03.11.08
ip addresses - yours, theirs, locations
I had known for some time that ip addresses were one way for people to find out who you are, online. I knew that each computer had to access the internet through a gateway that has it’s own ip address, what I hadn’t known years ago, is that there are many ways to get someone’s ip address, and how easy it is to locate someone on a map, even from the other side of country, with just an ip number.
A few years ago I was chatting with someone using the instant messenger that came with another program, while talking with this gentlemen, he asked me how the weather is today in Lebanon TN. This shocked me, I had just met this guy online, how did he know where I worked? Was it someone I knew, but didn’t know I was talking to him? I had to chat with this guy for an hour to get him to divulge how he knew where I was.
He explained that his firewall program showed the ip address of incoming connections, and my chat window was just that, an incoming connection, so he took the ip address number and popped it into a free online tool, ip location, and had my whereabouts pinpointed in about 30 seconds. If that sounds complicated, believe me, it is not. Just about everyone has a firewall program running on their computer, it may take some tinkering to find connected ips, but that is the only hard part. Once you have someone’s ip addy, simply put it into one of the free online ip address tools and it will show you a map of where they are connecting from the internet.
Don’t worry, these tools don’t give you the actual street address of the person you are connecting with,just the connecting node from the net. So Jack was able to find that I was accessing the internet through comcast in Lebanon TN, he knew the area that I was in, but not my actual, exact location. Of course a subpoena to comcast could them to divulge the address wince they have the exact records of where each ip resolves to.
There are also cool tools for checking the email headers someone sent you, and getting their ip and it’s originating address on a map as well.
There are ways to mask these things, proxies, remailers, and other programs to hide ip’s from email and while surfing the net, but most people do not use them.