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Oct 13th, 2008, 11:52am
   Mischel Internet Security Forum
   Internet Security
   General (Moderators: Helena, Gavin_Coe, Magnus)
   Website knows my city?		 « Previous topic | Next topic »
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   Author  Topic: Website knows my city?  (Read 726 times)
Feldon
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Website knows my city?
« on: Jun 9th, 2005, 9:02am »		 Quote Quote  Modify Modify
I was just visiting a website where there was a banner ad asking if I wanted to meet singles in <insert hometown here>.  Did they get this from my ip?  Or is there somewhere in winXP sp2 where I've filled in my address and the website is utilizing that?  Thanks in advance.
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Ian
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Re: Website knows my city?
« Reply #1 on: Jun 9th, 2005, 6:47pm »		 Quote Quote  Modify Modify
It'll be from your IP, then they run a rDNS on the ISP (which they've got from running a Whois lookup on the IP). FWIW, these tricks get it wrong for my ISP - they place me in a city 50 miles away 'cos that's where their registered office is.
 
If you want to be sure that it's not a snoop on Windows, there are tools that will warn if your personal details are being transmitted via the Internet (the one I use is the IDlock feature built into ZoneAlarm Security Suite).
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syntheticexctasy
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Re: Website knows my city?
« Reply #2 on: Jul 10th, 2005, 11:40am »		 Quote Quote  Modify Modify
I was kind of wondering about this myself, as any rDNS I perform to my IP address shows a city that's about 30 miles away, but whenever I see one of those banners, it's right on the dot.
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Ian
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Good things come to those who wait ...

   


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Re: Website knows my city?
« Reply #3 on: Jul 12th, 2005, 3:49pm »		 Quote Quote  Modify Modify
It may be that there's a fixed sub-net that your ISP has assigned to  your home town then. Most home users these days get a dynamic IP address that changes with each log on, although several of my colleagues on cable Internet have retained a fixed IP that they've had for years now - could either be a blessing or a curse (depends what you do 'out there' Grin ). Given that dynamic IPs all come from a common pool, it could be that your ISP has split up it's ranges into city-by-city, but all a simple rDNS would show is the registered ISP details.
 
This might help them manage their user-line contention too, since once a city runs out of dynamic IPs no-one would be able to get a new connection until someone logs off. A city of 1 million, with 300,000 registered accounts could have 60,000 IP addresses in its pool to give a 50:1 contention ratio, which is about the same as allocating the last two IP octets to the city (would give 256*256 max, which is 65,535 IP addresses, though in reality there are a few less than this since some IPs in each octet are reserved). Just a thought Wink Grin
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