January 31, 2026
Pings, Lies & VPNs
We have ipinfo at home or how to geolocate IPs in your CLI using latency
DIY internet location finder stuns HN: “It works!” vs “Latency lies”
TLDR: A dev built a small tool that guesses real‑world locations of internet addresses by timing routes from a global, volunteer probe network. The crowd is split between applause for a clever, transparent experiment and skepticism about messy delays and easy spoofing, as the creator stresses it’s a demo, not a product.
Hacker News is buzzing after a dev dropped a DIY internet location finder that uses ping and traceroute—think “time how long the internet takes to answer you”—to guess where an address really lives. Inspired by ipinfo’s big reveal that many VPNs fake locations via public databases, the maker plugged into Globalping’s 3,000 community probes and built a tiny command-line tool to crowd‑measure where an IP likely is. The repo is here: github.com/jimaek/geolocation-tool.
And then the comments went full “CSI: Traceroute.” Fans cheered the scrappy “ipinfo at home” energy—“Amazing idea and execution,” said one—while skeptics threw cold water: latency (internet delay) can be messy and doesn’t always map to geography. One user even asked if a host could add fake delays to trick the test, basically “geo catfishing.” The author stepped in with a reality check: it’s a demo, not a polished service, and serious accuracy needs way more probes and smarter methods. Meanwhile, jokesters dubbed it “latency astrology” and quipped that “pings don’t lie… except when they do.” The vibe: half clapping for a clever, transparent experiment that mirrors ipinfo’s approach on a tiny scale, half cautioning that internet paths and peering deals can make your “local” look long‑distance. Drama, doubt, and delight—classic HN energy wrapped in a nerdy whodunit.
Key Points
- •A demo CLI tool estimates IP locations (country, U.S. state, city) using latency-based measurements via Globalping’s probe network.
- •Inspired by ipinfo’s probe-based approach that countered falsified VPN geolocation data from registries and geofeeds.
- •Workflow: detect continent with a few probes, then use many probes within that continent; pick the country with the lowest latency; refine to U.S. state if applicable.
- •Ping (ICMP) proved unreliable due to blocking; TCP-based pings were complicated, so traceroute was adopted, using the last available hop’s latency.
- •The author outlines limitations and proposes improvements, including multi-protocol traceroute, examining multiple hops, ASN/whois weighting, and retesting low-certainty IPs.