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How did the phrase "non-US IPv4 address space" even acquire meaning? The purpose on an IP address is to name a system on the internet such that you can send pac

How did the phrase "non-US IPv4 address space" even acquire meaning? The purpose on an IP address is to name a system on the internet such that you can send packets to it. WTF does that have to do with geography? (Apart from the fact that you might generally want to aggregate geographically close systems into contiguous address ranges in order to keep routing tables managable, but that obviously has exactly zero to do with borders of countries and stuff like that, and more with the physics of signal propagation ...)

devonnulled 12y ago
So back in the day, IANA was the sole controlling body for IP address allocations. When the internet began to grow, they redelegated certain blocks (with the largest being /8 in CIDR notation) to organizations in geographical communities. This is called the RIR (Regional Internet Registry) system. In order to get IP addresses from a certain RIR, you have to be a business or customer within that region. The region of North America and some of Latin America is under the American Registry for Internet Numbers, also known as ARIN. Please see this page for more information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Internet_registry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Internet_registry
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
  Which all has exactly zero to do with what is meant here by "non-US IPv4 address space", as it in no way implies that the systems that you assign those addresses to are themselves located in those geographic areas, let alone that their users speak a particular language and similar crap that people have overloaded the meaning of IP addresses with. It's a division for administrative purposes, nothing more, and as you might notice, it doesn't even have country granularity. (Also, the question was rhetorical - I know how that idiocy happened, and I expect that most people here do.)
  - sneak 12y ago
    Asking arrogant rhetorical questions on HN that have literal answers, you should not be surprised when you get literal answers.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
      Would you mind explaining what was arrogant about my rhetorical question?
k3oni 12y ago
I think this has more to do with GeoIP databases than anything else and registry CIDRs allocations across the world.
- danyork 12y ago
  Exactly. It's the fact that many sites rely on GeoIP databases to try to offer the best localized services to people coming from various regions. GeoIP databases can also be used by firewalls, of course, to block all connections coming from a certain region.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
  Yeah - but what's the point of GeoIP databases? Most if not all of the use cases are idiotic. The browser tells me that the user understands English and French, but since the GeoIP database tells me the client's address is "brazilian", I'll deliver portuguese text! WTF? Similarly, routing requests to servers in the same country is kinda stupid - you want to achieve responsiveness, and responsiveness comes from shortest paths in the network graph, not from being inside the borders of the same country, or even from shortest geographic distance. In that case some suboptimal routing at least should be of little consequence, so it might be a usable approximation. Limiting access to content because you are in the wrong place is about as counter to the idea of the internet as you can get, so it's idiotic simply because of that. There simply is no sane reason to even have a concept of a "location of an IP address", other than its location in the network graph for packet routing purposes. (edit: and the first one of those is causing lots of unnecessary pain, not only to travellers who suddenly have to deal with a "different internet" simply because they moved their body to a different place on the planet, but also for people in multi-lingual countries, who regularly have to deal with moronic websites forcing them into some particular language version that supposedly is the "language of their location", ignoring the fact that the user not only doesn't understand the language, but specifically tells the server via appropriate headers which languages the user understands.)
  - junto 12y ago
    This is a pet hate of mine. Tech companies, especially US ones have a horrible habit of assuming language preference based on location. In Spain != Spanish. Or do say 14 million Catalan speakers anyway. Whenever I travel abroad I notice how sites ignore my Accept-Language HTTP header. It is just impolite.

devonnulled 12y ago

So back in the day, IANA was the sole controlling body for IP address allocations. When the internet began to grow, they redelegated certain blocks (with the largest being /8 in CIDR notation) to organizations in geographical communities. This is called the RIR (Regional Internet Registry) system. In order to get IP addresses from a certain RIR, you have to be a business or customer within that region. The region of North America and some of Latin America is under the American Registry for Internet Numbers, also known as ARIN. Please see this page for more information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Internet_registry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Internet_registry

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
Which all has exactly zero to do with what is meant here by "non-US IPv4 address space", as it in no way implies that the systems that you assign those addresses to are themselves located in those geographic areas, let alone that their users speak a particular language and similar crap that people have overloaded the meaning of IP addresses with. It's a division for administrative purposes, nothing more, and as you might notice, it doesn't even have country granularity. (Also, the question was rhetorical - I know how that idiocy happened, and I expect that most people here do.)
- sneak 12y ago
  Asking arrogant rhetorical questions on HN that have literal answers, you should not be surprised when you get literal answers.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
    Would you mind explaining what was arrogant about my rhetorical question?

k3oni 12y ago

I think this has more to do with GeoIP databases than anything else and registry CIDRs allocations across the world.

danyork 12y ago
Exactly. It's the fact that many sites rely on GeoIP databases to try to offer the best localized services to people coming from various regions. GeoIP databases can also be used by firewalls, of course, to block all connections coming from a certain region.
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
Yeah - but what's the point of GeoIP databases? Most if not all of the use cases are idiotic. The browser tells me that the user understands English and French, but since the GeoIP database tells me the client's address is "brazilian", I'll deliver portuguese text! WTF? Similarly, routing requests to servers in the same country is kinda stupid - you want to achieve responsiveness, and responsiveness comes from shortest paths in the network graph, not from being inside the borders of the same country, or even from shortest geographic distance. In that case some suboptimal routing at least should be of little consequence, so it might be a usable approximation. Limiting access to content because you are in the wrong place is about as counter to the idea of the internet as you can get, so it's idiotic simply because of that. There simply is no sane reason to even have a concept of a "location of an IP address", other than its location in the network graph for packet routing purposes. (edit: and the first one of those is causing lots of unnecessary pain, not only to travellers who suddenly have to deal with a "different internet" simply because they moved their body to a different place on the planet, but also for people in multi-lingual countries, who regularly have to deal with moronic websites forcing them into some particular language version that supposedly is the "language of their location", ignoring the fact that the user not only doesn't understand the language, but specifically tells the server via appropriate headers which languages the user understands.)
- junto 12y ago
  This is a pet hate of mine. Tech companies, especially US ones have a horrible habit of assuming language preference based on location. In Spain != Spanish. Or do say 14 million Catalan speakers anyway. Whenever I travel abroad I notice how sites ignore my Accept-Language HTTP header. It is just impolite.