GeoIP database comparison

[Martin Mulazzani]

TorStatus is already using the Maxmind GeoLite database.

For consistency, this could be an argument to use it in Tor as well. If 
another GeoIP is chosen, TorStatus might be changed for consistency.

Greetz, Martin

Karsten Loesing wrote:
> On 4/29/10 6:08 PM, Andrew Lewman wrote:
>> On Thursday April 29 2010 04:58:27 Karsten Loesing wrote:
>>> - Interestingly, trusted resolves 7368 requests to Nigeria with the
>>> Maxmind database, which were only 8 with ip-to-country. I wonder if this
>>> can be correct. Is Tor this well-known in Nigeria?
>> That seems high to me.  What about other countries like Iran and 
>> China?  When China blocked the public list of relays in September 
>> 2009, we saw jumps of bridge users in Australia and Japan the same 
>> day we saw the jumps from China.  This seems like imprecise 
>> assignment to me.
>
> China had 3520 requests (2.37% of all requests on that day) with the
> Maxmind database and 2248 (2.28%) with ip-to-country, and Iran had 2168
> (1.46%) with Maxmind and 1568 (1.59%) with ip-to-country. No changes to
> worry about here.
>
>> Iran's connections to the outside world go through Turkey, Kuwait, 
>> and Azerbaijan, etc.  See, 
>> https://svn.torproject.org/svn/projects/presentations/images/iran-internet-
>> connectivity-TAE-14.gif
>>
>> I wonder if we're over-counting other countries, even with the new database.
>
> I also had a closer look at the reported numbers for Nigeria. There were
> 7368 requests from Nigeria (with the Maxmind database), but these
> requests came from only 328 unique IP addresses. That's a ratio of 22.5
> requests per IP address, with a ratio of 1.6 on average for other
> countries. I think we're seeing something unusual going on here, but
> false resolution of IP addresses is probably not the problem.
>
> While looking at the numbers, I found more African countries in addition
> to Nigeria and Tunisia that suddenly have Tor users. Here are the
> request numbers for some of these countries: Nigeria 7368 (from 328
> IPs), Tunisia 320, Côte d'Ivoire 272, Morocco 272, Senegal 240, South
> Africa 216, Algeria 184, Ghana 104. All of these countries were reported
> to have 0 requests with the old database, except for Nigeria which had
> 8. There are no similar increases for countries in other continents.
>
> Bill's point about being able to replace the free Maxmind with the
> commercial Maxmind is also a good one. I'm considering to use the
> commercial database on gabelmoo to get somewhat more precise (or more
> up-to-date) results. Still, these results will be comparable to what
> other relays with the free database report.
>
> Best,
> --Karsten
>