IP address

[IanF]

My phone and laptop seem to think I’m in some other country, even when on my home WiFi .. US (understandable), Ireland (not been there recently), India (don’t think I took my laptop), basically anywhere I am not. So now certain UK sites that require you to be in the UK won’t let me login. Not using any vpn/proxy whatevers.. any ideas how I get it back to a UK address? All products are Apple designed, (made in China).

[Beany]

IP Geolocation is notoriously bad, so it's possible your ISP has bought some cheap netblocks and not updated the geolocation data for them - or their doing something funky on their end.

Who is your ISP?

[IanF]

I’m with Three plus Virgin Media at home

[Matty]

I had a similar problem with Vodafone. Kept thinking I was in India. They gave me a fixed IP address for free in the end as they couldn't resolve it.

[IanF]

Okay.. I’ll moan at Three then. Thanks gents

[IanF]

Okay.. found a solution to the problem. iCloud private relay was the issue, guess it hides some info that certain websites use to determine your location.

[Beany]

Okay.. found a solution to the problem. iCloud private relay was the issue, guess it hides some info that certain websites use to determine your location.

Yeah it'll be acting effectively as a VPN, and giving different 'visible' connection endpoints to websites than you actually use.

So you go to new.bbc.co.uk and that site thinks you're coming from an endpoint in the US etc.

A bit fucking stupid of them to not assign you IPs (that aren't your real one) with a UK geo-location range though, it's not like that'd be hard to do from a purely logistical standpoint

[Simon]

Okay.. found a solution to the problem. iCloud private relay was the issue, guess it hides some info that certain websites use to determine your location.

Yeah it'll be acting effectively as a VPN, and giving different 'visible' connection endpoints to websites than you actually use.

So you go to new.bbc.co.uk and that site thinks you're coming from an endpoint in the US etc.

A bit fucking stupid of them to not assign you IPs (that aren't your real one) with a UK geo-location range though, it's not like that'd be hard to do from a purely logistical standpoint

It's unlike you Beany, but there's a fair bit wrong about this post... Ironically as we are one of the main companies behind private relay I can say that it more sounds like 'someone has stuffed up' than 'its inherently broken in design'. I'm actually not allowed to say much more, but, think about why everyone doesn't get the same issue?

[Beany]

I'm not *that* au fait with how geographically tagging IPs works (other than it seemingly being regularly not that reliable other than at a country scale, for the most part), but 'someone done goofed' is the main thrust there really.

Are there any decent resources on it online (even high level stuff) as I've irregularly found it frustrating to not understand it in the way that, say, I understand BGP and ASNs etc (which is also high level, but I have a better functional understanding of the underlying structure than I do about geo-tagging)