tl;dr it requires owning your own IP blocks and then lying.

> In reality, the “location” of an IP is inherently fuzzy. For instance, my 2a14:7c0:4d00::/40 block was originally allocated to Israel. But later, I bought parts of this range and announced them via BGP in Germany, the US, and Singapore (see previous article on Anycast networks). Meanwhile, I’m physically located in mainland China. As the owner of this IP block, I can also freely edit the country field in the WHOIS database — and I set it to KP (North Korea).

> Because of this ambiguity, it’s nearly impossible to precisely determine an IP’s location using any single technical method. As a result, almost all geolocation databases accept public/user-submitted correction requests.

I would not be surprised if this practice is technically against most terms of service.

> tl;dr it requires owning your own IP blocks and then lying.

If this was the case, and theres tons of financial incentive to do so, wouldnt cloudflare,etc, block not based on the reported 'country' but some fuzzy heuristic that knows what country it comes from? hops?

Yeah Geo-IP is "fake" when I look at this deeper, idk why people use this as source of truth

also important point when you using Starlink and got totally different "relay" station sometimes can be thousand miles away, I think we need to "upgrade" our internet infrastructure for interplanetary system

I've wanted to try something like this before, but I was under the impression that providers like MaxMind might use other techniques to figure out the "real" location of a server.

ipinfo.io uses a probe network for this[1], but even then a server physically located in the Netherlands with an IP announced as being from, say, Seychelles would still respond to pings faster from a European location than from somewhere like Singapore (unless you go out of your way to induce latency to ICMP responses).

[1] https://ipinfo.io/blog/probe-network-how-we-make-sure-our-da...