[HN Gopher] How to Get a North Korea / Antarctica VPS
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How to Get a North Korea / Antarctica VPS
Author : uneven9434
Score : 194 points
Date : 2025-11-14 01:30 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.lyc8503.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.lyc8503.net)
| ranger_danger wrote:
| 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.
| Sanzig wrote:
| And here I was hoping someone had a Proxmox node running at
| McMurdo and was renting out VMs for the novelty factor.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| isn't this possible with tech like starlink????
|
| I bet they didnt to buy cooling system /s
| ronsor wrote:
| > I would not be surprised if this practice is technically
| against most terms of service.
|
| It doesn't really matter. RIPE and other RIRs let you put
| whatever metadata you want for an IP range into the database,
| and you can serve whatever you want from your own geolocation
| feed. If the geolocation providers don't like it, it's up to
| them to stop fetching your data.
| throwaway808081 wrote:
| IIRC the country code RFC does not specify physical location,
| nationality of entity, or other.
| throwawaysoxjje wrote:
| _Whose_ terms of service? Their upstream? the RIR's?
| palata wrote:
| Naive question: how do you own an IP block? Can you just buy it
| somehow?
| q0uaur wrote:
| the linked page has an earlier blog entry talking about that:
|
| https://blog.lyc8503.net/en/post/asn-1-asn-registration/
|
| quickly skimming the article i couldn't see a specific price
| for the ipv4 block, but ipv6 is cheap - the article mentions
| having to pay at least $50 a year + service fees to a "LIR",
| and you also need a BGP-enabled hosting provider which i
| imagine will come with similar cost at least (don't quote me
| on that).
| immibis wrote:
| For RIPE (don't know others) the are two ways: you can either
| sign up as a full member (an ISP) for 1500EUR/year, which
| gives you the same rights as any other ISP. You can also
| request a "provider independent" or PI address block, which
| comes with some contractual restrictions (you have to use it
| yourself and you can't act as an ISP), from a member for
| 50EUR/year plus their profit margin. Officially you should
| get one from your actual ISP, but there are a few RIPE
| members who sell easy access to PI blocks as part of their
| business model.
| sva_ wrote:
| It seems like they only own an IPv6 block though, and then get
| the IPv4 from CF
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| > 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?
| gpm wrote:
| They've got enough points of presence that they ought to be
| able to narrow most people down to a reasonably small circle
| just by speed of light - unless they're intentionally
| increasing their ping or on some terribly congested network or
| something.
| rootsudo wrote:
| The fuzzy heuristic can just be ping speed. Can't beat the
| speed of light (yet.)
|
| But cloudflare already is toxic, doable third party cookies -
| friction nonstop, etc.
| seszett wrote:
| That might work in big countries like the US, but in western
| Europe it's basically impossible to tell whether a connexion
| originates from London, Paris, Brussels or Amsterdam just by
| hop count or latency.
|
| Even just jitter in router response time is already higher than
| the difference in latency due to speed of light between those
| locations. And just France is large enough that a connexion to
| some IP in France might legitimately travel further or not
| compared to a connexion to some other country, from basically
| any vantage point you might be looking from, and might or might
| not round-trip through Paris, adding potentially up to 1500 km
| of uncertainty in the path.
|
| Identifying the interchanges the packets go through can help
| though, but not as much for residential ISPs.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| 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
| basilikum wrote:
| It's the best there is and good enough for most business
| purposes. Regulations may require you not to do business with
| people in certain countries so you have to do a good faith
| effort not to provide your services to those people. GeoIP,
| despite just being an indicator or correlation rather than
| objective truth, just happens to be that good faith effort.
| alwa wrote:
| ...and for that matter, the more people game GeoIP like this,
| the less it's "good enough."
|
| The regulatory imperative isn't going anywhere, even if we
| degrade our good-enough, handshake-based, AS-operator-
| trusting system.
|
| If history is any guide, any replacement technology might
| look a lot more intrusive and a lot more onerous: the first
| thought that comes to mind is some kind of DRM-style, device-
| based, attested location surveillance (tied to a government
| ID? Why not?!) as "proof of location," and I'm sure the
| powers that be could come up with "better"...
| palata wrote:
| > any replacement technology might look a lot more
| intrusive
|
| Unfortunately, I don't think that not gaming GeoIP will
| change that. It's going there already.
| __m wrote:
| Yes we need more tools to track people
| grishka wrote:
| As someone who constantly runs into problems visiting websites
| because of my IP geolocation, I agree that the system needs to
| be updated to make it impossible to use IP addresses for
| anything except packet routing.
|
| I have a long thread of screenshots of this crap, and that's
| just select examples:
| https://mastodon.social/@grishka/111934602844613193
| vel0city wrote:
| I live in Texas, but for a while my ISP issued me IP
| addresses that had some geolocation information suggesting I
| was in Quebec. Hey, at least its still North America.
|
| Tons of websites and apps would use that IP location to
| default payment to Canadian dollars, default language as
| French, incorrect timezone, metric units instead of imperial.
|
| It was like that for a couple of years. Quite annoying.
| grishka wrote:
| > metric units instead of imperial
|
| Don't see a downside here! :D
| vel0city wrote:
| I was thinking the same as I typed up that part!
|
| Still strange when they somehow manage to get my location
| for a weather report right but default to Celsius for
| temperature.
| a-ve wrote:
| 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...
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > unless you go out of your way to induce latency to ICMP
| responses
|
| Might be hard to get the ping response time right from your
| Seychelles probe if you're pretending to be in Seychelles but
| actually in Netherlands
| londons_explore wrote:
| You can add 100ms to all responses to simulate 'user is on
| the end of a slow ADSL connection'.
|
| That way you can still get the 'right' ping times to all
| places
| Scoundreller wrote:
| This website seems awfully fast for a 56k host...
| walletdrainer wrote:
| Tangentially related https://github.com/blechschmidt/fakeroute
| :)
| hirako2000 wrote:
| Which no longer seem to work anywhere. As per the readme.
|
| Interesting technical insights though.
| walletdrainer wrote:
| It works perfectly fine, simply depends on whether or not
| your provider forces source address filtering.
| reincoder wrote:
| Thank you for mentioning us. I work for IPinfo. We perform a
| combination of a ping and a traceroute to understand how
| packets travel through the internet so that we can determine
| the location of the IP address. Our objective is to map the
| entire internet.
|
| However, ideally, we should have a PoP in Seychelles. Some of
| our recent expansions have been in offshore territories.
|
| https://ipinfo.io/probe-network
| parallax_error wrote:
| > Now test your VPS's IPv4 geolocation using Cloudflare's /cdn-
| cgi/trace endpoint (available on any site behind CF)
|
| Interesting, this really does seem to work on any site behind CF.
| Are there any other endpoints like this?
| sentientslug wrote:
| Cloudflare has a few:
| https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/reference/cdn...
| bgc wrote:
| The cdn-cgi endpoints are documented here:
| https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/reference/cdn...
| rootsudo wrote:
| This is a great post, I was asking about this for asn location to
| ChatGPT and it was telling me it wouldn't help on this request
| lol.
|
| But thanks to this series I setup an ARIN account, got allocated
| ipv6 and ipv4 addresses and starting the ASN assignment process.
| It's a fun rabbit hole to go into.
| est wrote:
| surprised to see a p3terx blog referene here. His CF WARP scripts
| were quite popular.
|
| Some background info: in China, all online discourse are required
| to show the user's provincial-level origin, or country name for
| non-mainland users, using geoip. this is enforced by the Cyber
| Admin Commission of CCP.
| miki123211 wrote:
| > all online discourse are required to show the user's
| provincial-level origin
|
| What is the point of such a rule?
|
| I understand why one would want to show that a foreign user is
| foreign, but what's the point for showing provincial origin?
| est wrote:
| > What is the point of such a rule?
|
| Hmm, it's a bit dark: China does not have a federal level
| task force like the FBI or CIA, raids/arrests are executed by
| provincial or municipal PD. It's called Gong An Shu Di Yuan
| Ze thingy
| londons_explore wrote:
| Internet rules vary in different parts of china.
|
| Some western sites are blocked in some regions but not
| others.
| bouncycastle wrote:
| different provinces have different demographics and therefore
| slightly different sentiment?
| numpad0 wrote:
| China has multiple levels and systems of citizenships and
| human rights granted...
|
| That said, most European _countries_ are smaller than bigger
| Asian _cities_ , and no country on Earth is less than 4x
| smaller than China or India, so it might be just a fair game.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| China has a lot of local politics and is surprisingly
| decentralised.
|
| If you look at how American social media is, with people from
| Texas claiming to know in detail what New York is like (and
| vice versa), it makes some sense.
|
| Not saying I agree with it and the privacy implications, but
| I can see the sense.
| sanex wrote:
| We should do this for national news shows that talk about
| Chicago.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| I was surprised too, but later learnt the author is also from
| China, which explained it.
|
| BTW, does his CF WARP scripts still work? I know he no longer
| updated it, but never really knew if it still works after all
| these months (years?).
| est wrote:
| I believe it partially works, the `warp-cli` command changed
| a lot in recent versions.
|
| My impression it either setup a socks5 proxy or generate a
| wireguard config and connect to CF.
| samlinnfer wrote:
| The real question is where does Cloudflare get North Korean IPv4
| blocks to feed into Warp, or Antarctic blocks for that matter.
| walletdrainer wrote:
| Cloudflare is a big player and can get the geoip providers to
| do basically whatever they want.
| samlinnfer wrote:
| So they did the same trick and got a geoip block just like
| the OP did?
| walletdrainer wrote:
| They're big and can just write the geoip provider and be
| like "hey we want to run this vpn service and still provide
| websites with accurate geoip data"
| efesak wrote:
| Cloudflare does not have any IPv4 blocks in North Korea.
| Geolocation databases use RIPE as the primary source and then
| make estimates using various tools.
|
| Interestingly, according to RIPE, North Korea has only assigned
| one IPv4 block (see
| https://github.com/analogic/ipgeo/blob/master/by-country/KP),
| whereas Antarctica has none.
| b3lvedere wrote:
| This is going to be fun when the moon and Mars have internet.
| vaylian wrote:
| Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/713/
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| My first thought was "is this legal?", but then had a hard time
| considering even which jurisdiction this (or using a "fraudulent"
| IP location) would fall under?
| cedilla wrote:
| In Germany it could be computer fraud, which criminalises
| entering incorrect data into a computer system for financial
| gain. I don't know if "watching a different set of shows on
| Netflix" would qualify.
| reincoder wrote:
| I work for IPinfo. Creating adverserial geofeeds is not illegal
| -- it's just frowned upon at best. We treat geofeeds as self-
| reported location data, and we do not assume they are
| trustworthy.
|
| This is exactly why, unlike much of the industry, we maintain a
| large team across engineering, data engineering, data science,
| and research, along with a substantial data-processing
| infrastructure and 1,200+ servers. Our entire purpose is to
| verify location data rather than simply aggregate, parse, and
| repeat whatever is self-reported. Otherwise, it's just GIGO.
|
| Even though we came up short in this particular case, we are
| actively pushing updates right now that eliminate these issues
| going forward.
| shevy-java wrote:
| I saw a few documentaries about North Korea. Now, I'll skip the
| potemkin-village propaganda part of the regime, but I was quite
| surprised that they had skilled developers too and modern
| equipment / computers. Granted, this was an exception (Pyongyang
| is an exception in general anyway) and naturally in these
| documentaries you can only see what the regime feeds you, but
| even then I was surprised to see that they weren't like, say, 20
| years behind or something like that. It may not be anywhere near
| as close to the quality in South Korea, but the image of some
| retrolooking guys from the 1945s is also incorrect. Of course a
| lot of this is weird, since they perfected the potemkin village
| strategy where things look so extremely bizarre like from almost
| 100 years ago now, but then they have some designated people
| roleplaying as computer designers and architects, and they
| actually are not totally clueless but know some things (that is,
| they are not all playing the potemkin part at all times, all the
| way).
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| Did you know a country's political system says nothing about
| how smart its citizens are? Education levels can differ, sure.
| But in IT especially, almost all learning material is freely
| available online. All you really need is motivation. And
| autocratic regimes have plenty of ways to create that.
| dbspin wrote:
| North Korea doesn't have access to the open internet, so no
| learning materials are 'freely available' online. All
| computer access is gated through the countries own locked
| down Linux distro 'Red Star OS', and all internet access is
| blocked.
| elsjaako wrote:
| There are effective North Korean hacking teams. They seem
| to operate from China, but one assumes that there are ways
| to train North Koreans in this stuff before sending them
| abroad to do the work.
|
| I will agree that for most people in North Korea access to
| the outside internet is limited, but your claim that "All
| computer access is gated" is a stronger one, that I haven't
| seem evidence for.
|
| Also, we know that Red Star OS exists, but I haven't seen
| any information about it's actual use. I can imagine it's
| used in certain sectors (e.g. education or certain
| ministries), but if you have information about it's usage
| I'd be interested to see that.
|
| My gut feeling is that there is probably still a lot of
| cracked windows PCs also used in industry, but I have no
| evidence for that either. This is just based on how in my
| experience China works, and the fact that there is some
| business exchange between North Korea and China.
| armada651 wrote:
| I don't know why you'd be surprised that they have skilled
| developers and modern computers. North Korea has a state-funded
| hacking and phishing operation that generates $2 billion, which
| represents a pretty significant part of their $35 billion GDP.
| jojobas wrote:
| Being proper laundered currency available for whatever
| international purchases it's punching way above its $2B
| weight.
| Razengan wrote:
| > _I was surprised to see that they weren 't like, say, 20
| years behind or something_
|
| That actually says more about what the Western "First World"
| media feeds their people, that the rest of the world is 20
| years behind and stuff :')
|
| Maybe 10, maybe some places, sure. In terms of social progress
| and basic rights, hell there are places that are 50 or even 200
| years behind (see Afghanistan's treatment of women for example)
|
| But tech-wise, I was surprised when I visited some parts of the
| Middle East and Asia; almost everything was available online,
| paid for electronically, clean and effective mass transport,
| walkable and safe cities..
| wqaatwt wrote:
| > media feeds their people, that the rest of the world is 20
| years behind and stuff
|
| Well western or pretty media having no access to the country
| pretty much guarantees that everything they might be
| reporting is a mix of speculation and outdated information.
| Doing the best you can with whatever data is available
| doesn't seem like an unreasonable approach.
|
| > see Afghanistan's treatment of women for example
|
| Or much of the the "advanced" gulf states..
| sofixa wrote:
| > That actually says more about what the Western "First
| World" media feeds their people, that the rest of the world
| is 20 years behind and stuff :')
|
| More like, "western" media rarely talks about most countries
| not undergoing a crisis, somehow relevant or close
| culturally. A British paper will talk about the US and
| Western EU countries because they're relevant to Britons and
| close partners; it will also cover Ukraine and Gaza because
| they're undergoing crisis and relevant. It won't talk all
| that much about the war in Mali or the local politics of
| Tashkent. French media will cover former colonies like Mali
| more due to the shared language and the presence of large
| amounts of people of that descent in France, but won't cover
| e.g. what's happening in Sri Lanka day to day.
|
| So the little that the average "westerner" hears about North
| Korea is the occasional weird case, or when they make missile
| tests / international threats. The state of urbanism in
| Pyongyang is irrelevant to most people, so there is little
| reporting on it.
|
| > But tech-wise, I was surprised when I visited some parts of
| the Middle East and Asia; almost everything was available
| online, paid for electronically, clean and effective mass
| transport, walkable and safe cities..
|
| _Wildly_ location dependent.
|
| > clean and effective mass transport
|
| Big Chinese cities, big former Soviet cities, Hong Kong,
| Singapore, South Korea, Japan. Everywhere else in Middle East
| and Asia doesn't have effective mass transport there might be
| a few metro lines like in Dubai, or be rapidly expanding like
| Hanoi, Riyadh, but nothing else comparable to the gold
| standards of e.g. Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, London, Paris.
|
| > walkable and safe cities..
|
| Which cities were walkable? I have yet to visit a developing
| country where walking wasn't _barely_ an afterthought with
| little to no sidewalks, no priority for pedestrians, etc.
| While it 's definitely better in some countries compared to
| others, it's really not the norm in "the Middle East and
| Asia". It is in most developed countries in those regions,
| like Japan, China, South Korea, UAE, Saudi (and the last two
| have temperatures that make it challenging).
|
| > almost everything was available online
|
| My favourite is the countries in the middle. E.g. Sri Lanka,
| where the railways are stuck in the 1950s from when the
| British left, everything is on paper (schedules, tickets,
| etc.) and you have to go to a train station to buy a
| ticket... but a lot of other things are quite digital.
| Everywhere has 4G coverage, everyone has a phone with data.
| But some things are literally decades behind.
| __alexander wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_39
| t-3 wrote:
| Dude, computers and internet have been worldwide for 20+ years.
| Even war zones have internet and modern computers. The only
| place that doesn't is Cuba which is physically separated from
| the rest of humanity by geography and embargoes.
| a_bored_husky wrote:
| Hello from Cuba. We do have internet and modern computers.
| dewey wrote:
| Related to that, people might remember "The Pirate Bay is now
| hosted in North Korea" times.
|
| Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5319419
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| Is there a way to buy actual hosting in Antarctica?
| 0x1ch wrote:
| How does one feasibly purchase IP blocks these days? Most blocks
| that are available are starting in the six figure range,
| generally higher from what I see.
| kachapopopow wrote:
| /24 is only 7k and decreasing right now.
| 0x1ch wrote:
| Edit: Ah, my filtering wasn't working. I see now! Not bad.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Six figures should get you one hell of a block, it's more like
| 6k for a /24 IPv4 block sale.
|
| An IPv6 block, as used here, should be "free" (as in
| registration fees alone).
|
| If you register a new company with only IPv6 there are ways to
| get one or two "free" (as in registration fees alone) /24 IPv4
| blocks to aid in NAT64 and DNS hosting for your first ASN. All
| in all it was something a little over 1k for me to get an Org
| ID + ASN + /40 IPv6 + a /23 IPv4.
| 0x1ch wrote:
| Not sure where you're finding $6k blocks for IPV4? Edit: Ah,
| my filtering wasn't working.
| reincoder wrote:
| I am the DevRel for IPinfo. While we recognize that we should
| have been more accurate in this instance, it's worth breaking
| down how our methodology works. We are also rolling out some
| geolocation tweaks that should neutralize the inaccuracies caused
| by adversarial correction submissions.
|
| First, we use active measurement for IP geolocation as our
| primary source. Our main data source is our ProbeNet
| infrastructure, which consists of 1,200 PoPs across 500 cities.
| Through ProbeNet, we run active measurements to every IP address
| and routable IPv6. Because we run both ping and traceroute, we
| typically have a very strong sense of where an IP address is
| located.
|
| However, ProbeNet is not our only data pipeline. We process
| several dozen additional data sources. For example, unrouted or
| unassigned IP addresses do not generate active measurements, so
| we must rely on other forms of data.
|
| In reality, we must "fallback" to alternative location evidence
| when active measurement is unavailable. Even though we manage,
| expand, and maintain a very large server network and a highly
| complex data pipeline, some IPs require us to rely on what the
| ASN operator reports.
|
| It's fair to say that no ASN other than AS131279
| (https://ipinfo.io/AS131279 ) is located in North Korea. However,
| if someone asks for evidence showing that a particular IP address
| is not located in North Korea, that is extremely difficult to
| prove in isolation. We prefer not to rely on a null-island
| methodology and instead choose a location based on a hierarchy of
| hints.
|
| For unrouted or unassigned IP addresses, geolocation can point to
| random locations, and in such cases we often must rely on the ASN
| operator's data. I've seen this happen, even among well-
| established ASN operators. Some assign random placeholder
| locations to unrouted and unassigned ranges particularly for IPv6
| IP addresses.
|
| More context:
|
| https://community.ipinfo.io/t/the-north-korean-gamers-on-ste...
|
| https://community.ipinfo.io/t/why-is-this-orange-com-ip-rang...
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(page generated 2025-11-14 23:02 UTC)