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No Servers in China, huh? Why don't you ask you masters about Jitong Communications, in Tiajin. That was in China last time I looked.

Here's the situation as of February.

http://groups.google.com/group/news.admin.net-abuse.email/browse_thread/thread/48e62939e58b079b/

and a quick visit to http://visualroute.visualware.com/ and we find that 203.93.173.3 is hosted in China.

And here we are in March, once people had caught on to you.

Registrant:
Phorm, Inc.
264 W 40th Street 16th Floor
New York, New York 10018
United States
Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: OIX.COM
Created on: 28-Jul-95
Expires on: 27-Jul-11
Last Updated on: 29-Feb-08
Administrative Contact:
Cote, Chris chris.cote@phorm.com
Phorm, Inc.
264 W 40th Street 16th Floor
New York, New York 10018
United States
2123592030
Technical Contact:
Clark, Allan allan.clark@phorm.com
Phorm, Inc.
264 W 40th Street 16th Floor
New York, New York 10018
United States
2123592030

Domain servers in listed order:

Iran's not offline. Many Iranian sites (www.president.ir, www.tu.ac.ir) work fine. But instead of routing across the Atlantic it's routing across the Pacific, through links between California and Singapore. It's slower than it should be, but it's working.

To be fair, router1.iust.ac.ir isn't responding for me either. Oddly, though, www.iust.ac.ir responds fine. And VisualRoute is having no trouble with router1.iust.ac.ir.

ITR has only a single node in the Middle East, so it's not really going to tell us much about this picture.

psst.. http://visualroute.visualware.com/ and paste this IP 194.225.228.25 Where does it go? No one knows!

Doing a quick IP trace http://visualroute.visualware.com/ tells us that Torrentspy is located in the Netherlands. How exactly does that fit into all this?

Yeah I wonder about that, I'm supposed to have DSL (Verizon), always suspected it to be a bit slow: here are my test results: download: 783kbs, upload: 138kbs. I don't have my contract here, but that seems slow. I'm moving from this house, or I'd check further into it. (I just checked, I'm paying for the high speed connections, my test results are about 1/3 what "up to" speeds should be...)

My download speeds feel sluggish, the upload speeds are a little painful. My biggest objection to the upload speed results is they are just barely better than ISDN. WTF?

(BTW, go here if you want to see what your speeds are... It's a test site to see if your connection speed supports VOIP. Mine BARELY could.)

I find that xt, visual xtraceroute, only knows the geographical location of one in twenty hops. This thing which is an online visual traceroute somehow does a lot better.

That one has a database, but it doesn't rely on whois data, so it may not infringe the patent. Trying again...

http://www.visualware.com/personal/products/visual route/index.html

Click on live trial and give your email. It seems almost identical to the patent - it runs a traceroute and figures out where each hop is. I have no idea how old it is, or whether it's related to Digital Envoy, though.

better if he could overlay a map of the world

You're not the first to think of that, e.g. here. (free reg required, as of recently)

They have gathered a bunch of geographic-vs-IP data, and although it's not a world map as you mentioned, they provide a visual traceroute, i.e. an approximate geographic route from their server to a host you specify, e.g. your own PC/internet gateway. Click left/right to zoom in/out.

Their ultimate goal is to sell it to you, for you to map things from your own point of view. Using it on their site is free and of course more limited.

(Not affiliated in any way, etc. etc. etc.)

One such publisher is Visualware. Their software phones home on each traceroute.

ip address: 192.168.55.3 [dhcp77-1.example.com]
local ip address: 192.168.55.3
date/time: Mon May 05 07:22:22 EDT 2003
ethernet mac: censored
user name: censored
computer name: censored
license key: NONE - CRACKED VERSION
product: VisualRoute (build 1858)
zone: en_US-06:00

ip address: 192.168.55.3 [dhcp77-1.example.com]
local ip address: 192.168.55.3
date/time: Mon May 05 07:22:22 EDT 2003
ethernet mac: censored
user name: censored
computer name: censored
license key: NONE - CRACKED VERSION
product: VisualRoute (build 1858)
zone: en_US-06:00

Well, according to visualroute It would appear that whilst www.es5.com is in "Israel" download.es5.com is in Amsterdam.

VisualWare's Email Tracker Pro

Emailtracker proÂ

Send theyre ISP a copy of the mail headers and the picture from visualroute :D

Works wonders. And say you are now blocking theyre ENTIRE domain for spamming. That helps alot :D

Two years ago my computer was stolen from my apartment and the police were basically useless. No fingerprints, no clue. A long chain of events that all went in my favor found my computer back in my hands and a suspect for many robberies in my area in police custody.

My computer at home was set up for complete remote access through several tools. The most important was a dyndns client that updates your ip on dns servers any time it changes. This way, you don't need the expense of a static ip to be able to get to your machine over the Internet. I also had VNC (sort of like a graphical terminal server), FTP, and a web site.

The first thing I did when I noticed that the IP addy changed in DNS (telling me my computer was brought online) was to find out who owned the IP address. Using a tool called VisualRoute, I was able to get a nice graphical image of where the IP traffic was originating from. Unfortunately, the user was using AOL and I have no idea how to trace the phone calls. I called up AOL anyway and told them to save the data about the user that was using the IP in question at the time given by the dyndns service. They won't give you any data of course, but a court order could get it out of them.

Next, I got clearance from the police to "snoop." I was told that you have the right by law to any and all info on a computer that you own, even if the data belongs to someone else using the computer. This data can then be used against the "perps" in a court of law. So I wrote a program that checked for a particular page on my web site every minute or so. If found, my computer was online (a simple ping won't work since someone else might be using the dynamic IP after my machine went offline). Anyway, my computer played "Bad Boys" to let me know it was time to check up on my stolen computer.

Using VNC in "read only" mode I watched everything that was done on my computer while it was online. I also used FTP to recover some files that were important to me. Then one day I watched as someone made an online purchase. I recorded everything they put in: name, address, credit card number, everything. I chuckled as the final checkout screen assured them that the site was encrypted and no one could see this information. It also so happened that they had a digital camera (probably stolen also) so I downloaded all their pictures as well (a painful process on dialup).

I showed the important info to the police and they were able to get a warrant and make a visit to the address I supplied and the house I had pictures of. While there, the detective called me up and I "took" control of my computer via VNC after they connected it to the Internet. The detective told me that the wife was quite shocked at this spectacle. Anyway I showed them several documents and things that helped show it was my computer. The Dell Service Tag was also helpful in this regard.

Anyway, thought this story from the front lines was relevant to the discussion, ENJOY!

I never intended to say Visualroute is infallible. It is useful.

I have used Visualroute on about a dozen people around the world, and in all of my tests I had the correct state or counrty.

I came across something interesting in their FAQ
Q: What do the colored lines on the map mean?
A: Links drawn in blue indicate known locations. Links drawn in purple indicate that a 'guess' was made. Guess locations are derived from domain registration (WHOIS) information.

It turns out the BLUE line on the www.findlaw.com was exactly right. The extra segment going from California to North Carolina was in purple. I don't know how they are determining "known locations", but it is obviously something better than WHOIS information, because that is what it uses when it "guesses".

-

Of course you still need the IP address, but that's a little easier to find. You could even do a little social engineering to get it...

No need for social engineering. Anytime you play a game with someone you create an internet connection, that means your machine has to know their IP address. On Win98 (and probably all MS OS's) just open a dos window and type NETSTAT to see the text version of their address (userID.AOL.COM), or NETSTAT -N to see the dotted IP address (123.45.67.89).

Lots of people hesitate to tell you their IP address, thinking it is some big secret. It's rather amusing to get into a game with them and say "Your IP address is 123.45.67.89, your ISP is RoadRunner, and you are in Southern California, right near the coast".

How do I do the last part, naming their location? Just type their IP address into visualroute. (Requires Java) One end of the line is fixed at the visualroute server, the line shows the physical location of every server along the route to the target. You can click the map to zoom in.

It is interesting to note that it is not uncommon for servers locations to be completely different from the country code in the address. For example www.indymedia.org.il (Isreal country code) is actually hosed in Chiago USA. Often it is simply more convient getting content hosted on major US server farms, but sometimes it could be relevant for legal reasons, or it could even be intentionally missleading.

P.S.
I used www.indymedia.org.il as an example because it's the only example I remember off hand. I recall that one becase indymedia is anti-isreal, and I suspect the Isreal country code may be intentionally missleading. The indymedia "news" sites are certainly independant, but in my oppinion extremely biased and unreliable. It is a good source for certain stories the "major media" may have neglected, but double check any information you get there. The writing often drops to the level of pure propaganda.

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you don't think it makes sense... NYT registration provides me with

I meant the slashdot services cannot function without a login, and only asks the bare minimum to enable that functionality. My salary data provides no desirable function, I'm not using the NYT to compute my taxes.

I don't remember using real information when signing up for NYT

And what exactly is the point of FORCING someone to enter bogus data? Hi, I'll be your waiter tonight, do you have our frequent diner card? No? Well, here, take a few minutes to fill out our form detailing your favorite sexual positions and practices. You are free to enter bogus answers but I refuse to take your order until you do so. All future dinner orders will be correleated with your listed sexual prefferences. Pretty absurd, but is it fundamentally any different?

And to use that data to target content more effectively, improve site structure, fund content that readers enjoy, and target advertising more effectively.

By that argument you should have entered valid NYT registration data, including accurate income.

cookie is useful to me because it allows me to get to content that otherwise would not be available

It may be mandatory, but it is not necessary. Everything would work fine without it.
Your browser is saving a file on your hard drive, but it isn't for your benefit. You have every right to delete or alter it at will. Too bad browsers don't randomize the cookie contents at every boot-up. Maybe I'll download the Mozilla source and write code to do that. It's my browser, it's supposed to what I want/need done, and I don't want it helping people track me.

Cookies have been around for seven years or so. Most people have them turned on.

As you say, most people have turned them on, but that also implies many people do not. Assuming everyone has or accepts cookies is a bad assumption. Assuming everyone runs internet explorer is a bad assumption. And javascript, and pop-up windows, and Macromedia-Flash, and ActiveX controls, and Windows MediaPlayer, and even Windows itself for that matter.

A web site that makes these assumptions is broken. It is fine to use these features where they are genuinely necessary, but the rest of of the website should still function without them. Do you have any idea how many websites I've come across that actually work perfectly in Netscape (or another case listed above), except they have javascript at the top that tells the page not to display? It gives an error message saying I need IE, then I bypass the code and the everything works fine.

I trust slashdot's use of my information more...
Why?

Does "why" matter? I also choose to trust EXE files from some sources and not from others. I have to explain myself if I say "no"?

I see this as a fair trade.
I was really hoping for someone who could explain the ethical dilema here - why should I be concerned?

There is an entire industry built around collecting and selling personal data. NYT is far from the worst offender, but it is still an offensive practice. Most companies involved are pretty slimy, and even the "respectable" ones may sell your data to the slimy ones. Even if you enter bogus data your real identity may be recovered by combining the information with other databases. Your IP address, cookies, a "fingerprint" of the information revealed by your computer during normal browsing, or other means may be used to link your real name entered at one site with with data collected at another where you entered a bogus profile. If you have any doubt, I have 2 links for you. This one (requires java) will reveal your physical location. Click the button with your IP address, then you can click map to zoom in twice. (The other end of the line is the website location.) Then there's this one which shows some of the things your browser reveals about your computer (expecially if you use IE). If you go down the full list it is quite likely enough information for a unique fingerprint of your computer, and therefor you. All of that information and more is available to every website you hit. Once someone collects your information you have no idea who it's sold to, what other data it is combined with, or what is done with it.

My point is that it's possible, someone can make a buck off of it, sooner or later it will happen. It only takes one sleazy website to trace your location and fingerprint your computer. Lets just use NYT data as an example. Say NYT compiles a list of every article viewed by every account and sells it. Another company buys it and links your NYT data with you. At that point the possibilites are endless. Maybe your employer or neighbor wants to see what disease you regularly read up on (Aids perhaps?). Maybe some anti-abortion or pro-abortion group wants to check if you read the pro-abortion or anti-abortion articles.

I bet you dismissed the example above as paranoid. IT IS MERELY AN EXAMPLE. Too many companies have already proven they will abuse your information at the first opportunity. The more people get used to giving data for a "fair trade", the more places that collect data, the more it gets sold back and forth, the more it accumulates, the more likely major abuses become. Eventually it approaches certainty. That's not paranoia. By the way, did you click the link before and see the map pointing to your location?

Some people refuse to buy shoes made by children in overseas sweatshops. One pair of shoes won't make any difference, but companies notice when they see a percentage of people doing it. When I hit a website their logs show one more person who has pop-up ads blocked. It's browser, my screen, and I don't want ads poping up all over it. If blocking the ads breaks the site then they see that pop-up ads drive away visitors. Same with NYT. I'm not telling them what I earn. Either they get bogus data (wasting my time and currupting their database) every time (I don't keep the cookie), or it drives away visitors and we both lose.

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Here's a quick pair of tips for you - if you can't reacha site due to bad DNS, try hitting www.anonymizer.com and using their free proxy. It's imperfect but it may do the trick.
Another option is to use visualroute.visualware.com to get the IP, then going to that instead of the URL.

I think you mean http://www.visualware.com/emailtrackerpro/index.ht ml. :) Anyway, I just tracked down a spammer using that and VisualTrace down to their ISP, so it looks pretty nice.

--pi

but if people were just sitting around, waiting for some local content to gobble up, then there would be thousands of mycommunity.com's out there

If only it were that simple. Almost everyone I talk to has mentioned the fact that they wish, for instance, that there was a good local auction site (because they want to buy and sell stuff minus the shipping and customs hassles, and because they want to deal with large stuff like fridges, stoves, furniture, etc), yet the few who tried found that the classic inertia/network effect came into play: No one is selling because there are no buyers, and no one is buying because there's no sellers. There is CLEARLY a need for this, but it doesn't mean it is filled. Well let me put it another way: Many people have tried to fill it to discover the problem in getting the inertia started, which generally requires the big $ to advertise. This is where big worldwide sites are well known and pull in the users, but the local content gets missed.

As far as geographical HTTP tags, of course it would be a feature that would be able to be disabled, just as right now I can set my Accept language to Chinese if I really wanted (for all of those who claim that discrimination will be used [I'd love to know what sites people visit that makes them think that], please realize that your browser is already telling plenty about you, including your preferred language ordering, etc, and AS IT IS someone can do a tracerouting and determine to a fair degree where you are on the planet. See http://visualroute.visualware.com).

Pass a law? All residents must log into "mycommunity.com" once a week or be fined?

Did I somehow insinuate that? This whole discussion is about lack of community and why it happened, and most anyone who knew the online community that existed in the days of BBS' understand that. So no, I suppose you're right: we should all accept that MSN and Yahoo represents community to the general internet population nowadays.

It just seems like a lot of work (both software/standard implementation, and content formatting), for almost no benefit.

It's much too big of a topic to be covered in a reply hidden deep in an obscure thread, but there are considerable benefits to it, but I don't expect it to fly among the paranoid, anti-commercial, anti-capitalism Slashdot crowd (Yup advertising is one huge benefit of it: Imagine if every tiny little retailer could target only people within 3 KM of their location...of course advertising is evil so let's pretend I didn't say that). As far as the work involved it is absolutely trivial and several people have taken stabs at it.

If you go there a poster by the name of Israel writes lengthy columns and celebrates when palestinians are killed (even children).

That only supports my position that Indymedia's only value is perverse amusement that it refers to itself as journalism.

It's also amusing to note that www.indymedia.org.il is hosted from Milford, CT, USA.

And before you try to say that many sites are hosted in the US, http://adelaide.indymedia.org.au/ is hosted in Australia,
http://www.indymedia.nl is hosted in the Netherlands,
http://indymedia.no is hosted in Norway,
and http://www.indymedia.org.uk/ is hosted in England.

Indymedia ".Isreal" is the ONLY Indymedia site with a deceptive country code.

Visualroute is lots of fun. As a matter of fact, not only are YOU a fellow American, you appear to be a fellow New Yorker. Hi neighbor :)

If you have any more credible sites for coverage I'd enjoy taking a look at them.

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There has been a commercial solution out for a very long time, called VisualRoute. I used it for a job I did a while back. Pretty slick stuff. You really don't need *any* centralized server, if the end box is up - you can find out pretty close where it's at. One of the major problems with this is AOL because all their IPs are divied out of Ohio or some other state (can't recall).

Sorry ya got beat to the punch, but you can go punch your friend because there is a company that is making a lot of money off that idea.

Wow. You believe that the Oil Companies are behind it all. I read your post and just blurted out "Wow".

Oil Companies have a significant amount of influence, but I think you're several orders of magnitude out of scale.

You propose that the Oil Companies have total control of not only of the US government, 10 thousand investigators, 10 thousand of the US media (do you have any clue how many newspapers there are here?), but also of the governments and media of Germany, England, France, Israel, Japan and Pakistan? (Just to list the ones in my post).

Oh yeah - the Oil companies also control the court system. Ummm, why were the Oil Companies interested in indicting Bin Laden for the embassy bombings in 1998? And why did they convict members of Al-Qaida? Even if I accepted your theory I can't figure out the logic there.

Ummm, and I guess the Oil Companies made fake videotapes of Bin Laden talking about attacking America? ummm, maybe I'm dense - this is REALLY not making much sense to me.

You _do_ know that Oil companies want to run pipelines over Afghanistan, right?
Somehow I don't think that manufacturing a war the simplest or cheapest way to pump oil.

You _do_ know why Saddam Hussein (the most likely culprit when it comes to the Anthrax-attacks) is still in charge in Iraq, right?
I wasn't privy to the decision making process, but I think the main reasons were #1 The US didn't want to upset the surrounding governments and #2 I think they really believed that he would have been overthrown from within.

you know, it _was_ the CIA who trained Osama bin Laden and gave him weapons to fight those nasty russians
Yeah, I know. Cold war proxy battle crap. Too bad the CIA didn't know they would have been better off letting Russia conquer Afghanistan.

You don't _want_ to question your government and your media, which is plainfully obvious.
Hehe, amusing. In case you missed it, I was already familiar with indymedia.org. I specifically went looking for opposing viewpoint news sources for 2 reasons. #1 To catch any USA bias in the news #2 To try to understand the other side. It turns out most Afghan news websites are physically located in the US. I specifically went to the trouble to find out which servers were outside the US using this really cool tool.

But, of course, your government never lies. Ever.
No, everybody lies. But I think that people in the US government probably lie less than in most other governments because they know the favorite pass time of the US press is to catch them at it.

Sigh. How does it feel to be so ignorant - really?
What I don't know I can research.

Sigh. How does it feel to have delusions that your cat is a secret agent of the Oil Companies?

Next, Netcraft say it's an NT 4 box.

AFAIK, this is a shared host - if you knock over the box then you'll take down a whole bunch of sites run by people who're totally innocent (not to mention all the innocent people who bank with this company who'll be affected by such an irresponsible attack).

Having checked IPs, my site doesn't seem to be hosted on the same box, but I know I'd be pretty pissed if my visitors couldn't get to my site because someone had decided, with pretty tenuous reasons, to hAx0R the host machine. If you (understandably) feel a need to take action, please try to do it in a more productive manner.