Internet geolocation

An alternative to hosting and querying a database is to obtain the country code for a given IP address through a DNSBL-style lookup from a remote server.

Secondary sources include: Accuracy is improved by: If geolocation software maps IP addresses associated with an entire county or territory to a particular location, such as the geographic center of the territory, this can cause considerable problems for the people who happen to live there, as law enforcement authorities and others may mistakenly assume any crimes or other misconduct associated with the IP address to originate from that particular location.

For example, a farmstead northeast of Potwin, Kansas became the default site of 600 million IP addresses when the Massachusetts-based digital mapping company MaxMind changed the putative geographic center of the contiguous United States from 39.8333333,-98.585522 to 38.0000,-97.0000.

[3] The technology is already widely used in multiple industries,[4] including e-retail, banking, media, telecommunications, education, travel,[5] hospitality, entertainment, health care, online gaming and law enforcement, for preventing online fraud, complying with regulations, managing digital rights[6] and serving targeted marketing content and pricing.

[7] Additionally, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has proposed that geolocation software might be leveraged to support 9-1-1 location determination.

[8] An IP address or the related unique URL may also be investigated with basic functions, typing from the keyboard two instructions: ping and traceroute.

When it is possible to identify the true location of online visitors, geolocation can protect banks from participating in the transfer of funds for illicit purposes.

[11] Banks can prevent "phishing" attacks, money laundering and other security breaches by determining the user's location as part of the authentication process.

Jim Ramo, chief executive of movie distributor Movielink, said studios were aware of the shortcomings going in and have grown more confident now that the system has been shown to work.