I wish to track a user's country from where my website is accesed .
ex; if a customer from a particular is accessing say america how to trace that the user is actually from america.
Is there any way
What you are talking about is called GeoIP and there are many ways to do it. Normally this is done using a third party that has a mapping of IP addresses to physical locations.
This is of course not 100% accurate, as people may be using VPNs, TOR or simply spoofing addresses.
It's not possible in all cases, but most IP addresses can be mapped to a location (even down to the city). There are quite a large number of such geomapping services.
Use MaxMind service.
http://www.maxmind.com/app/javascript_city
They got free and paid versions.
You can determine the country of the IP address of last proxy that a user is using. This is often their country, but not always.
Users can set out to obscure it e.g. by using TOR or another proxy service.
Or their ISPs might be passing them through NAT or through other countries.
And what do you do with the information? Offer them the site in their presumed-native language? Or customise your contact details appropriately?
So you have to think carefully about how you use this information. It is a good idea to present a page in the native language that you think the user is surfing from, but you must make it easy and obvious for the user to change their country. Not all surfers in any given country actually speak the language, and not all people can call toll-free numbers, and not all people in one country are wanting support that's specific to their country, they may be seeking support for when they are elsewhere or for a friend etc.
Related
So the original requirements was that on the launch of the app, the mobile app will get the current location of the user precise to City. Based on the city, the server/app client will give-city related content.
I know it would not be too difficult if I could use the core location service (since you know suspicious (self-concerned) users usually will disable the location service for a not-so-trusting app).
I have searched the web for few hours and get an summary of following solutions where I need your help to decide which one could be my best option or if you have any other better ones.
Using the [NSlocale autoupdatingCurrentLocale]
cons:
a.The explanation of the return value of the call from apple's document: "The locale is formed from the settings for the current user’s chosen system locale overlaid with any custom settings the user has specified in System Preferences." From which I don't understand what is "custom settings the user has specified in System Preferences"
reference link
b. This value could be misleading and not related with user's actual current city/country at all.
comments: I would be appreciated if anybody could explain me how the locale is changed according to user's setting.
Getting the current iPhone TimeZone
NSTimeZone *localTime = [NSTimeZone systemTimeZone];
NSLog(#"Current local timezone is %#",[localTime name]);
cons:
a. same as item b above, because user can always specify rather than let the system auto update the time zone.
b. precision is comprimised, only capital city will be listed.
comments:Not very promising but easy to implement
Using IP based location detection webservice
Based on my reading, the process will involve the app sending a request to a server where the server will record the IP of the request.(Don't think from App itself could get its own IP correctly since it may inside a local network) Based on the IP recorded through some third party service (with a IP db or some other available APIs), it will return the city information back to the client.
cons：
a. I've never implemented such thing, don't know if it is feasible for a mobile app.
b. Even if it is possible, don't know if it is faster than the core location service.
comments: If you know it is possible for a iOS app to do so please let me know.
Please kindly give me any thoughts you have or suggest any better solution if you know.
Thank you very much.
A preventive measure to avoid all your trouble would be to create an app that wouldn't appear 'not-so-trusting' and use core location to get the location. If a user still does not allow your app to know the location and knowing his city is a must, let him select a city from the list of cites for which content is available. Of course this opens up a huge hole allowing use to get the content for ANY city. Only you can decide if this is an acceptable tradeoff for simpler implementation.
If you must know the CITY automatically without core location, the first two options you mentioned, 'locale' and 'time zone' are useless as each of them encompasses large number of cities. Also, as you mentioned they're dependent on user's settings.
So reverse geocoding the IP address of a web service request using GeoIP or some such service is your best bet. You can find a lot of discussion and references for this on the web.
NSlocale can be highly inaccurate. My colleague bought the iPhone from New Zealand (he was studying there). When I am testing his phone to get the locale for language, it still show as New Zealand English.
Using IP is possible. I made a quick search and I found:-
Find IP address in iphone
how to get ip address of iphone programmatically
You might want to take a good read from above links.
I still think using Core Location is the best way to get the location of the user.
I've just put a Rails app live on heroku.com which services some touchscreen kiosks and have had my first taste of malicious users with some bogus service bookings. I would like some suggestions on audit data which I can log to help me to track down or otherwise discourage or prevent such malicious activities.
Some brief background - I have designed a Rails based website which is targeted towards the Tourist industry and allows customers to book accommodation and other tourist related services such as boat trips. We run this application on touchscreen kiosks (think 6.5 foot tall units with 40" touch screens) and email notifications of bookings to service providers.
What I'm looking for is suggestions on things that I can record at the point of bookings (and other transactions) taking place so that I can help to authenticate valid bookings and record details which can be used later to trace these bogus bookings. I might then add this information to a black-list to block these machines from creating further problems.
I'm already recording the request.remote_ip address but would ideally like to be able to record the hostname of the remote_ip as well since the IP address might change dynamically. Is this possible? Should I create a random key and store it as a cookie to identify each client machine uniquely?
I'm not looking to prosecute every person who makes a bogus booking, I just want to be able to discourage, prevent or track such malicious activity and would appreciate any suggestions on how best I can do this.
Many thanks,
Craig.
The question is a bit vague I think. You need to look at what you know: what actually IS a non-valid bogus booking? How did you personally figure out that some particular booking was bogus? Did someone tell you, did you figure it out from the data yourself?
You first need to gather all the bits and pieces you have of bogus bookings, and if there is a pattern then that is what you implement as a filter. I mean if someone knew a booking was bogus, why did your system not know it?
Logging IP addresses and hostnames is kind of futile..you'll never catch whoever did it this way. Why not validate up-front with credit card numbers or minimum a confirmed e-mail address? If you have an up-front credit card number then you have a direct link to the person for disputes and/or blocking further attempts by card number. IP addresses are too hard to track.
An IP address can be converted to a hostname by a reverse lookup, but if the IP changes the hostname changes too. If you alreay log an IP, you can always do a reverse lookup later, but I don't really see the value of knowing the host name(?).
in my asp.net mvc app i have a survey Model that can be created by anyone. Moreover, i want people from specific part of world to participate (vote) in the survey. It is easy job if i know the location (it could be city, country or state etc.). i want to add this location restriction at the time of survey creation (i.e user could tell that people of Islamabad or punjab or Pakistan) could vote or fill out this survey form. Moreover, i want to add that location restriction is applicable (or expected) for small number of surveys (5 percent at most) so how to most efficiently implement this functionality.
You could do this a couple of ways:
Determine where the user is from based on a previous question asking their location. Not bullet proof as the user could easily say they are from somewhere they are not.
Obtain an IP -> Country mapping list that will provide you a lookup of the customer's IP address vs. their location. You would restrict based on this.
You can figure out someone's location using IP address. There are many services out there that offer IP address location. They will give you an approximation of the users location based on that.
Here is an example of the service:
You can also get their location using HTML5 geolocation features.
For your case using IP address is probably good enough. The HTML5 option is nice because if the user doesn't have a GPS device on their system it eventually falls back to using IP address location.
In order to get a users IP address in ASP.NET you can use
Request.Servervariables("REMOTE_ADDR")
I have a client who has a requirement that they can't sell particular products 'outside the United States'.
They'd prefer that users can see the site, but when they try to checkout present a message indicating they are outside the United States.
Their site is built in Rails 2.3.8.
Check out the GeoIP gem (make sure to read the instructions, you need to download the GeoLiteCity or GeoLiteCountry database in order for it to work). It uses MaxMind's GeoIP database and can give you the country (or city, in the case of the city database) of an IP address, with some accuracy. There is a commercial database with better accuracy available, which I would recommend for your use case.
However, be advised that this is by no means a definitive solution. Some customers will be turned away wrongfully, and some will be able to order even though they should not. Things like satellite connections, proxy servers and VPN services make IP location impossible, and no database is 100% complete or correct.
What you're looking for is some kind of rough geolocation. One way to get this is to query a DNS zone designed specifically for this; one such zone is described at http://countries.nerd.dk.
I am from Ukraine. And when a particular US shop doesn't want to sell products overseas it usually specifies in the policy/faq/etc that only US bank issued payment cards are accepted.
That seems for me the best solution to solve: "can't sell particular products 'outside the United States'. "
As there are package/mail/freight forwarding companies which can be used by a potential client of that customer though residing outside US but whom the customer won't have to ship directly. That customer would still benefit from those sales but are freed from dialing with burden associated with overseas shipping.
And when you will solve it with geolocation, that customer would still be able making additional money, when people would still be using the site through different kind of proxies, if that customer will be worth it. :)
You can use their data that you pull into your database to check the user's IP address. http://www.ipligence.com/geolocation/ (you still have to worry about proxying)
I would also check where your shipping it to (checking addresses like suggested above), also check the card address with the card backer like VISA, etc..
And suggested above, your money processing agent shouldn't allow any transactions from outside the U.S. on particular items (if possible)
But I did read your statement SOME products may not be allowed to be sold outside the U.S. So you'll need a way to mark those products in your system and then let the user know they are unable to purchase those items, but continue on with others in the cart.
You could use a Rack Middleware, but it will require that you fork it on Github first.
https://github.com/roja/rack-geo
At the moment this project gives you City and Organisation names based on the IP address of the computer making the request - you need Country Code too.
You could add it to the code relatively easily here: https://github.com/roja/rack-geo/blob/master/lib/rack/geo.rb
You could then set a Rack environment variable to indicate if the request is from the USA, in the call method:
Rack::Request.new(env)["born"] = "...in the USA"
Add it to your config file:
config.middleware.use Rack::Geo
And then in your controller you can test if the request has this environment variable set appropriately and redirect to a 'sorry you must be from the USA' page:
if params['born'] == "...in the USA"
redirect_to "/not_from_round_here"
end
Bear in mind that IP address sniffing is fallible. I often take trains in the UK and end up with Google in German.
A geoip alternative is can be found here: http://humbuckercode.co.uk/licks/gems/geoip/
Uses the maxmind libraries, easy to set up, no schema updates needed, fast
I'd like to use visitor IP addresses into a company name. This will be used for displaying something like "Hello visitor from Apple Inc." . Note I am looking for the company name, not the domain name. Extra points for determining the originating country. The app is written in Ruby on Rails, but examples in other languages will do. Thanks!
There are databases for this kind of thing, but they are hardly 100% accurate, so I'd think long and hard before using them to make assumptions regarding content you present to your visitors. If you still want to do it, here are two companies that offer databases that include organization level detail:
http://www.maxmind.com/app/ip-location
http://www.ip2location.com/
Edit to clarify based on additional answers:
The organization level detail in the databases from these vendors is different than ISP information, which is what the others are referring to. The databases from the vendors above are actually assigned organizational information based on research, not reverse lookup on IP ownership.
For starters, know that often it is impossible - e.g. many people's connection will be from Insight, or Comcast, or whatever their ISP is. I'm not sure if your intended feature is all that snazzy if you greet me as being "from" Insight Broadband.
You're very likely to get this more wrong than right, but you can get this from a whois client.
For example, to see owners of US addresses (at least), you can whois from the CLI to play around:
whois -h whois.arin.net 17.18.19.20