Are geolocation services using other methods than pure IP address? - geolocation

More than a question this may be general information . I am using a VPN service and located in the Middle East. I've found most (if not all but one) IP geolocation webpages shows my location as New York which matches the VPN IP address. But the service whatismyipaddres_dot_com shows the correct IP address and my location in Kuwait. Clicking some links on the mentioned webpage it takes me to a page showing they use several services from which one is showing Kuwait and the other two New York. However,contary on the expected "majority vote", they pick the single one different which, in fact, is right. As you can see they do not mention the name, but I believe the provider is Maxmind (maxmind_dot_com).
Sorry, not allowed to post images!!
Does anyone knows what they may be using ( router MAC? Google account ?).I use VPN to access ESPN , etc , but if this method is used by all other geoloc services in the future ,it will render the VPN unusable !

The web site whatismyipaddress dot com is using a mixture of HTML5 geolocation and IP geolocation.
Most likely your MAC address are being used to geolocate the location using HTML5 than using IP address geolocation.
Source: http://www.geolocation.com

Related

IP address with different country

We are using IP geolocation vendor in our application. And vendor will update their database in monthly basis.
But IP address is getting assigned to different country over time. Any proper reference or standard for this changes?
You can publish a geofeed file and host it in your website. The format is based on RFC 8805.
However, it is still up to the geolocation vendor to trust your feed and take into records. IP geolocation is under heavily manipulation due to many reasons.

Are there changes in Workbench connecting to Google Cloud MySql?

I have seen some similar posts, but this one is intriguing me a lot. I moved from the Pacific area (with my instance in USA Central) to Finland. I have been able to connect to the MySql database with WorkBench without any issue before (with whitelisted IP address). Since the move to northern Europe, I have not been able to connect to the DB at all, with no changes to my local setup.
I thought that it may be a time-out issue, but I have just created an instance in the Europe-North region, and the same problem exists.
I have also switched from my company's WiFi (and IP) to a mobile based IP address (I have been able to use both in the past in the Pacific area).
My only remaining (illogical) thought is that is a local firewall issue, but I am not sure and do not know how to fix that.
I am scratching my head - anyone with an answer?
The error messages looks like this (similar to other posts, but with no similar solutions!)
If you have moved locations, you likely have changed IP addresses as well. Make sure that you have authorized your network's current IP, and that your firewall is open to your instances public IP on port 3306.
You can also look into using the Cloud SQL proxy, which doesn't require authorizing an IP address.

How can I get nodemcu to popup a browser window upon connection to an ESP8266 AP?

I know in airports, for example, I've connected to their AP, and it pops up a browser window to log in on my device. Is it possible to do so with NodeMCU in lua, or even with c firmware?
This can accomplished by setting the DNS server for a connecting client [via DHCP] to a sort of DNS proxy. It doesn't need to be a fully featured DNS server, it only needs to be able to either return a static DNS answer for any host name query or forward the request to a real DNS server, to resolve host names as usual.
The static answer effectively hijacks web requests at the DNS level, by forging the DNS answer, causing all host names to resolve to the IP address of a local web server. That local web server ignores any Uri details and serves a login prompt for every request. It must also maintain a list of client MAC addresses that have authenticated.
NodeMCU does have a built-in DHCP server, as part of it's built-in WiFi AP, but running both a web and a DNS proxy in ESP8266's limited memory would be a hell of a trick. I think that two of them working cooperatively, interfaced using the SPI bus might be workable... maybe even three of them, one dedicated to maintaining the list of authenticated MACs, expiring them, etc.
Note that the only part of this I have done on an ESP 8266 is some very simple web server functionality, so it's mostly theory. If you try it I'd be very interested in hearing about it. :-)
You might want to try out CaptiveIntraweb project (https://github.com/reischle/CaptiveIntraweb) which is based on NodeMCU.
There is also thread (http://www.esp8266.com/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=3618) on ESP8266 community forum that discusses the solution details.

Find public IP address of the session user in Grails

I want to request the remote address of the session user in grails. I found a question here which describes the problem (Grails find public IP address of the session user) and the answer really works. I use only request.getRemoteAddr() and I receive 0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1 in my localhost.However, what I have to do to see the real IP address of the user?
In this previous question which I have found it is said "Try looking at the output of request.remoteAddr when viewing the site from a different computer". I really don't know what this means and I need your help here. I can load the server only in my own browser and I use "localhost:8080/..."
Please,tell me how and where to get the correct request. Thanks!!!
"Try looking at the output of request.remoteAddr when viewing the site
from a different computer"
means that you will need to connect to the application running on your machine from another machine in your LAN.
If you have another machine in your LAN, you will need to find your local network IP address (use ipconfig) and from the other machine connect to this address. For example if your IP is 192.168.0.2, connect to http://192.168.0.2:8080
As tim_yates mentioned request.getRemoteAddr() may not always return the correct address due to dynamic addressing and proxy servers. However you may find the original address from various HTTP headers such as: HTTP_CLIENT_IP, HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR, HTTP_X_FORWARDED
Take a look at the answers to this question which provides more information about this subject.
That's the best you're going to get.
0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1
Is your local address. Also, this cannot be guaranteed to be unique to a user due to dynamic addressing and proxy servers

Prevent Visitors from Voting again

Orginal Question
I want to implement a voting system on my page that is open to visitors and users i.e. non-authenticated users can vote.
Is there a rails/rack (or other) solution to identify visitors for this purpose?
Summary/Result:
If you want to implement a system where a visitor can take a certain action only once, i.e. a voting system. You have to divide your visitors into two groups:
Visitors that don't want to/don't have the tools to trick voting
Visitors that don't manipulate the result can be tracked using techniques such as: evercookie, Webbrowser Fingerprinting (panopticklick) and IP-Blocking.
Gems:
https://github.com/daddyz/evercookie
https://github.com/Valve/fingerprintjs
JS:
https://github.com/carlo/jquery-browser-fingerprint
Paid-Services:
http://threatmetrix.com
Visitors that want and can trick voting
Visitors that want to manipulate the result will and can do this. Here's a example. You can set the barrier high for those visitors, but its usually easier for them to bypass those than for you to implement them. The reasons for this are perfectly outlined by the answers to this question.
Client software identification
Web browser fingerprinting
panopticklick only identify browser configuration, not human beings. Just using a different browser (IE/FF/Opera/Chrome) on the same computer, using the same browser on a different user account on the same computer (different set of installed plug-ins, so different browser fingerprint) or using a different computer will "fool" panopticklick.
This is not a weakness of panopticklick, as panopticklick does not try to identify human beings, only Web browsers.
"Private browsing mode" should make the browser fingerprint less unique.
Cookies
evercookie, just like any sort of cookie, is specific to a user account (or a computer) : just using a different account or a different computer would give you a different identity. (Different users cannot access each other cookies because of file permissions.)
"Private browsing mode", if implemented properly, will clear all cookies, including "super cookies".
IP address
Changing IP address
Some subscribers have :
a fixed IP address;
an IP address which changes rarely;
an IP address which changes if they unplug their modem for hour, days, or weeks;
an IP address which changes almost every time they reboot their modem;
an IP address which changes every 24 h, even if they do not want that (as the IP address change will break TCP connexions).
This is not made-up. I know ISP with all these different IP allocation policies. I have no statistics about the number of users in these different categories, however.
Some ISP will make you pay just to have a fixed IP address. So I believe a changing IP address is pretty much the norm in practice for most Internet users.
Proxies
Using an anonymous proxy (including Tor) will give a different IP address, just as a VPN.
But all the proxy users (or all users of a Tor exit node) will probably have the same IP address.
Shared IP address
In almost all cases, family members will share an IP address.
Most small/medium businesses have only one outside address. This has been a problem in practice with per-IP anti-spam limit for webmails.
Almost all mobile IP users share the same IP address with a few or a lot of other users. This has been a problem in practice with per-IP anti-DOS limit! The server administrator had to list outgoing IP addresses and white-list them! Whenever the mobile ISP uses a new outgoing IP address, its clients are blocked again until the server administrator adds the new IP address.
You probably do not want to play this "game".
You can use cookie, but that can be disabled and expired, or IP address to identify the visitor. This can be tricked too, and there is a chance that from larger networks, people come with the same IP (e.g. from corporate network).
Basically there is no foolproof solution. I think the IP address can be "good enough" if nothing important depends on it.

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