How to Get a North Korea / Antarctica VPS
blog.lyc8503.net
blog.lyc8503.net
ipinfo.io uses a probe network for this[1], but even then a server physically located in the Netherlands with an IP announced as being from, say, Seychelles would still respond to pings faster from a European location than from somewhere like Singapore (unless you go out of your way to induce latency to ICMP responses).
[1] https://ipinfo.io/blog/probe-network-how-we-make-sure-our-da...
Might be hard to get the ping response time right from your Seychelles probe if you’re pretending to be in Seychelles but actually in Netherlands
That way you can still get the 'right' ping times to all places
Interesting technical insights though.
However, ideally, we should have a PoP in Seychelles. Some of our recent expansions have been in offshore territories.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5319419
Some background info: in China, all online discourse are required to show the user's provincial-level origin, or country name for non-mainland users, using geoip. this is enforced by the Cyber Admin Commission of CCP.
What is the point of such a rule?
I understand why one would want to show that a foreign user is foreign, but what's the point for showing provincial origin?
Hmm, it's a bit dark: China does not have a federal level task force like the FBI or CIA, raids/arrests are executed by provincial or municipal PD. It's called 公安属地原则 thingy
Some western sites are blocked in some regions but not others.
That said, most European countries are smaller than bigger Asian cities, and no country on Earth is less than 4x smaller than China or India, so it might be just a fair game.
If you look at how American social media is, with people from Texas claiming to know in detail what New York is like (and vice versa), it makes some sense.
Not saying I agree with it and the privacy implications, but I can see the sense.
BTW, does his CF WARP scripts still work? I know he no longer updated it, but never really knew if it still works after all these months (years?).
My impression it either setup a socks5 proxy or generate a wireguard config and connect to CF.
also important point when you using Starlink and got totally different "relay" station sometimes can be thousand miles away, I think we need to "upgrade" our internet infrastructure for interplanetary system
The regulatory imperative isn’t going anywhere, even if we degrade our good-enough, handshake-based, AS-operator-trusting system.
If history is any guide, any replacement technology might look a lot more intrusive and a lot more onerous: the first thought that comes to mind is some kind of DRM-style, device-based, attested location surveillance (tied to a government ID? Why not?!) as “proof of location,” and I’m sure the powers that be could come up with “better”…
Unfortunately, I don't think that not gaming GeoIP will change that. It's going there already.
I have a long thread of screenshots of this crap, and that's just select examples: https://mastodon.social/@grishka/111934602844613193
Tons of websites and apps would use that IP location to default payment to Canadian dollars, default language as French, incorrect timezone, metric units instead of imperial.
It was like that for a couple of years. Quite annoying.
Don't see a downside here! :D
Still strange when they somehow manage to get my location for a weather report right but default to Celsius for temperature.
I will agree that for most people in North Korea access to the outside internet is limited, but your claim that "All computer access is gated" is a stronger one, that I haven't seem evidence for.
Also, we know that Red Star OS exists, but I haven't seen any information about it's actual use. I can imagine it's used in certain sectors (e.g. education or certain ministries), but if you have information about it's usage I'd be interested to see that.
My gut feeling is that there is probably still a lot of cracked windows PCs also used in industry, but I have no evidence for that either. This is just based on how in my experience China works, and the fact that there is some business exchange between North Korea and China.
I was a whole lot better at reading the manual before the internet .
That actually says more about what the Western "First World" media feeds their people, that the rest of the world is 20 years behind and stuff :')
Maybe 10, maybe some places, sure. In terms of social progress and basic rights, hell there are places that are 50 or even 200 years behind (see Afghanistan's treatment of women for example)
But tech-wise, I was surprised when I visited some parts of the Middle East and Asia; almost everything was available online, paid for electronically, clean and effective mass transport, walkable and safe cities..
Well western or pretty media having no access to the country pretty much guarantees that everything they might be reporting is a mix of speculation and outdated information. Doing the best you can with whatever data is available doesn’t seem like an unreasonable approach.
> see Afghanistan's treatment of women for example
Or much of the the “advanced” gulf states..
More like, "western" media rarely talks about most countries not undergoing a crisis, somehow relevant or close culturally. A British paper will talk about the US and Western EU countries because they're relevant to Britons and close partners; it will also cover Ukraine and Gaza because they're undergoing crisis and relevant. It won't talk all that much about the war in Mali or the local politics of Tashkent. French media will cover former colonies like Mali more due to the shared language and the presence of large amounts of people of that descent in France, but won't cover e.g. what's happening in Sri Lanka day to day.
So the little that the average "westerner" hears about North Korea is the occasional weird case, or when they make missile tests / international threats. The state of urbanism in Pyongyang is irrelevant to most people, so there is little reporting on it.
> But tech-wise, I was surprised when I visited some parts of the Middle East and Asia; almost everything was available online, paid for electronically, clean and effective mass transport, walkable and safe cities..
Wildly location dependent.
> clean and effective mass transport
Big Chinese cities, big former Soviet cities, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Japan. Everywhere else in Middle East and Asia doesn't have effective mass transport there might be a few metro lines like in Dubai, or be rapidly expanding like Hanoi, Riyadh, but nothing else comparable to the gold standards of e.g. Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, London, Paris.
> walkable and safe cities..
Which cities were walkable? I have yet to visit a developing country where walking wasn't barely an afterthought with little to no sidewalks, no priority for pedestrians, etc. While it's definitely better in some countries compared to others, it's really not the norm in "the Middle East and Asia". It is in most developed countries in those regions, like Japan, China, South Korea, UAE, Saudi (and the last two have temperatures that make it challenging).
> almost everything was available online
My favourite is the countries in the middle. E.g. Sri Lanka, where the railways are stuck in the 1950s from when the British left, everything is on paper (schedules, tickets, etc.) and you have to go to a train station to buy a ticket... but a lot of other things are quite digital. Everywhere has 4G coverage, everyone has a phone with data. But some things are literally decades behind.
This is exactly why, unlike much of the industry, we maintain a large team across engineering, data engineering, data science, and research, along with a substantial data-processing infrastructure and 1,200+ servers. Our entire purpose is to verify location data rather than simply aggregate, parse, and repeat whatever is self-reported. Otherwise, it’s just GIGO.
Even though we came up short in this particular case, we are actively pushing updates right now that eliminate these issues going forward.
First, we use active measurement for IP geolocation as our primary source. Our main data source is our ProbeNet infrastructure, which consists of 1,200 PoPs across 500 cities. Through ProbeNet, we run active measurements to every IP address and routable IPv6. Because we run both ping and traceroute, we typically have a very strong sense of where an IP address is located.
However, ProbeNet is not our only data pipeline. We process several dozen additional data sources. For example, unrouted or unassigned IP addresses do not generate active measurements, so we must rely on other forms of data.
In reality, we must “fallback” to alternative location evidence when active measurement is unavailable. Even though we manage, expand, and maintain a very large server network and a highly complex data pipeline, some IPs require us to rely on what the ASN operator reports.
It’s fair to say that no ASN other than AS131279 (https://ipinfo.io/AS131279 ) is located in North Korea. However, if someone asks for evidence showing that a particular IP address is not located in North Korea, that is extremely difficult to prove in isolation. We prefer not to rely on a null-island methodology and instead choose a location based on a hierarchy of hints.
For unrouted or unassigned IP addresses, geolocation can point to random locations, and in such cases we often must rely on the ASN operator’s data. I’ve seen this happen, even among well-established ASN operators. Some assign random placeholder locations to unrouted and unassigned ranges particularly for IPv6 IP addresses.
More context:
https://community.ipinfo.io/t/the-north-korean-gamers-on-ste...
https://community.ipinfo.io/t/why-is-this-orange-com-ip-rang...
Interestingly, according to RIPE, North Korea has only assigned one IPv4 block (see https://github.com/analogic/ipgeo/blob/master/by-country/KP), whereas Antarctica has none.
Interesting, this really does seem to work on any site behind CF. Are there any other endpoints like this?
An IPv6 block, as used here, should be "free" (as in registration fees alone).
If you register a new company with only IPv6 there are ways to get one or two "free" (as in registration fees alone) /24 IPv4 blocks to aid in NAT64 and DNS hosting for your first ASN. All in all it was something a little over 1k for me to get an Org ID + ASN + /40 IPv6 + a /23 IPv4.
> 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 bet they didnt to buy cooling system /s
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.
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).
If this was the case, and theres tons of financial incentive to do so, wouldnt cloudflare,etc, block not based on the reported 'country' but some fuzzy heuristic that knows what country it comes from? hops?
But cloudflare already is toxic, doable third party cookies - friction nonstop, etc.
Even just jitter in router response time is already higher than the difference in latency due to speed of light between those locations. And just France is large enough that a connexion to some IP in France might legitimately travel further or not compared to a connexion to some other country, from basically any vantage point you might be looking from, and might or might not round-trip through Paris, adding potentially up to 1500 km of uncertainty in the path.
Identifying the interchanges the packets go through can help though, but not as much for residential ISPs.
But thanks to this series I setup an ARIN account, got allocated ipv6 and ipv4 addresses and starting the ASN assignment process. It’s a fun rabbit hole to go into.