, but where an ambiguity is 
provided, it is sufficient to cover
most of the city of San Jose, including my house of course.

Needless to say, it’s not confidence inspiring. I might look to see whose house 
it does send me to later
if I feel inclined, just for amusement.

Owen

Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Owen DeLong]

> On Apr 11, 2016, at 11:15 , John Levine  wrote:
> 
> 
>> The problem with MaxMind (and other geoip databases I've seen that do 
>> Lat/Long as well as Country / State / Town) is that the
>> data doesn't include uncertainty, so it returns "38.0/-97.0" rather than 
>> "somewhere in a 3000 mile radius circle centered on
>> 38.0/-97.0".
>> 
>> Someone should show them RFC 1876 as an example of better practice.
> 
> Oh, heck, you know better than that.  You can put in all the flags and
> warnings you want, but if it returns an address, nitwits will show up
> at the address with guns.

I hear this argument about various things over and over and over again.

However, my home address has been published in multiple whois databases since I 
moved here in 1993.

Not once has a nitwit with a gun shown up on my doorstep as a result. (I have 
had visits from nitwits with guns,
but they were the results of various local oddities unrelated to the internet).

Examples:

1.  A neighbor managed to get the SJPD (most common example of 
nitwits with guns in this area) to darken
my doorstep because he spotted (and complained about) a dog in 
my yard being out of control and not
on a leash or supervised. (Not sure why they thought it was my 
dog, as I have never owned a dog at this
address).

2.  I opened my front door to be greeted by a nitwit with a gun 
(again, SJPD) telling me to go back inside
while they completed an arrest nearby.

So, apparently there still aren’t enough nitwits with guns operating enough 
typewriters to fulfill this bit of conventional
wisdom as yet.

Owen

Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Ricky Beam]

On Mon, 11 Apr 2016 12:55:11 -0400, Chris Boyd   
wrote:

Interesting article.

http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/

...

"Until you reached out to us, we were unaware that there were issues..."

Bull! I can dig up dozens (if not hundreds) of emails from coworkers and  
customers who have complained to MaxMind about their asinine  
we-don't-have-a-frakin-clue results. They've known for years! They're paid  
for a definitive answer, not an "unknown", which is why the default answer  
is the same near-the-center-of-the-country lat/lon. He, personally, may  
have had no idea, but MaxMind The Company did/does.

Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Owen DeLong]

> On Apr 11, 2016, at 10:26 , Steve Atkins  wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On Apr 11, 2016, at 10:11 AM, Hugo Slabbert  wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> On Mon 2016-Apr-11 13:02:14 -0400, Ken Chase  wrote:
>> 
>>> TL;DR: GeoIP put unknown IP location mappings to the 'center of the country'
>>> but then rounded off the lat long so it points at this farm.
>>> 
>>> Cant believe law enforcement is using this kind of info to execute searches.
>>> Wouldnt that undermine the credibility of any evidence brought up in trials
>>> for any geoip locates?
>>> 
>>> Seems to me locating unknowns somewhere in the middle of a big lake or park 
>>> in
>>> the center of the country might be a better idea.
>> 
>> ...how about actually marking an unknown as...oh, I dunno: "unknown"?  Is 
>> there no analogue in the GeoIP lookups for a 404?
> 
> It's not unknown - it's (according to the DB, anyway, which has a bunch of 
> flaws) "in the US somewhere".
> 
> The problem with MaxMind (and other geoip databases I've seen that do 
> Lat/Long as well as Country / State / Town) is that the data doesn't include 
> uncertainty, so it returns "38.0/-97.0" rather than "somewhere in a 3000 mile 
> radius circle centered on 38.0/-97.0".
> 
> Someone should show them RFC 1876 as an example of better practice.
> 
> Cheers,
>  Steve

So really, what is needed is two additional fields for the lat/lon of 
laterr/lonerr so that, for example, instead of just 38.0/-97.0, you would get 
38.0±2/-97.0±10 or something like that.

This seems reasonable to me.

Owen

Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Valdis . Kletnieks]

On Mon, 11 Apr 2016 21:13:48 +0200, Niels Bakker said:
> * baldur.nordd...@gmail.com (Baldur Norddahl) [Mon 11 Apr 2016, 21:02 CEST]:
> >They should stop giving out coordinates on houses period. Move the
> >coordinate to the nearest street intersection if you need to be that
> >precise (I would prefer nearest town square). Anything more than that
> >should be illegal.
>
> That's going to make USPS's and FedEx's lives a lot harder.

Are they in the habit of delivering to a location identified by an IP
address?  I've never managed to get either one to deliver to anything
other than a street address (and in fact, we recently had to assign street
addresses to all the buildings on campus because too many GPS-based programs
only work on street addresses, not building names).


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Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Niels Bakker]

* baldur.nordd...@gmail.com (Baldur Norddahl) [Mon 11 Apr 2016, 21:02 CEST]:

They should stop giving out coordinates on houses period. Move the
coordinate to the nearest street intersection if you need to be that
precise (I would prefer nearest town square). Anything more than that
should be illegal.


That's going to make USPS's and FedEx's lives a lot harder.


-- Niels.

Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Sean Donelan]

On Mon, 11 Apr 2016, Laszlo Hanyecz wrote:
I imagine some consumers of the data will 'correct' the position to fall on 
the nearest road in front of the nearest house.


If GeoIP insists on giving a specific lon/lat, instead of an uncertaintity 
how about using locations such as the followign as the "default I don't 
know where it is"


United States: 38.8899 N, 77.0091 W (U.S. Capital Building)
Missouri: 38.5792 N, 92.1729 W (Missouri State Capital Building)

After the legislators get tired of the police raiding the capital 
buildings, they will probably do something to fix it.