Production by country

[wirthi]

Hi,

how is the "production per county" calculated? I guess the value for Austria (and other countries) is not correct.

According to the stats system, I contributed 10.12 K cEMs/sec, more or less constant over the last few days. Nevertheless, the value for my country is only 3.45 K cEMs/s. It seems that my production is not included in this value.

I have read the "warning" on the bottom of the page so I guess my IP-Address or hostname is not recognized to be Austrian. Right now it is in the form *.adsl.highway.telekom.at, what should enable the parser to recognize it as Austrian (at).

Thanks for any information,
Christian

[Nuri]

Hi Christian,

You can find the discussion about country stats, including how they are calculated, and also about other SoB stats on this thread.

As you can see from that thread, the country stasts issue has been discussed deeply, but unfortunately there is no progress. I am pretty sure many users are not happy about the way the country stats are handled now.

I personally would prefer no country stats at all (instead of the current version which gives 100% false results for many countries, and more than 50% overall).

In fact, the word "slightly" in the warning at the bottom of the page should be replaced with "substantially".

[wirthi]

Oh, I see, thanks.

What about an option to select your country at the user-preferences?

[MAD-ness]

This has also been considered but was dismissed as being open to abuse and not being reliably more accurate than the other options.

I obviously can't speak for Louie and Dave, but since there is no obvious (or easy) highly reliable solution, I don't imagine that this is something that resides at the top of their 'to-do' list in terms of optimizations and enhancements.

[hc_grove]

Actually, no real explanation is posted in that thread.

The closest we get, is a statement from Louie telling us that some IANA listings are used. But what he means by that never got answered.

And better solutions were presented. IMHO the best solution is probably using whois.

Having country stats that not even includes half the work done, is simply silly. No country stats would be a lot better, but IMHO basing the stats on information from the users would be even better.

.Henrik

[MAD-ness]

http://www.free-dc.org/forum/showthr...highlight=IANA

quote:Originally posted by Mystwalker
How accurate is the reserve lookup when it comes to identifying the country?


quote:From the new page
Beware: these statistics are only estimated. They are based on the two-letter country code of the IP address from where the work was submitted. Since some IP addresses don't resolve properly to hostnames, and some hostnames' country codes are not really the country where the IP is located, there is inherently some error in these numbers. Also, it should be noted that non-country-code domains like .com, .net, .edu and so on are included in the United States' totals, since most US domains end in these instead of .us.

When you do a reverse DNS lookup on an IP address, you get a hostname like "foo-bar-27.wanadoo.fr". The by-country rank script extracts the top level domain (TLD) "fr" from the address, consults an internal lookup table of all the country codes, and tallies that address up to the totals for France.

This works reasonably well for every country but the United States. Even though there is a "us" TLD, its use is mostly restricted to government or educational use. The script just assumes that "com", "edu", "net", "org", "gov", "mil" and anything else that isn't a country code is probably from the United States. I suspect the US's totals are probably artificially high because of this, but probably not by too much (certainly not enough for it to drop from the #1 spot).

There probably is a better way to get more accurate country information from ARIN, RIPE and so on, but it would probably be a lot slower and a LOT more programming. If anybody knows of easier ways to do this, I'm all ears.

- Kugano

While I admit the DNS solution isn't perfect, I'm not sure I'm ready to allow users to choose their country in their preferences either. The reason is that, while certainly no one here falls into this category, there are a lot of dishonest people out there who would choose a country other than their actual country. The by-country page would then become a popularity contest, and that's not what they're meant to be at all.

I'm going to look into the idea someone suggested earlier on the forum about using IANA/ARIN/RIPE/etc. data to determine country ... someone, somewhere, has to have come up with a database mapping IP ranges to countries.

- Kugano

Any RPSL compliant inetnum object should have a country field containing the 2-letter ISO-3166 country code - but bear in mind that the object data may have been edited by error-prone humans (like me). Unfortunately, there's no guarantee that ARIN data will be as standard as RADB/RIPE/APNIC/CW etc

A query to whois with the flag to search any database will cover most bases, but would generate a LOT of lookups - you should then either cache answers, or probably run your own IRRd with live updates from RADB/RIPE etc. This may be more involvement than you're looking for....

Using the RIPE whois client, the following pipeline would give
you approx what you're after:

whois -a -r -T inetnum <ipaddress> | egrep '^country:'

- Vato

Those are simply some excerpts.

I suggest checking the linked thread to get the full details of the discussion.

In regards to an accurate, feasible and relatively easy solution, I don't remember one being proposed but I am sure that Louie and Dave would love to hear of one if it exists.

[dmbrubac]

I have to agree about no stats being better than obviuosly wrong ones - According to the country stats and my user stats, I did 120% of the work yesterday.

What is odd is I have a static IP for my NAT, and my domain should easily resolve correctly - it's .ca

Abuse or not, send us an email Louie! We will respond with a country code (shown in the email) and our user id (already filled in). A little script to parse it a voila.

Don't even show it on our profile if you don't want to.

Dave

[Lagardo]

I agree with those who point out that FALSE data is a whole lot worse than no data at all.

If you don't know something, say "I don't know". Anything else is dishonest.

There's nothing wrong with a "best guess" IFF (if and only if) it is accompanied by an honest estimate of confidence.

"This could be slightly off" is not an honest confidence estimate for data that is false by a factor of two and more. And an intentional misstatement of confidence is as much a lie as any other lie -- probably even more so, as it pretends that error analysis has already taken place and the data was deemed accurate.

While I admit the DNS solution isn't perfect, I'm not sure I'm ready to allow users to choose their country in their preferences either. The reason is that, while certainly no one here falls into this category, there are a lot of dishonest people out there who would choose a country other than their actual country.

So to prevent "dishonest people out there" from choosing a country other than their actual country, we have dishonest administrators that choose countries other than their actual countries for them?

And then have the gall to insult them by calling them dishonest?