A rather disturbing website...

[Bob Eager]

But strangely, my details are complete...! Unless their engine has decided to use that field all the time.

[Bob H]

I'm in Yorkshire, and it shows me as being in the correct town.

[Andrew Gabriel]

Fixed IP here, and it's 150 miles out, suggesting Nottingham. Usually, sites guess I'm in Bracknell (where my ISP is), but the suggestion from this site has no relationship with with anything I can think of.

Ah, worked it out - it thinks I'm in Arnold (near Nottingham), which it's presumably got confused with Andrews & Arnold, my ISP.

[BartC]

It gets my city right, but it bizarrely thinks it's in Staffordshire (several counties away).

[Davey]

It tells me that I am somewhere in the middle of London, whereas I'm actually between Bury St. Edmunds and Norwich. Oops. I like this note: "IP Language: English, Irish, Ulster Scots, Scottish Gaelic , Scots, Welsh, Cornish"

Yeah, we use the last six of those a lot.

[Brian Gaff]

I do find annoying those sites that send you pages with what it assumes is your location embedded in a message so to speak. I had one the other day, Hey, find singles in the instert area here area, click here, etc, These are of course adverts for dating agencies and probably more dodgy enterprises, but really if I'm going to a web site about things I like to read about do I really want that sort of irritation? For some reason as it is sent before the page and not within it the ad blocking is not always effective in stopping them.

Often as well when you do go look there you find a list of people either in other parts of the UK or in one case all in America. Absolutely stupid. Its a bit like those Google sponsored links which is why I no longer use google, well tthat and having to turn instant off all the time unless i register, I got fed up with find new and used olive branches on Ebay, if I'd searched for olive branches etc. The other irritation to me at least on Google and certain other search providers is that if I even hint that I'm looking for anythign with blind in the title I get adverts for blinds. So I know this is what we pay for having sites that are free out there, but really, more imagination and better choices are really needed. Brian

[alan]

I use a fixed IP but this web site doesn't seem to get beyond the identity and location of my ISP.

[happy zombie jebus on the cros]

it showed a circle around london. slough is the nearest it got to me and that is still approx 15 miles out.

i have been to web pages that are far more accurate, some get it down to maidenhead which is 7 miles away.

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mhm x v i x i i i

[dennis]

Paranoid?

It was within 30 miles of me so I changed my IP address to one about 40 miles away.

[happy zombie jebus on the cros]

a silly question, your email is for demon and you are not using thier news server. does demon no longer have a new server? back in the day, they had the best news server in the country.

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mhm x v i x i i i

[Bob Eager]

Yes, I mentioned that either here or in the other group where TNP Posted this.

I think it's a bit disturbing that our TNP didn't know about this information availability years ago...!

[spuorgelgoog]

It thinks I'm in State: Edinburgh, City Of. So that's about 40 miles away.

This does explain why I got Edinburgh dating adverts on one website though.

Owain

[alan]

But only when it wasn't broken.

I was with Demon in the early 90s and stayed with them for around 10 years (originally this was dial-up on a 28K modem at National rate phone charges). My recollection of their news service was that it was very unreliable. Demon were probably the first NOT to realise that attempting to support binary newsgroups and customers downloading from them 24/7 was like throwing money into a hole in the ground.

I've had a few providers since and all have been better than the service I was getting from Demon. I've mainly changed because of value for money (not cheapest price) especially when the ISP started concentrating on commercial customers rather than home usage. In one case I changed from f2s because they were taken over by one of the big players (talk talk I think) and introduced throttling on text only Usenet by blocking port numbers for 6 to 10 hours a day and then lying about any limiting measures.

[Peter Crosland]

He is well known for his misleading posts.

[Mr Pounder]

Well, it was spot on with me.

[Andrew Gabriel]

I still use demon as a mailbox, but not for anything else. I keep meaning to move that, but never get around to it.

In the early days, usenet news was Demon's biggest service, and a significant attraction for new customers.

They outgrew INN or Cnews or whatever it was they used, and they set their developers on creating a scalable news server, and they managed to produce a high performance news server for vast numbers of readers. However, the ISP business became too cut-throat to keep a development dept, and they had to lose that. They then tried to find a company which would maintain their news server and live service (I worked for one of the companies they approached and we looked at it, but we didn't take it on). Usenet was also dropping in significance, and I expect they eventually found that the cost of maintenance and running the live service wasn't worth it, and they probably no longer needed a highly scalable server. So I believe they now subcontract the whole service out to Highwinds(?) who run a large OEMed service for multiple ISPs. It may have changed several times since the subsequent Thus, C&W, and Vodafone buyouts.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

It's 50 miles out for me. Thanke fekc.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I did. nearly every other IP methodology either puts me in harlow, london or somewhere where IDnet (my isp) haskit. This one put me 3 miles from my house.

That suggest that someone somewhere is building a geographic database of IP addresses and sometimes its remarkably accurate.

Think: you go online shipping you fill in your name and address, and the vendor passes that off to e.g. a third party for card verification, or google analytics or something and google says 'hmm. Thats his addess, that's his IP number' and stuffs it in a database somewhere.

I reiterate, whois and reverse DNS records ALONE are not enough to ID my location that exactly.

Those I know. This is different.

What is clear is that it hasn't got that accurate data on most people, especially those on dynamic addresses. But on some, it has.

However another oddity. The whole RANGE of IP addresses appears to be more or less the same as far as the lookup is concerned.

but step outside of that class C and suddenly its moves to Hertfordshire.

One possibility is that BT monitors radius servers And that is in fact the exchange code of the DSL kit being cross referenced.

[The Natural Philosopher]

exactly. I suspect that there is a sparse database, that searches for exact matches, and then progressively uses less precise tools. You and I are 'known' to it. Others are not.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I think not. well known for disagreeing with others misleading posts, including presumably from the sour nature of your post, some of yours.