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tl;dr it requires owning your own IP blocks and then lying.

> In reality, the “location” of an IP is inherently fuzzy. For instance, my 2a14:7c0:4d00::/40 block was originally allocated to Israel. But later, I bought parts of this range and announced them via BGP in Germany, the US, and Singapore (see previous article on Anycast networks). Meanwhile, I’m physically located in mainland China. As the owner of this IP block, I can also freely edit the country field in the WHOIS database — and I set it to KP (North Korea).

> Because of this ambiguity, it’s nearly impossible to precisely determine an IP’s location using any single technical method. As a result, almost all geolocation databases accept public/user-submitted correction requests.

I would not be surprised if this practice is technically against most terms of service.



> I would not be surprised if this practice is technically against most terms of service.

It doesn't really matter. RIPE and other RIRs let you put whatever metadata you want for an IP range into the database, and you can serve whatever you want from your own geolocation feed. If the geolocation providers don't like it, it's up to them to stop fetching your data.


And here I was hoping someone had a Proxmox node running at McMurdo and was renting out VMs for the novelty factor.


isn't this possible with tech like starlink????

I bet they didnt to buy cooling system /s


Whose terms of service? Their upstream? the RIR’s?


IIRC the country code RFC does not specify physical location, nationality of entity, or other.


It seems like they only own an IPv6 block though, and then get the IPv4 from CF


Naive question: how do you own an IP block? Can you just buy it somehow?


For RIPE (don't know others) the are two ways: you can either sign up as a full member (an ISP) for 1500€/year, which gives you the same rights as any other ISP. You can also request a "provider independent" or PI address block, which comes with some contractual restrictions (you have to use it yourself and you can't act as an ISP), from a member for 50€/year plus their profit margin. Officially you should get one from your actual ISP, but there are a few RIPE members who sell easy access to PI blocks as part of their business model.


the linked page has an earlier blog entry talking about that:

https://blog.lyc8503.net/en/post/asn-1-asn-registration/

quickly skimming the article i couldn't see a specific price for the ipv4 block, but ipv6 is cheap - the article mentions having to pay at least $50 a year + service fees to a "LIR", and you also need a BGP-enabled hosting provider which i imagine will come with similar cost at least (don't quote me on that).




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