Operation Felix - Google thinks we are in Germany

Are you in Gibraltar? Have you had Google offer you content from Germany yet? Or perhaps, quite out of the blue, another google site - such as blogger.com - has suddenly starting to speak to you German?

- Well its been happening for about a month now to some of us and as it hasn't sorted itself out, perhaps it is time we took a look.

GeoIP location is what has gone wrong here. Every machine on the internet has an IP address (a unique number) that says where it can be located. [This is what makes the internet work, the domain names are just the pretty bits sitting on top.] Websites then cross reference a visitor to their location and provide targeted adverts - well at least that is the theory.

It appears that at least some Gibraltar IP addresses are, as far as Google is concerned, in Germany.

Actually I can be more specific, Google seems quite confident they are in Frankfurt am Main.

Now IP addresses are all centrally allocated in big blocks to national country authorities and also entities such as universities, etc. The only problem is the world is running out of them, and in order to make room some rather generous older allocations need to be revisited.

That is most likely what has happened here. We have been given a block that used to be allocated to Germany.

The problem is certainly occurring for me as I type this, and I'm using Gibtelecom ADSL which has given me an IP address in the block: 217.65.48.*

According to the RIPE database this is within a block allocation to Gibraltar (occasionally you might cross the internet privately before entering it publicly in another country - but that's clearly NOT what's gone wrong here).

Concerned that this might affect lots of other sites, I've tested the Maxmind database (Maxmind are the biggest suppliers of this technology), however they have us set-up correctly, as do the bbc - who detect their UK users from other nonUK users.

At first I therefore though it might just be the main code at google.com to offer a localised version, and further that code might not get updated very frequently.

However it is also being used on their award wining visitor statistics program, Google Analytics. (The screen shot above comes from Google Analytics.).

Given the speed at which we are running out of type4 ip addresses, the need to review and reallocate blocks will only increase. It is therefore a pity that website are starting to make increasingly daft use of them.

The mobile phone company O2 in the UK is crazily using GeoIP to prevent nonUK users for even looking at their web shop (shop.o2.co.uk). The reason they give? - We don't delivery and can't sell to people outside the UK. What a daft reason, recently I was trying to advise a UK based relative on mobile phones, O2 lost a purchase because they would let me in to look are and advise someone else.

The futures exchange EURONEXT LIFFE has even more amazingly been using it to determine what information people get. Not what language they want to use, nor what information they want as the default - but what information is available to them full stop. It is hard to think of a more international business than financial markets.

At least this error makes a change from the websites who have correct GeoIP tables and know that we are in Gibraltar, but then have wrong country profiles and default to assume we should be spoken to in Spanish by default.

I don't know yet if it is affecting others outside of 217.65.48., but we will do more tests later.