[LINK] Following 4 corners

[Scott Howard]

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 11:18 PM, <grove at zeta.org.au> wrote:

> I use a neat Firefox addon called "Flagfox".  It displays
> a flag of the country the server is hosted in, within the
> URL input line.   For example, the URL for google.com.au is
> displayed with an Amerikan flag.    It also handily displays the
> IP address as a tooltip. if you want as well.
>

If you're in Australia, then google.com.au is almost certainly served from
within Australia.
eg :
$ ping www.google.com.au
PING www.l.google.com (150.101.98.211): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 150.101.98.211: icmp_seq=0 ttl=60 time=2.419 ms

That's from a host in Adelaide, and www.google.com.au is 2 milliseconds
away.

Apps like this use various "GeoIP" databases to may between an IP address
and a location, and most of these databases have a relatively high level of
inaccuracy for things like websites (although they are normally far more
accurate for client location).

  Scott.