[tor-dev] Tor and IP2Location LITE

[KL Liew]

>> All in all, we (Tor's metrics team) are considering it! But it'll be on
>> the order of weeks or maybe months before we can move this forward.

No problem. Just let me know if any helps needed.

On Mon, Aug 21, 2017 at 4:02 AM, Karsten Loesing <karsten at torproject.org>
wrote:

> On 2017-08-16 21:19, Karsten Loesing wrote:
> > On 2017-08-16 05:38, KL Liew wrote:
> >> All,
> >
> > Hi Kim,
> >
> >> My name is Kim, the founder of IP2Location, a geolocation service
> >> provider since 2002.
> >>
> >> It looks like Tor is looking to review other providers for GeoIP service
> >> while I was reading one of a meeting minute for a meeting back in March
> >> 2017.
> >>
> >> https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/
> meetings/2017Amsterdam/Notes/Metricsin5Years
> >>
> >> We are very interested in contributing to Tor and work on this matter.
> >> Tor can host and integrate IP2Location LITE
> >> (http://lite.ip2location.com) into their application. IP2Location has
> >> programming libraries in most languages. We can also work with
> >> developers if there is any technical issues.
> >>
> >> In term of accuracy, you can find the latest research paper published by
> >> TUM. IP2Location has good accuracy as reported in Table V.
> >>
> >> Title       : HLOC: Hints-Based Geolocation Leveraging Multiple
> >> Measurement Frameworks
> >> Authors     : Quirin Scheitle, Oliver Gasser, Patrick Sattler, Georg
> >> Carle from Technical University of Munich (TUM)
> >> PDF Access  : https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.09331.pdf
> >>
> >> Let me know if there is any questions.
> >
> > Thanks for reaching out to us!
> >
> > It's indeed on our list to evaluate other geolocation databases and
> > possibly switch over. I'll bring this topic up at tomorrow's metrics
> > team meeting to discuss possible next steps for such an evaluation. I'll
> > get back to you here to share the results.
>
> So, we discussed this at our team meeting on Thursday and decided to
> further evaluate switching to IP2Location.
>
> That would be a non-trivial project, because we're using geolocation
> data in at least two places: 1. shipped with the core Tor program and 2.
> deployed on Tor Metrics services like Onionoo. And at least the former
> requires close coordination with Tor's network team.
>
> In any case we'll want to be sure whether this switch is the right move
> before starting such a project. The paper is a good start, but we might
> want to run more evaluations ourselves. For example, we could involve
> relay operators by asking them which resolved location is closer to
> reality. But even this evaluation requires writing some code, which puts
> it on a long list of things we'd like to do.
>
> All in all, we (Tor's metrics team) are considering it! But it'll be on
> the order of weeks or maybe months before we can move this forward.
>
> > One question, though, that just came to mind: Are there archives
> > available for past IP2Location LITE databases, or do you provide just
> > the latest version? Having archives, possibly even back to 2002, would
> > be pretty useful for Tor Metrics. (I didn't look around as much on your
> > homepage, so please apologize if this question is already answered
> there.)
>
> You replied off-list:
>
> > We do not have archive for the IP2Location LITE. We just started this
> free database a few years back.
>
> Okay. Maybe we could do something with archive.org in that case. It's
> not that we do have a complete history for MaxMind's files, except that
> we could probably create our own history from Tor's Git repository which
> contains files based on MaxMind's files.
>
> All the best,
> Karsten
>
>
> >
> >> - Kim
> >
> > All the best,
> > Karsten
> >
>
>
>
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