Re: [Sks-devel] geokey.webtru.st

[Phil Pennock]

On 2011-10-25 at 03:23 -0600, Ryan wrote:
> My plans from here are to get more accurate Geo location information for the 
> keyserver network and build dynamic map based off the results.. build it up 
> as an interesting web-portal to the SKS network for now.
> If accuracy is acceptable I may proceed by creating DNS pools for each 
> continent and any country with a defined number of servers available. 

When I put together http://sks.spodhuis.org/sks-peers I added
country-code stuff; it's been there almost since the start.

My experience, working at $BigInternetCompany, was that all IP-based
geolocation is flawed but that it's the only tool available for
legally-mandated filters (eg, Germany-based prohibitions on what can be
promoted by your users) and all jurisdictions accept that these are
"good enough".  Against that, one of the biggest complaint sources from
users was being redirected to the wrong version of the homepage because
of inaccurate geolocation.

The only thing good enough, when I last looked, was to buy geo data from
sources but not trust it, instead using internal sources, such as fixes
from users, adjustments via inferring data from what users set for
themselves, etc etc etc.

So for the spodhuis page, I didn't even _try_ to do more than a rough
approximation and I just coded a DNS lookup against the
zz.countries.nerd.dk zone -- it's an RBL-style lookup and returns a TXT
record with the country-code.  Works well enough.

(And also states that keyserver.fr is in FR).

Sometimes it's just not worth making more than the vaguest effort.

-Phil