How would they know?

[Freston]

An obscure link. I followed it. The contents of the page was below par, and not what I was looking for. Yet I was flabbergasted about the adds.

I guess we all know those adds. Girls from your hometown being offered for dating, with names and pictures and all.

What worried me, I'm running a fresh install of Slack 12. My computer doesn't or shouldn't know my hometown. I live in a 150,000 pop city in Europe, so seeing those adds on an American site rules out probability or chance. 15-20 girls from my hometown advertising on an American site, there is a service behind it.

How do they know my hometown? I can't remember entering that anywhere on the net or my computer :S

[Vergil83]

When you connect to a web site they get your ip address. Using that, they can make a good/perfect guess what city you live in.

[Freston]

The country, I would have thought. But the city? IP, aye? Darn.

[bigtomrodney]

Your IP address is associated with your ISP and the local exchange. It can be looked up pretty easily. Try this -

whois your_wan_ip_address

[tommytabib]

There are programs that you can download to hide your IP address ( at least there are for windows, ive never looked for any linux ones)

[Freston]

Your IP address is associated with your ISP and the local exchange. It can be looked up pretty easily. Try this -

Yeah, I tried it just now. Funny thing though. I live in a mid-sized city right next to the capitol. Guess where the ISP is at. All city information leads to the capitol no 20 km east. So either I'm not looking right (probably), or something else I'm missing.

There are programs that you can download to hide your IP address ( at least there are for windows, ive never looked for any linux ones)

Yeah, there are several ways to do that on Linux. But I've never looked into them in detail.

[rudie_rage]

There are programs that you can download to hide your IP address ( at least there are for windows, ive never looked for any linux ones)

I used TOR for a bit. After a bit of setting up it worked great. Every time you clicked a link your IP changed. Google got interesting... Kept thinking I moved from Germany to France to US in a heartbeat, and kept changing default languages to match.

[anomie]

Yeah, I tried it just now. Funny thing though. I live in a mid-sized city right next to the capitol. Guess where the ISP is at. All city information leads to the capitol no 20 km east. So either I'm not looking right (probably), or something else I'm missing.

Check out each of these:

IP Address Locator - Enter an IP address to find its location - Lookup Country Region City etc

What is my IP address? Show my IP address. IP Tracer & IP Locator.

The second URL offers a google map that you can zoom in on down to the city street level. (You can also view a satellite image.) See how close those get to you.

I used TOR for a bit. After a bit of setting up it worked great.

tor/privoxy is a pretty good solution. The main problem you may run into is some sites end up banning known proxy service IP addresses (because a lot of ne'er-do-wells abuse the privilege).

[rudie_rage]

tor/privoxy is a pretty good solution. The main problem you may run into is some sites end up banning known proxy service IP addresses (because a lot of ne'er-do-wells abuse the privilege).

as just a regular TOR user everything worked fine, but when I set my computer up as a TOR exit node I was banned from IRC :S

Thats a big deal for me. lol. I guess I'm not sharing bandwidth anymore.

[d38dm8nw81k1ng]

i remember getting told by a website that i live in the midlands so it can't be that accurate.