Re: question about ip addresses

Ryan A wrote:

Hi, I know what you are talking about... I really dont have an idea how they are doing it but there is a site on the net that whenever I visit tells me my exact locatation (country,city)...they are using another site to do this but heres the address: http://noCme.com hope that helps, Cheers, -Ryan. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jake Malone" <jake@therussianjudge.com> To: <php-general@lists.php.net> Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2003 7:39 PM Subject: Re: [PHP] question about ip addresses

Is it possible to get longitude/latitude or anything like that? I've seen sites that do that. That would make pretty simple to nail down the

location

to a city/state. -Jake "John Nichel" <jnichel@by-tor.com> wrote in message news:3EA6C66B.2020201@by-tor.com...

Free of charge.... ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/dbase/split/ripe.db.inetnum.gz ftp://ftp.arin.net/other/dump/aup_dump.txt.gz ftp://ftp.apnic.net/public/apnic/stats/apnic/ ftp://ftp.lacnic.net/pub/stats/lacnic/ I could be wrong, but I think things like proxies are taken into consideration. This data won't give you the state, but it will give you the country to where the IP address is assigned. Looking up IP addresses from the registrars is what I used to do to trace spam before discovering spamcop.net. All you get is the information as to who is responsible for the ip address. For an ISP this just indicates where the ISP is, not where the user is. I've got a static IP address and the site mentioned gives me as being in London, well I'm 30 miles outside in the county of Essex, but my ISP is London based.

A multinational company may use its block of IP addresses anywhere, as long as it has the infrastructure to route it, or a company may simply tunnel it. An ISP using DHCP could give the same IP address, at different times, to different people in completely different parts of a country. In the case of companies like AOL, swapping over IP address between people on-line during the same session. If a proxy is being used, then all you will get is the information about who is responsible for the IP address the proxy is using. I like the noCme frighteners. If you see the contents of your c:\ drive in the box then I'd worry. I'm using linux and there is nothing there, a proper web browser (sorry but not IE) should not allow that on security grounds. To sum up, no you cannot get much geographical information from an IP address, only the street address of the company responsible for administering it. IP addresses are network rather than geographically based. HTH Chris