How accurate is IP GeoLocation?

What is the accuracy of IP GeoLocation?

Where's Waldo? Well, now you can find out—that is, if he's connecting with you online.

Through a simple Internet tool, you can generally get a good idea of where someone is communicating with you through the Internet, if you feel you need to do that. You can get pretty close to finding their location, but not as close as you think.

You can get a good idea of the where someone is emailing you from using a geolocation tool, like the one right on our site (see IP Lookup). And that, for the most part, should be good enough. It will not give you anyone's name and address, but it's not supposed to. That would be a violation of their privacy... and a little too creepy.

Zeroing In. Sort of.

When you came to the whatismyIPaddress.com website, you saw that your IP address was conveniently displayed on the home page. And you also saw—maybe surprisingly—that other information was displayed, such as your:

• Country
• Region
• City
• ZIP code
• Longitude and latitude

Whoa! Where did that come from? It came from the IP address geolocation service used to look at the IP address of wherever you were when you visited our site. The IP address you saw could be your home computer's IP address, or the one at the local coffee shop or airport. It all depends on where you are.

Maybe that unnerves you a bit. But you can also look at this as a way to be educated on the power of the Internet and the tools that you (and others) can use to keep safe. (Read our section on Change IP Address.)

After all, your name, street address, nickname or favorite color were not revealed. Chances are, your location was, at best, some five or six miles away from your home.

And as this article is being written (at a local coffee shop), the geo-locator says I'm near Wichita, Kansas, when I'm in fact smelling the breezes off the Pacific Ocean between San Diego and Los Angeles. (If you go to our Hide IP address page you'll find out how that can happen.)

Still, even when not pinpoint accurate, geolocation usually puts a computer user in a nearby town or area, which may be good enough for the person who wants to know where the curious email they received was really sent from. Check out Trace Email.

According to companies that report on these things:

• Accuracy rates on naming the city from an IP address vary between 50%-80%.
• Determining the nation of an Internet user is 95%-99% percent accurate, for reasons that have to do with how IP addresses are allocated and registered.
• Determining the physical location of the user, down to a city or ZIP code, is trickier and less accurate.

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What is a Private IP Address?

What is a Private IP Address?

When you send a letter from your house to a friend, you have to know the address to send it to so that the postman knows which street and which house to take it to. Computer networks such as the Internet are no different, except instead of sending your Web traffic to an address like 1145 Main Street, your computer's "location" (the destination for your emails and Google inquiries) is known by its IP (Internet protocol) address.

In theory, your individual computer has to have its own unique IP address so that it will only receive the information that is meant for you. You don't want your emails and the responses to your Google searches going anywhere else. (If you go to the WhatIsMyIPAddress.com home page, you can see your public IP address.)

However, there is a major exception to this: That would be those network computers that are linked to a router and share the same IP address. Included in that number are home/office networks. All routers have an IP address built in.

In this instance, the router—once it has established its Internet connection through an Internet Service Provider—sends data to each individual device on that network based on something called a Network Address Translator (NAT).

The organization that doles out IP addresses to the world reserves a range of IP addresses for private networks. Private networks can use IP addresses anywhere in the following ranges:

• 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255 (65,536 IP addresses)
• 172.16.0.0 - 172.31.255.255 (1,048,576 IP addresses)
• 10.0.0.0 - 10.255.255.255 (16,777,216 IP addresses)

The assumption is that these private address ranges are not directly connected to the Internet, so the addresses don't have to be unique. In today's world, these private address ranges are often used for the protected network behind network translation devices.

Why is that? Because in a private network, the router connects to the Internet. From there, the router connects the other devices (usually desktops, laptops and tablets).

Because the private address ranges in a network don't have to be synchronized with the rest of the world, the complete address range is available from any network. A network administrator using these private addresses has more room for subnetting, and many more assignable addresses.

These blocks of addresses can be used by anyone, anywhere. Even if your neighbor is using the exact same addresses, it won't cause a problem. This is possible because these addresses are known as non-routable addresses. The network devices on the Internet are programmed to recognize these addresses. These devices (known as routers) will recognize that these are private addresses belonging to your network and will never forward your traffic onto the Internet.

You do need to obtain one real address from the general pool so that your home router can perform what is known as Network Address Translation (NAT). NAT is a process in which your router changes your private IP Address into a public one so that it can send your traffic over the Internet, keeping track of the changes in the process. When the information comes back to your router, it reverses the change—from a real IP address into a private one—and forwards the traffic back to your computer.

A typical home network router keeps two IP addresses: one for local devices to connect to across the local area network (LAN), and one for the external or wide area network (WAN) Internet connection.

The internal LAN-IP address is normally set to a default, private number. Linksys brand routers, for example, use 192.168.1.1 for their internal IP address. No matter the brand of router, its default internal IP address is listed in the manufacturer's documentation. Administrators have the option to change this IP address during router setup or at any time later. Unless someone manually changes it, however, this private LAN-IP address remains fixed.

The external WAN-IP address of the router is set when the router connects to the Internet service provider. This address can also be viewed on the router's administrative console. Alternatively, the WAN-IP address can be found by visiting a Web-based IP address lookup service—such as WhatIsMyIPAddress.com—from any computer on the home LAN.

I'm being attacked by one of these IP addresses!

If you are seeing unexplained Internet traffic to your computer from these numbers, it is important to remember the following things:

• The traffic does not come from IANA. As the authority for IP addresses, they do not use or operate them, and they are not the source of the traffic.
• As use of these numbers is untracked and unrestricted, we can not tell you who is using these numbers.
• It is perfectly normal to see traffic from these numbers if you have a small home or office network. By default, most routers and access points use these numbers to assign to your local computers. It is most likely these numbers represent computers on your own internal network.
• If you see these numbers in the headers of an unsolicited email, they usually indicate transit between servers within a corporate network or ISP. They are not useful in identifying the origin of an email. In such cases you can usually find the true origin by looking for the earliest "Received" mail header.

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What is a Proxy Server?

What is a Proxy Server?

A proxy server is a computer that offers a computer network service to allow clients to make indirect network connections to other network services. A client connects to the proxy server, then requests a connection, file, or other resource available on a different server. The proxy provides the resource either by connecting to the specified server or by serving it from a cache. In some cases, the proxy may alter the client's request or the server's response for various purposes.

Web proxies

A common proxy application is a caching Web proxy. This provides a nearby cache of Web pages and files available on remote Web servers, allowing local network clients to access them more quickly or reliably.

When it receives a request for a Web resource (specified by a URL), a caching proxy looks for the resulting URL in its local cache. If found, it returns the document immediately. Otherwise it fetches it from the remote server, returns it to the requester and saves a copy in the cache. The cache usually uses an expiry algorithm to remove documents from the cache, according to their age, size, and access history. Two simple cache algorithms are Least Recently Used (LRU) and Least Frequently Used (LFU). LRU removes the least-recently used documents, and LFU removes the least-frequently used documents.

Web proxies can also filter the content of Web pages served. Some censorware applications - which attempt to block offensive Web content - are implemented as Web proxies. Other web proxies reformat web pages for a specific purpose or audience; for example, Skweezer reformats web pages for cell phones and PDAs. Network operators can also deploy proxies to intercept computer viruses and other hostile content served from remote Web pages.

A special case of web proxies are "CGI proxies." These are web sites which allow a user to access a site through them. They generally use PHP or CGI to implement the proxying functionality. CGI proxies are frequently used to gain access to web sites blocked by corporate or school proxies. Since they also hide the user's own IP address from the web sites they access through the proxy, they are sometimes also used to gain a degree of anonymity.

You may see references to four different types of proxy servers:

• Transparent Proxy

  This type of proxy server identifies itself as a proxy server and also makes the original IP address available through the http headers. These are generally used for their ability to cache websites and do not effectively provide any anonymity to those who use them. However, the use of a transparent proxy will get you around simple IP bans. They are transparent in the terms that your IP address is exposed, not transparent in the terms that you do not know that you are using it (your system is not specifically configured to use it.)

• Anonymous Proxy

  This type of proxy server identifies itself as a proxy server, but does not make the original IP address available. This type of proxy server is detectable, but provides reasonable anonymity for most users.

• Distorting Proxy

  This type of proxy server identifies itself as a proxy server, but make an incorrect original IP address available through the http headers.

• High Anonymity Proxy

  This type of proxy server does not identify itself as a proxy server and does not make available the original IP address.

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What is IPv6? (Internet Protocol Version 6)

What is IPv6?

Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) is a network layer protocol that enables data communications over a packet switched network. Packet switching involves the sending and receiving of data in packets between two nodes in a network. The working standard for the IPv6 protocol was published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in 1998. The IETF specification for IPv6 is RFC 2460. IPv6 was intended to replace the widely used Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) that is considered the backbone of the modern Internet. IPv6 is often referred to as the "next generation Internet" because of it's expanded capabilities and it's growth through recent large scale deployments. In 2004, Japan and Korea were acknowledged as having the first public deployments of IPv6.

The explosive growth in mobile devices including mobile phones, notebook computers, and wireless handheld devices has created a need for additional blocks of IP addresses. IPv4 currently supports a maximum of approximately 4.3 billion unique IP addresses. IPv6 supports a theoretical maximum of 2128 addresses (340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 to be exact!). Recent advancements in network technology including Network Address Translation (NAT) have temporarily lessened the urgency for new IP addresses, however, recent estimates indicate that IPv4 addresses could be exhausted as soon as 2012.

IPv6 and IPv4 share a similar architecture. The majority of transport layer protocols that function with IPv4 will also function with the IPv6 protocol. Most application layer protocols are expected to be interoperable with IPv6 as well, with the notable exception of File Transfer Protocol (FTP). FTP uses embedded network layer addresses to facilitate data transmission. An IPv6 address consists of eight groups of four hexadecimal digits. If a group consists of four zeros, the notation can be shortened using a colon to replace the zeros.

A main advantage of IPv6 is increased address space. The 128-bit length of IPv6 addresses is a significant gain over the 32-bit length of IPv4 addresses, allowing for an almost limitless number of unique IP addresses. The size of the IPv6 address space makes it less vulnerable to malicious activities such as IP scanning. IPv6 packets can support a larger payload than IPv4 packets resulting in increased throughput and transport efficiency.

A key enhancement over IPv4 is native support for mobile devices. IPv6 supports the Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) protocol which enables mobile devices to switch between networks and receive a roaming notification regardless of physical location. MIPv6 is a hallmark of the protocol and was specified as a firm requirement during the design of IPv6. The IETF has separate specifications for MIPv6 that detail data structure, messaging, and security requirements.

Auto-configuration is another IPv6 enhancement that is considered a great benefit to network administrators. IPv6 devices can independently auto-configure themselves when connected with other IPv6 devices. Configuration tasks that can be carried out automatically include IP address assignment and device numbering. An IPv6 router has the ability to determine its own IPv6 address using data link layer addressing parameters. The IETF has issued RFC 2462 to set guidelines for IPv6 auto-configuration.

The IPv6 protocol improves upon IPv4 with increased authentication and privacy measures. IPSec security is embedded into the IPv6 specification to manage encryption and authentication between hosts. This built in security framework enables secure data traffic between hosts that is independent of any applications on either host. In this way, IPv6 provides an efficient end to end security framework for data transfer at the host or the network level.

The deployment of IPv6 networks is growing worldwide. Full replacement of IPv4 is expected to take some time, as it remains the most widely used Internet Protocol. The United States, China, and India are leading recent deployments of the IPv6 protocol and have large investments in IPv6 network infrastructure. The United States government has mandated that federal agencies must complete the transition to an IPv6 infrastructure no later than 2008. Software companies are also releasing operating systems that support the IPv6 standard. In 1997, IBM became the first commercial vendor to support IPv6 through its AIX 4.3 operating system. The latest version of Microsoft's Windows operating system, Windows Vista, has full IPv6 support enabled by default.

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How to Hide Your IP Address

How to Hide Your IP Address

Borrow a different IP address to go anywhere online and stay hidden.

There are a few ways to hide your IP address...that unique number assigned to the network connection on the computer.

Top 4 reasons why people want to hide their IP address:

1. Hide their geographical location
2. Prevent Web tracking
3. Avoid leaving a digital footprint
4. Bypass any bans or blacklisting of their IP address

The safe and secure way

Use a Trusted Proxy or Virtual Private Network. Sign up with these services and when you go online, you'll be showing the world a different IP address...one that's on loan from the service you're using.

Here are some VPN providers that you might consider:

• Hide My Ass
• PureVPN
• Private Internet Access
• VyprVPN
• ExpressVPN

VPNs can be free or you can pay for the service. They help you get on the Internet and assign you a different IP address, but there's a wide range of reliability in providers.

There are many more advantages to using a personal VPN service over a proxy (usability, security, access to blocked sites).

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