A rather disturbing website...

[Adrian]

The Welsh border runs through my village, yet apparently I'm in Bedford...

[Tim Hodgson]

Hang on - you're saying dynamic IPs are distributed according to some geographical rule? That would rather defeat the point of dynamic IPs, wouldn't it?

[The Natural Philosopher]

not really.

[Tim Streater]

So the ATM circuit is built on the fly? That would make some sense.

[Adrian]

I'm on BT ADSL - yet it got me 150 miles wrong. And it _definitely_ isn't down to insufficient online purchasing! The google connection posited is also unlikely, since one of the several GMail accounts I use is behind a domain name that's registered here.

[Tim Hodgson]

Well, I take the point to be that number_of_IPs < number_of_customers. The more constrained you are by geography, the more IPs you need for a given number of customers.

[ARW]

I told the apprentice that the black line on my satnav was the border of Isengard. We were in Chester and travelling South on the A483 at the time. He never questioned it.

[Adrian]

In message , The Natural Philosopher writes

The location that it says that I'm at is about 70 miles out, and (so far as I know) has no relevance to me or my ISP.

Adrian

[John Williamson]

As far as I can tell, there is a range of IP addresses allocated by the ISP to each exchange or hub, and these will be geographically identifiable as belonging to lines connected to that hub. The dynamic bit just means that if a subscriber disconnects, their IP address becomes available for re-allocation from that pool to another local subscriber.

[John Williamson]

Dynamic IP addresses are a hangover from the days of dial-up links, where you only went on line for as long as you needed to download, say, new posts to newsgroups you followed. As you were charged by the time you spent connected, you then went off-line to read and compose your replies, then you connected again to send you replies and read new posts. In this way, the telco only need one IP address for ten or so subscribers.

Some hotels still use this charging model for in-room internet conenctions.

[Dave Liquorice]

You expect an apprentice to have read Tolkien?

You expect a lot...

[Peter Crosland]

It is interesting to note that not a single post confirms the OP's hypothesis.

[alan]

Or the site attempts to drop a Trojan onto your computer. Those with a compromised system get all their personal data read from the hard disk and the site reports your address.

[Steve Firth]

If you kept going and got to London, he'd have to believe it.

[dennis]

That's rubbish. There are tools you can use to locate yourself to a few hundred yards. he wifi identity is not usually passed beyond the router/ap unless you send it at the application layer.

[dennis]

Its done at the IP layer. The customers ATM circuit does not get as far as the ISP on the ADSL services.

[Tim Hodgson]

Ah, ok. I'd never heard the geographical bit before. Time for some googling.

Thanks.

[John Rumm]

Yup, but slightly (but not much!) different from jo public wanting access. (they might need to pay beer money to one of the aforementioned public officials).

[Java Jive]

Quite. One doesn't really need to say any more.

To liven things up though, we could place virtual bets on how soon he suggests that it's all the fault of the EU, or greenies, or both, or tries to claim that if only we'd built new nuclear power stations, none of it would have happened.

I'll place a virtual fiver >

[Tim Streater]

Whose idea was this, then, and why.