What's the practical difference between DNS and IP?

Hi,

I know I need to use an IP from another country to check results or make myself look to Google as if I was in that specific location. Recently, I signed up for Netflix, but I needed to use a DNS service from the US to fake my location. What's the difference between IP and DNS when faking locations?

Thanks

(reverse) DNS is the weakest way of determining a location, but also the cheapest. So some websites might choose this to do geolocation. They look at the domainname that gets returned by doing a reverse DNS on the IP you are coming from and match it to a country.
The simplest way is to look at the topleveldomain, eg: .com, .be, .nl, .de, .fr, .es, .it, .af, .il, .se, .fi, ...
For .com they might also look at the domain itself to determine if it is a US ISP, eg att.com, sprint.com, etc

IP is a better way, where they look at your IP address and match it in a GeoIP database to a country.
But since IP addresses get traded between ISPs (since the ipv4 pool is depleted they sell it to eachother if they have surplus) these databases need to get updated all the time. Most of the people who build these databases ask for a montly subscription or a fee everytime you download the database, so its a bit more expensive. But it works best and fastest.

They might also do a combination of both to make sure your IP is in the US, and reverse DNS to determine you are actually a residential user and not using a proxy or VPS in a datacenter, since a residential user will have a reverse dns like: dsl-12-54.access.isp.com while your datacenter ip might be something like: hosted-by.isp.com. Further more they can do an additional check by doing a forward resolve on the dns name to see if the ip matches, to make sure you are not spoofing the reverse dns (eg if you set your datacenter reverse dns like: dsl-12-54.access.sprint.net or something, it won't forward resolve since sprint is not pointing that dns record to the ip you have in the datacenter)

Thanks, but I still don't get how Netlfix detects my real location using a UK proxy, but not using UK DNS :-/ As an example...

You need a VPN (virtual private network) service that will let you set your country. There are many VPN services,
but STRONGVPN is fantastic and allows you to set the country.
$60 a year and DWWI

Traste said:

Thanks, but I still don't get how Netlfix detects my real location using a UK proxy, but not using UK DNS :-/ As an example...

Click to expand...

friedman said:

You need a VPN (virtual private network) service that will let you set your country. There are many VPN services,
but STRONGVPN is fantastic and allows you to set the country.
$60 a year and DWWI

Click to expand...

Thanks for the info, but I already know what. This thread is about understanding the technical differences, not about Netflix or VPN, so please stick to it

There are many ways your country could be detected.
the ICANN assigns blocks of IP addresses to specific countries or entities.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks

Here is the difference between DNS and IP:

DNS is the domain name service - it translates names like cnn.com to an IP address, like 192.168.1.100 (that's a private [RFC 1918], not public, IP - it won't be routed onto the internet, so you'll need a NAT.
machines talk to each other on ip addresses and ports - web servers typically run on port 80. Your browser uses some port on your side to talk to port 80 of the website you're visiting.
A router or NAT could allow a website running locally on port 8080 to be reachable on port 80 to external users.

In reality, one IP address could have up to millions of DNS records...There are many types of DNS records.

IP is the Internet Protocol, so I think you mean IP address.

When it comes to country detection, they can look at your IP address, your recent cookies and even more...

Here is a published method google recommends to determine country.
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/basics#DetectingUserLocation

Traste said:

Thanks for the info, but I already know what. This thread is about understanding the technical differences, not about Netflix or VPN, so please stick to it

Click to expand...