IPv6 Locator Now Available on IPGP

September 4th, 2014

We are happy to announce that we have just released an IPv6 Address Lookup tool. This tool is aimed to complete our tool collection, which includes: IPv4 Address Lookup, Find Someones IP Address tool and Geolocation API.

IPv6 addresses were introduced to fix the problem with the shortage of IPv4 IP addresses. It si considered that IPv4 addresses were already exhausted about 3 years ago. However, because the IPv6 are not that popular, they cannot be used alone. Many web servers does not have ipv6 support yet and the computers using only ipv6 won't be able to access. However, many Internet Service Providers started to assign IPv6 addresses to their users, as an alternative for IPv4, which are still used but usually shared along many computers.

Here you can access the IPv6 Address Locator.

IP Address Location Databases, a Violation of User Privacy ?

June 17th, 2014

no-privacy

With the latest situation created by NSA and their spying mission, the online privacy become an important aspect in our Internet Usage. Although some can say that only if you do bad things you fear for this, online privacy should still concern those who don't and never plan do to something stupid. The problem is that the data is traced and then stored, and if someday you learn something about an important person, or you want to do something that some people won't like, they might search trough your online history and what you did online to find facts about your life would put you in a bad light with the purpose of dropping the issue. Another problem is that this data, as it was shown by Edward Snowden, can be accessed by almost anyone who is somehow related to the NSA.

Getting back to public data that anyone can access, here comes the IP Address. While it is not that easy for someone to get the exact location based on your IP Address and find who you are, in most cases he can find out the city you live in. Is this a big issue ? In 99% of cases it is not an issue. Most websites are not interested in your location for other reason than marketing purposes: seeing where the most visitors are coming from to be able to provide better services. Website knowing your approximate location can also mean that when you go to a website you will be shown content relevant to your location without searching for it, for example weather websites, big online stores. But, there will be websites who can use your location to do things that many will consider bad, for example some websites might block your access to the website if you are located in a certain country or a certain state, based purely on their experience with past users from your location. This is considered discrimination and website owners should be charged for this. Websites can have different prices for people in different places ( based on the purchase power and average income ), that is also illegal in most countries.

Despite there are legal actions against those type of websites who do such kind of things, the real problem here is if a bad intended person can do harm to you if he knows your IP Address. Well, since most websites keep this data private, if you visit a trap site building only for this purpose, he can watch your actions without you being aware of this. For example he gives you a link to an online survey and he ask you do complete it. You might not be aware but the survey is a trap site and he gets the results associated with your IP Address. I mean, you should not complete online surveys providing sensitive data unless you trust the source, but more creative guys can find ways to trick you into this.

Maybe the question that anyone have is if someone can find you and "meet you" in person starting only from your IP Address. If the creativity on one side is at a certain level, and the ignorance is on the other side, then yes. There are public databases who shows the city an IP Address if from, and the Internet Service Provider. He might get some more data about you, maybe a photo or some habbits. If he have those the search might not be that hard and he can find you ultimately by associating data from phone books for example. If he knows your name then it will be much easier. However, there are many people who gives their information away on the Internet. Should you be scared of someone finding where you live ? Why would someone want to get to your house instead of emailing or phoning you before ? Journalists can be easily found and they are exposing others on a daily basis. If you really want to write something bad on the Internet about some mob boss you should know this and post anonymously ( there are many tools to hide your tracks on the internet ).

What do you think about this ? Do you have any examples of situations when the city - IP Address association can really harm someone ?

Launching JSON Version of IPGP Geolocation API

June 24th, 2013

We are proud to announce that from today, at the user demand, the JSON version of the IPGP Geolocation API is now available. Since today, the data was only available trough XML. Application Developers can now have the IP geolocation data returned in a format which is more friendly with all programming languages.

JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation. It is derived from JavaScript data structures, and is design to make the data readable by humans. The size of the data sent trough JSON is smaller than the size required to send data trough XML.

Here is an example of IP Location data returned in JSON:

{
 "Details":
 {
 "ip":"74.29.-.-",
 "code":"US",
 "country":"United States",
 "flag":"http:\/\/www.ipgp.net\/flags\/us.png",
 "city":"San Francisco",
 "region":"CA",
 "isp":"Comcast Cable",
 "organization":"Comcast Cable",
 "lat":38,
 "long":-97
 }
 }

Most programming languages have built-in functions to work with JSON data, including: Javascript, PHP, Java, ASP, C++, C#, Visual Basic, etc. For a complete list of programming languages and libraries to work with JSON data, please consult the official JSON site.

For example, in JavaScript, the right way to parse a JSON string is:

var myObject = JSON.parse(myJSONtext, reviver);
More information about working with JSON in javascritp here: http://www.json.org/js.html
In PHP, the right way to work with JSON data is: json_decode(myJSONtext); 

To get access to IPGP Geolocation and to get your API key you have to set up your subscription here: IPGP Geolocation API.

IPGP Visitor Origin plugin for WordPress

August 30th, 2012

As you may already know, we are doing our best to support the Geolocation API . Despite we are not very communicative, we are working hard to ensure that everything goes well.

In our free time, we are working at nice stuff. Past days we were working at a wordpress plugin that will let users to see details about the visitors inside their wordpress administration panel. The data shown include the country, city, state, isp, organization and visitor referer.

I hope you will enjoy it. You can freely download it from wordpress plugin directory:  http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ipgp-visitors-origin/