Geo-IP Blocking Leakage Due to USA Leasing State-Side IP Ranges to Foreign Countries

[Big_D]

Ok guys, seems that GEO-IP blocking is becoming inept to a certain degree and a solution will have to be devised. I have a few ideas on the notion myself but in a nutshell this is what we as an industry are facing.

The home user here isn't our concern, but rather surfers in public places such as Internet Cafes and so forth.

With all of this being said a service is being provided to these organizations outside of the USA where the actual internet service has a United States IP range as a result of a state side proxy.

For instance, in Romania there are internet cafe's everywhere, however the internet cafe purchases its connections and so forth through a USA based company. With that being said, even tho Romania may be blocked from the site, the public user will actually be able to view the site, cams, whatever you have blocked from that country, as the entire establishment is on a USA based IP address range.

Who can be affected? Well if you are an organization that produces content outside of the USA and require that your content be unreachable from that country due to your offer to the model/models or are avoiding local publicity for unknown reasons. Asia, Eastern Europe, South America or any other of your Internet Cafe rich areas are included in this.

The only solution I can figure out is to map out these companies and make contact with them to get their leased IP address range and add them to the ranges of IP's to block.

Granted it's only in public places we are facing this, but dammit, we gotta do something about it as all content will grow harder to obtain on a much larger scale. You have to realize, most people in these countries dont have the internet at home but rather in public places, so as the country becomes more "third world" so to speak, the more people you will have accessing your content.

[OMG Jim]

We also deal with the same issues when hiring models to work in our webcam studios in both Romania and Columbia. One of the first questions that the potential model asks is "Can this site be seen in my country?"

Up to this point we have in essence guaranteed to the model that we are blocking out the site from their home country to avert the model's friends and family from seeing them. In actuality we can only block the IP's originating from that country.

You bring up an issue with the public access via the internet cafes and I am sure that if we don't address this we may have models coming to us with the same issues. With all the technological brains here is there anyone that can suggest a course of action?

This may not seem like a big deal to most of you but I'm sure if it were yous ass being seen then you would think differently about this.

Time for some IDEAS here!

_

[peterk]

Interesting problem ... but a sollution to it would not be very simple

[warlock5]

Do you guys buy your GEO-IP databases? Is it possible some of the companies that sell them are updating them? I know Max-Mind has monthly updates.

[GrouchyAdmin]

#!/bin/sh
PATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin
ipchains -P input DENY
ipchains -P output DENY
ipchains -P forward DENY

Hey where did the internet go?

[TidalWave]

it indeed would not be simple because for all intents and purposes those ips would be seen as State side based. The only way would be to block based on more advanced rules. It would have to be done on a Layer 3 level where the filtering is done through routing. As even if they are on a USA based IP range, they are still traversing foreign network hops which use regionally based IP's.

So if you block those IP's on a routing/layer-3 level, you will be able to block the country.

But gone are the days of just using htaccess then

[warlock5]

What about redirecting non-English browsers?

[Big_D]

Originally Posted by warlock5

What about redirecting non-English browsers?

thats blocking multiple countries not just one, and in my experience a large majority of foreign PC's use english browsers....