Re: bridge relay: GeoIPFile config option

[Roger Dingledine <arma@xxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 10:36:23PM +0100, Karsten Loesing wrote:
> On 2/16/10 6:17 PM, Olaf Selke wrote:
> > am I right the bridge relay config option "GeoIPFile" means the path to
> > GeoIP.dat provided by MaxMind?
> 
> No. Tor can only handle the text-based ip-to-country database, but none
> of Maxmind's databases. You can the database that Tor understands in
> src/config/geoip in the sources:
> 
> http://gitweb.torproject.org//tor.git?a=blob;f=src/config/geoip;h=31c721a9fe1d554e6a404b046eeaa4d83162f49b;hb=HEAD
> 
> Or do you want to use Maxmind's database for some reason? If so, you can
> probably convert the text-based one (not .dat) easily.

Tor actually understands several variants of geoip db format -- but all
ascii, none binary.

It's derived from
http://ip-to-country.webhosting.info/downloads/ip-to-country.csv.zip
which is slowly rotting, and we need to find a better geoip db. The free
maxmind one is intentionally crippled, which makes me not so optimistic
about its future.

More generally, we have three or four geoip db's, and no ground truth, so
it's hard to know which ones are "better". Worse, they're all oriented for
commercial use, which means they all suck when it comes to tiny countries
where the citizens are unlikely to buy your televisions. For our bridge
user counts, those tend to be the countries we're most interested in.

So if anybody wants to pick up the torch and figure out how to maintain
a good free geoip db that specializes in getting the answers right for
places like Syria, please do.

--Roger

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