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Comment by kijin | Hacker News Reader

Are out-of-country DNS queries necessarily bad? If I were in upstate New York, for example, I would much prefer to use a resolver in Toronto than one in San Francisco. Measuring actual distance or network latency would be a much better way to detect suboptimal geolocation than simply checking whether the server is in the same country as the user.

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> Measuring actual distance or network latency would be a much better way to detect suboptimal geolocation

And how would you measure that in case of DNS servers? What you mean by distance ? Amount of hops? Physical distance? One hop can have the same latency as route with 3 hops. Physically closer POP can have higher latency than one that is further away. And we didn't even touch the throughput.

It's not so easy as it sounds.

> What you mean by distance ?

I believe the person you're responding to meant miles. Physical distance.

> It's not so easy as it sounds.

Their point was not that it isn't easy (and I think they realize that) but that the article seems to imply that out-of-country is suboptimal, and they're questioning that assumption. (Hence the SF vs. Toronto from upstate NY example.) DNS resolvers are already computing some form of location to determine whether a query is in or out of country, and presumably the resolver knows its own location, so it effectively is already solving (to a degree) the problem of computing distance; the poster's point was just that "in country" is not necessarily "closest", "fastest" or "best" (or even that those three are the same).

> DNS resolvers are already computing some form of location to determine whether a query is in or out of country

Most of it is based on publicly available IANA databases (RIPE, ARIN etc) which are not always accurate, as IPs are traded and moved between AS's all the time + dynamic IPs that are given to users from example both coasts of USA.

> the poster's point was just that "in country" is not necessarily "closest", "fastest" or "best" (or even that those three are the same).

And I wrote it's not easy to solve because you do not get accurate GPS positions to most of IP clasess, which means it's a lot easier to point to the same country and that's why almost every provider does that. Some use geo coordinates of IPs but only for certain classes that have accurate positioning and are inside the same country.

PS. I am building globally distributed anycast GEO-DNS service/system at the moment.

Welcome to Australia. (-:

* http://apcmag.com/why-using-google-dns-opendns-is-a-bad-idea...

They could definitely hamper mechanisms that use your location to enforce DRM, like video streaming services.

I assume that most parties that enforce DRM will look at the source address of the TCP connection, not what instance is accessed.

Too many people know about DNS tricks to get the 'right' instance.

Additionally, most VPN providers are blocked even if they are geographically in the right place.

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