Website and Security

metallica1973 · 07-09-2007, 02:05 PM

I have notices that when I go to certain websites, a lot of the advertisements display the city or the general area of where I am located at. That really concerns me from a security aspects of things.

1 - How do websites or crackers find out this information?

2 - I want to know how to better stealth or hide personal information from the internet?

garnetlion · 07-09-2007, 02:43 PM

There is a location associated with your IP address; there is no cracking involved. You can look up the information associated with your own IP address at http://www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm?GetLocation or any number of similar sites.

There's no way to hide your IP address or the information associated with it, although you could connect through some sort of proxy, and the ads would be targeted to the physical location of that proxy. The proxy itself would need to know your real IP address.

In actuality, it doesn't convey anything dangerous; they can't see your home address or name or anything like that. Even the location is fairly inaccurate. When I lived in a small town, I was always getting ads targeted to the major city 200 miles away because that's where my IP address resolved to. Similarly, all AOL traffic shows up as being somewhere in Virginia, although there are obviously AOL users all over the country. If you don't want to see targeted ads (or any ads for that matter), you can run Firefox with Ad-Block or Ad-Block Plus.

Hope this helps.

metallica1973 · 07-10-2007, 09:47 AM

I looked at geobytes and they were severals miles away. The site that I go, the ads will advertise in the axact town that I live in. I mean the exactly down on the button. I do understand what you are saying but I think this is a little to close for home.

Crito · 07-10-2007, 12:12 PM

Perhaps they're doing a dig of LOC record of last hop. You can get latitude and longitude of yahoo.com yourself, for example:

Code:

[surfer@lode ~]$ dig yahoo.com loc

; <<>> DiG 9.4.1 <<>> yahoo.com loc
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 23211
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;yahoo.com.                     IN      LOC

;; ANSWER SECTION:
yahoo.com.              1800    IN      LOC     37 23 30.900 N 121 59 19.000 W 7.00m 100m 100m 2m

;; Query time: 36 msec
;; SERVER: 68.87.68.162#53(68.87.68.162)
;; WHEN: Tue Jul 10 11:57:34 2007
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 55

Or if you want to use a web app try:
http://dns-loc.mapper.ofdoom.com/

X marks the spot.

http://mapper.ofdoom.com/index.pike?...on=-121.988617

metallica1973 · 07-10-2007, 11:28 PM

Is the LOC taken from the ip address that is assigned to my subscription? I understand the Longtitude and the Latitude but that must be obtained through how?