Hiding location

gash2024 · 29 Oct 2008 at 01:52

Someone posted my brothers location on utube the other night, he had posted from his uni onto utube and had fallen out with someone over something :rolleyes:

but all joking aside the person that posted was correct that my bro was located in such and such a city so iam a bit concerned now, first of all how did the person know where he was and what can i do to hide his location.

dbmzk1 · 29 Oct 2008 at 02:52

1) It's YouTube, not utube.

2) It is very easy to work out a reasonably accurate location from your IP address. This is no secret and is nothing to worry about. So what if someone knows what city you are in?

3) You can't hide your IP unless you browse using an anonymous proxy. But like I said, why does it matter?

Dist · 29 Oct 2008 at 04:21

For most IPs its possible to find out what ISP they are on, sometimes even area/city. But you cant find anything more specific then that, like the actual house/street, unless of course the person gives a court order to the ISP to reveal them details.

Like dbmzk1 said, a proxy is the only way to hide your IP, but free proxys are slow and laggy, and paid proxies are just not realy needed for simple internet use since its not possible to track down a person just by their IP anyway.

bigredshark · 29 Oct 2008 at 09:57

Dist said:
For most IPs its possible to find out what ISP they are on, sometimes even area/city. But you cant find anything more specific then that, like the actual house/street, unless of course the person gives a court order to the ISP to reveal them details.

Like dbmzk1 said, a proxy is the only way to hide your IP, but free proxys are slow and laggy, and paid proxies are just not realy needed for simple internet use since its not possible to track down a person just by their IP anyway.

That first point is not entirely true, if you have a static IP block then likely your ISP will register them with RIPE with your full address attached (certainly my home range is.). That'll have everything down to the door number and postcode (and possibly email address).

If you have a single IP then they tend to be assigned from big ranges which are registered as ADSL blocks rather than each individual IP, so you're a bit safer.

J.B · 29 Oct 2008 at 10:29

Following on from bigredshark, if he's at uni then chances are his IP address is one that has been allocated to the Universitiy. Very easy to look up.

For example here is the information held about my uni, found just by typing in 147.197 which is the allocated address range.

http://www.db.ripe.net/whois?147.197

Dist · 29 Oct 2008 at 13:35

bigredshark said:
That first point is not entirely true, if you have a static IP block then likely your ISP will register them with RIPE with your full address attached (certainly my home range is.). That'll have everything down to the door number and postcode (and possibly email address).

If you have a single IP then they tend to be assigned from big ranges which are registered as ADSL blocks rather than each individual IP, so you're a bit safer.

I never knew static IP blocks are done like that. My only experience with checking an IPs location is on IRC when its possible to reverse DNS (i think thats what the command does anyway) an IP to get the ISP name and sometimes area.

gash2024 · 29 Oct 2008 at 15:08

So how can you track someones IP from there posts? obviously an employee could do this but how does someone thats just a registered user do this?

tolien · 29 Oct 2008 at 16:46

My /29 from Zen has their address, just my name in a description field.

Dist said:
i think thats what the command does anyway) an IP to get the ISP name and sometimes area.

You're looking up the IP's WHOIS.