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Small paranoia flare
Indrid Cold
Posts: 16,688 Skive's The Limit
in General Chat
Is it true that based on your IP, any internet user is allowed to locate exactly where you are (house & address)? I heard it can be done, based on the phone lines etc you use to connect... :eek:
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Like my IP shows me as being in St. Helens, when I'm not.
For example, if you register a domain name with a certain (remains nameless) uk registrar, they can tell if the billing address and the address at which you are registering from do not match.
This is in place to prevent fraud.
As for ANY internet user doing it - I don't think so. Only regional.
Because most likely that its a public wifi spot.
I don't see how with dynamically assigned IPs... since you will be given an IP 012.345.678.910 which will lookup to be something like choco-serv1-london-ispfunnies which obviously gives the location of the server thats tunnelling your connection to the internet.
But it's impossible as far as I know to rip the home address information out of that without the ISP (who you are effectively connected to) giving you it.
For the purposes of using the internet through an ISP the answer is no. Your IP address and it's hostname belongs to your ISP. Some ISPs assign IP addresses by area (NTL used to do this so you'd have a hostname like bham-34-34-34.cable.ntl.com) which the most someone can assume is that you lived in birmingham.
Your friend was probably freaking you out with the iphone's GPS function.
@shy, you can, a proxy server. Depending on your proxy server though, you'd either have a slow or fast. Like China has a slow connection to most, but in proxies their connections for the most are faster. Since of it's routing path.
So you're saying that if he brought the iphone to my house and connected it to my wifi, it wouldn't pinpoint the location?
Basically some (clever) companies have started creating a database of wifi ssid's along with the GPS co-ords of where they've been located. basically people go around wardriving and submit their results to the database (I believe navizon are one of these companies)
When the phone tries the location, it can narrow down the search to hotspots within the region of the cell tower the phone is on. then it can narrow it down to a few house radius because it knows the hotspot is in a paticular location!
:P
What nonsense! How do you propose the companies who register domain names for clients manage to pull it off?
Utter tosh.