Where are you?
Writing about web page http://en-gb.www.mozilla.com/en-GB/firefox/geolocation/
Mapping an IP address to a physical location is never going to be entirely accurate and that's perfectly understandable. (Also such accuracy would in many cases be undesirable.) Though I hoped, albeit it perhaps naively, without any reason and not for any particular purpose, that Firefox's Geolocation feature would be able to accurately identify the University. We have (I believe) the whole 137.205. block of IP addresses to ourselves which makes us a good sized target, so to speak. Now that I've got around to trying I've found it puts me several miles away. The demo linked above merely indicates Coventry, after some quick further investigation the exact location it thinks I'm at is 52.405837 latitude -1.512661 longitude. Which I'm not. You probably aren't either.
Mike Willis
05 Oct 2009 12:49
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Mathew Mannion
I was messing around with this with the idea of trying to automatically determine whether users were close to the University or not, but found the same problem. I would imagine the problem is that the IP block is registered with just “Coventry” as the location :)
Tried it with my home IP address and it’s disturbingly accurate :/
05 Oct 2009, 19:53
Mike Willis
I just tried it from home and I get exactly the same location as when I’m on campus. I’m about as far away as it’s possible to get from the University without leaving the city. The resolution doesn’t seem to be very good for Coventry.
It does do better than some services that try and locate where you are though. One website I tried told me I’m in Wolverhampton and that it has no idea where to put the IP address your comment was posted from on a map. Another put me in Stafford.
I can’t find a way to feed the Google geolocation service Firefox uses an arbitrary IP address.
05 Oct 2009, 20:51
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