in reply to IP - country

I've wanted to do the same thing in the past to ban troublesome countries from doing credit card transactions. Some countries like Russia have many people trying to abuse credit cards and no way legal recourse for people outside Russia.

I've done this by hand using whois lookups to whois.ripe.net, whois.arin.net and whois.apnic.net which cover everyone. This is time consuming in the extreme though!

Recently I discovered http://ipindex.dragonstar.net/ which is a complete whois lookup on all possible ip addresses. I was contemplating downloading the info on the site, parsing it to produce a perl module which you could give an IP address to and it would return a country. This would be instant too!

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Re: Re: IP - country
by AgentM (Curate) on Mar 02, 2001 at 04:25 UTC
    That is extremely insecure. I understand how this may give you a sense of security, but logging into your website from Russia via SpaceProxy completely defeats the purpose of this check. In effect, it is faster to bypass the check than it takes to actually perform the check! It is very dangerous to rely heavily on such services.
    AgentM Systems nor Nasca Enterprises nor Bone::Easy nor Macperl is responsible for the comments made by AgentM. Remember, you can build any logical system with NOR.
[reply]
      I agree with you that this check isn't fool/hacker proof. However it is useful as an additional check. Believe me I've been there and had to deal with the chargebacks ;-)

      If you are talking about credit card transactions (which I was) then you are talking about secure transactions via https which in general aren't proxied.

      Of course most anyone technical can hide their true IP address but in our case that wasn't the sort of person we were dealing with.

[reply]

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