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.

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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 ?

The post IP Address Location Databases, a Violation of User Privacy ? appeared first on Ip locator.

Let me put this in other words. Using our latest developed tool: IPGP Find IP Address , you can create a short link to a story, a youtube video, a picture on the internet or anything you like, that will be re-routed trough our servers and it will tell you the IP Address of everyone who visited that link.

How this works ? When you send the short link to the person you want to find the IP Address, and he access it, he will be first sent to our server where we save his IP address, and then he is redirected to the story, facebook page, image, youtube video, etc. It is happening so fast that there is no way he could notice that anything happened.

Then, you can come back to the application and to see who visited your link and their IP addresses.

The post Find Someone’s IP Address Application appeared first on Ip locator.

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.

The post Launching JSON Version of IPGP Geolocation API appeared first on Ip locator.

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/

The post IPGP Visitor Origin plugin for WordPress appeared first on Ip locator.

Today, using our API you can programatically get the following details about any IP Address:

• Country
• State
• City
• Internet Service Provider
• Organization
• Latitude
• Longitude
• Link to country flag

Our API is very easy to use. The information is provided in XML format. The URL for accessing the API is: http://www.ipgp.net/api/xml/IP_ADDRESS/API_KEY .

Here is an example of how results are returned:

<IpLookup>
<Ip>123.123.123.123</Ip>
<Code>CN</Code>
<Country>China</Country>
<Flag>http://www.ipgp.net/flags/cn.png</Flag>
<City>Beijing</City>
<Region>Beijing</Region>
<Isp>China Unicom Beijing Province Network</Isp>
<Organization>China Unicom Beijing province network</Organization>
<Lat>39.9289</Lat>
<Lng>116.3883</Lng>
</IpLookup>

If you want to try IP Address Geolocation API, request your API key.

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When you don't pay enough attention, someone can steal your laptop or access your computer much easier than he can hack a website where people are working dedicated to protect that data. If you let your computer open at work someone can steal all your data in 15 minutes or less, without effort.

Data stored on cloud is safer than stored anywhere else, more, you can access it from anywhere and don't have to worry to sync your music files with your home and work computer, tablet or phone.

There are many companies that offer you cloud storage for your data. To make sure you choose the right one you may want to read some cloud backup review of companies that offer cloud storage. Among the features that you might want to look when you buy a cloud storage are: Speed, Uptime, ease of use, technical support, customer care, reliability and money. I intentionally left the money as last criteria because when you talk about your data, the money are the least you want to think about. I don't want to ask you how your data is worth for you. You can rent a cloud data storage for as low as 4$/month. Is your data worth more than this ?

To make sure you select the best cloud storage provider you can read some reviews on dedicated websites. On Top 10 cloud storage you can see which are the top 10 companies that offer cloud storage, top 10 companies that offer online backup solutions and top 10 companies that offer cloud servers.

When dealing with private data, the security is very important for all. These companies are paying money to ensure that your data and your connection is protected, so no one can steal it.

The post Store and Backup Your Data in the Cloud appeared first on Ip locator.

According to a poll i run on my site, 36% of my readers use Windows 7, and only 26% are using XP. The results of the poll may be not representative for the whole world, but they say something: Windows 7 is more popular right now. What happens ? The advantage that everything works on XP will go away. Software and driver developers will start to support less and less the "old" version of Windows and we will start to have problems.

The support for windows XP will end in 2014, but let's be honest, Microsoft is focusing all the powers to the new operating system, not to the old one, so not much to be done for XP. The support for Windows 98 ended in 2006, but i stopped using it in 2002.

Let's go deeper into stats. My Google analytics account says that 49% of my users are using Windows 7 or Windows vista, while 48% of them are using Windows XP. These stats are not so bad for windows XP. Some kind of stats may be encouraging for anyone, but as i said before these stats will never improve for windows xp. No new adepts, no new fans. At the beginning of this year Windows XP was at 70% percent. A really huge drop.

Conclusion: Maybe the support from Microsoft from XP stops in 2014, but the support from users already started to drop.

The post I think it is time to move from Windows Xp appeared first on Ip locator.

Arguments for Windows XP

Windows XP is faster.

The main arguments for the ones that don't want to move to Windows 7 is that they think they have a low resource computer that will be unable to handle Windows 7. This is partially true, Windows 7 is heavier than Windows XP, but that don't mean your computer will just crash when you try to install. It is also true that your computer will be slower with seven, but not the operating system is the cause. For example if you have 1GB of memory you will find out that your favourite Mozilla Firefox browser with 10 open tabs use most of your memory, while your operating system use only 20% or so.  I have some friends with 1GB computers that are using Windows 7, they often complain about the lack of memory that causes the computer to run slow sometimes but it is probably because the browser with a lot of open tabs. If you have less than 1GB you should not try using windows 7.

Windows 7 can't run all programs that i use.

If you are concerned about some big name software that it will not be available on Windows 7 you don't have to worry. They already have versions for Windows 7. If you concern about light software that you are afraid that the developer stopped working on it a long time ago also don't worry, they will surely work. Basically the software for Windows XP and Windows 7 is not that different. The only difference is when you use the version made for Windows 7 you can get more features. There is a bigger difference between W7 on 32 bit and W7 on 64 bit. So my recommendation, if you switch, use the 32 bit version, even if your computer works on 64.

The battery issue

There is a well known issue about the battery problem in Windows 7. If you run a laptop and you mind if you will have to change your battery after 1 year of use, then you should stay away from Windows 7, at least until they fix the bugs that cause the batteries to die very soon. I have a lot of friends with Windows 7 or Vista that are complaining that after 1 year of use their batteries are almost dead.

Windows 7 arguments.

Better visual enhancements

This can be a good argument especially for kids, or girls. It is a known fact that some persons like the animations even if they add few seconds to every action that you take. From my point of view, they are waste of time and they are annoying, i turn them off whenever i have the occasion, but i can't ignore the fact that a lot of people like it.  If you are a gamer that you like to have a dark-blue background image with a lot of things in it, and you think that the screen-saver with the highest animation is the right for you then wait no more and switch, you will find a lot of new visual enhancements that you will like a lot.

More secure

There are tons of malwares build trying to take advantage of Windows XP vulnerabilities, but with a good antivirus and firewall you can fix this once and for all. Is Windows 7 safer ? It is true that windows 7 has less known vulnerabilities, but this is probably because the malware creators didn't bothered so much to find them. It is also true that Windows 7 have by default some anti-virus security, but  they can have vulnerabilities too. While they didn't improved the file permission system at all, i can't say that you can be safer in Windows 7 so you will need an anti-virus too.

Want to be up-to-date

Being up-to-date is good. You should be aware that sooner or later the Windows XP will be only history, and if you anyway have to move then why not doing it sooner than later ? But, before you jump in and go to the first store to buy Windows 7, let me remind you that there are other alternatives too. Ask one of your tech friends to install linux on your computer and try it for few days. You will not be able to use it as you use Windows, but you should at least get used to it and the way Linux works. Why ? You already know the hype in the phone and tablet markets. More and more hardware developers switching to tablets, and the phones are getting more and more popular. There is a very high change that your operating system from the tablet that you'll buy to be based on Linux. I think Linux is the future. What linux provides is a good platform to build on, and this is why no one want to create their own from scratch, they take Linux and build on it. It is time saving and also more secure as we know that the security in Linux is top.

Conclusions

The decision is up to you, the fact is that Windows XP is getting no younger and Windows 7 is getting no faster, but sooner or later you have to move on.

The post Is Moving from Windows XP to Windows 7 worth it ? appeared first on Ip locator.

Exactly 4 years ago, on 7 July 2006 Ipgp.net was created. I am very proud to see that it is still popular, and the signs that it is a grown-up website are so obvious.

When it started there was only an ip lookup form. The loading time was about 30 seconds/query due to a heavy database and the results were inaccurate.

Now, the website responds very fast, accurate results, map included. Now we have this blog too, an API for developers, simple widgets.

I will drink a beer for Ipgp and i hope it will see significant improvements year by year.

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