Ip location

yaltara16

Beta member
Messages
1
Location
Australia
Hi folks,

I have used Whoreadme.com to track an individual with whom I converse by email. She uses 2 different email address, one traced to Sacramento CA and one from Miami FL.

Is it possible for a person to be in one location only and use some kind of server in another location, hence I get two seperate IP locations showing up ? California and Florida are a long way from each other.

Many thanks, Yaltara
 
Yes, so many factors affect where one appears to be. Never trust any display of physical location on the Internet.

(Keep in mind though, she probably is not concealing her location on purpose.)
 
Yes, so many factors affect where one appears to be. Never trust any display of physical location on the Internet.

(Keep in mind though, she probably is not concealing her location on purpose.)

^ That. It also depends on the server's location and if the service has more than one. Let's say for sake of argument that Google only had one server for gmail and it was located in California. Despite the fact that I live in Wisconsin all my email would appear to be from there. However if I also used yahoo and they had a server in Chicago Ill, then my email would appear to come from there.

In terms of email, never trust the physical location you track the IP to.
 
Taking celegorm's example further, an individual service such as gmail will be hosted on many tens of physical servers which will be geographically distributed for redundancy of the service. More often than not your activity will resolve to the one closest to you (in terms of packet latency that is) but it is technically feasible for your session to be served from anywhere.

An assignment I did during my degree looked at this sort of thing and showed interesting results. Take a selection of major websites (I used universities) around the world, perform a traceroute (and optional ping) every hour or so for a week - automated obviously - and look at how dynamic the internet routing is, I think you'll be surprised how convoluted some of the routes are!

But I digress, if the person was intentionally trying to hide their location then they could use proxy servers, the TOR network, cloud services or a myriad of other mechanisms which would be very difficult if not impossible to detect from the receiving end (in an email example anyway).

In summary, as all others have said, you can never be sure.
 
Could it be that she has 2 different ip addresses? Like one hard wired at home, and another for her phone data plan. My home Internet says I live in Chicago and my iphone says I'm in Michigan, but I actually live in indianapolis.
 
It could be. But still no telling whether the two IP addresses you traced are actually relevant to her real physical location.
 
why are you so intrested in her location anyway, if she is sending you junk just delete it or don't converse with here,

what is the end result you are looking for here even if you did get here location what effect is it going to make.

if you are worried she has highjacked your pc then you could find out what devices are attached by searching on command prompt netstat -ano

kind regards
 
Could it be that she has 2 different ip addresses? Like one hard wired at home, and another for her phone data plan. My home Internet says I live in Chicago and my iphone says I'm in Michigan, but I actually live in indianapolis.

As the 3G cellular network connects to 'the internet' at a different point to your home internet it is guaranteed you'll have different IPs, and likely they will have different geographic locations also. (That's how it works in the UK at least, not sure about US phone networks)

why are you so intrested in her location anyway, if she is sending you junk just delete it or don't converse with here,

what is the end result you are looking for here even if you did get here location what effect is it going to make.

if you are worried she has highjacked your pc then you could find out what devices are attached by searching on command prompt netstat -ano

kind regards

^- Ditto.
 
the mail server that it's on makes no difference.
it doesn't matter if your email provider is in china.

read the FAQ the service just puts a transparent image on the page.

so when you open the email there is an image tag.

in the server that hosts the image, (which is embedded in the email via HTML so loaded externally, not attached to the message) records the IP address of the person who downloaded the image to their local computer.

nothing to do with the address of the server where the email is stored.

anyway.
yes, it's most likely that the person has access to two different services, cell phone internet at home, internet at work, public broadband via library, perhaps internet cafe.

it also appears that the addresses assigned to those blocks have some inaccurate geo-ip information attached to them.
or the geo-information is correct and the part where traffic is breaking out of a network onto the internet (possibly via a proxy server) is different in the two locations.

(geo-ip information is pretty notoriously inaccurate. you ever see those adverts find xyz (usually find single ladies) in your area?
and they seem to have a reasonable idea about where you are sometimes, but other times you'll be half way across the country to where they think that you are...


putting a transparent image in emails is how many spam companies used to know if email accounts were used, (was the image downloaded) that is why most online email services like yahoo/msn etc now automatically block loading images unless you tell it that you trust the sender.
 
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