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nirax
Posts: 9
Joined: Mon Sep 15, 2008 9:05 pm

Re: FlagFox 3.3 Bugs

Post by nirax » Wed Sep 17, 2008 6:11 pm

actually i disabled quite a few more extensions like cooliris, fireFTP, showcase, foxytunes, etc ... will check the plugins sometime too ... the admins did whatever they wanted to do when they introduced proxy (some 6 months back) ... all they wanted was to disallow torrents ... i do not think they are that active enough to tinker with network on a day to day basis ... they have not even disallowed porn sites (maybe for obvious reasons) ...

i would like to know a few things --

1. does flagfox matches the site name prefix with a predefined set of countries and then with images to display the flag

OR

2. it dynamically asks some domaintools web site about the country of origin of web site and then displays corresponding image which is stored locally (or maybe even the image is fetched from the web) ... i feel it would be better if it maintains a local repository of images and maybe stores the country of origin of last 100 domain-country table as a local cache. maybe this storing could be adjustable by options. every 100-200 days this table could be recomputed by querying a preset website .. i mean the country of origin doesn't really change that frequently.

in all this where does DNS querry by FlagFox comes into the picture ? if there is a DNS problem then firefox should be facing the same problem while resolving IP addresses.

User avatar
DaveG
Flagfox Developer
Posts: 723
Joined: Wed Oct 03, 2007 9:06 pm
Location: Philadelphia, USA

Re: FlagFox 3.3 Bugs

Post by DaveG » Wed Sep 17, 2008 6:20 pm

Neither of the above. The description listed on AMO for Flagfox:
Flagfox is an extension for Mozilla Firefox that shows a flag icon in the address bar or status bar indicating the current website's server location. It uses relatively little resources, and works by accessing an IP address database contained within the extension rather than relying on top-level-domain roots like ".com" or ".uk". Clicking the icon loads Geotool, which provides a map of the location as well as more information such as the ISP and city. The context menu also provides quick access to information about the country of origin, as well as the ability to lookup the site's registrant via Whois.
There is a database included with Flagfox that knows where all the IP address ranges are physically located. (no, it's not 100% perfect, see the FAQ) That's what the "IP database update for <month> <year>" lines are in the changelog; I update the database each month. Flagfox takes the domain name and then looks it up in DNS (should just be a hit to the cache, seeing as you're already there) then uses that IP address to look up the location in its internal database.

One of the new features I added in 3.3 was a popup message to explain things when an address has a country code that is different from the country Flagfox says it's in, as they're not necessarily the same country. (server location can differ from domain registration; again, see the FAQ)

The problem here is that for whatever bizarre reason my request to Firefox for this IP address is stalling. I don't have enough info to know why yet.

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