Location location location [IP address

Abstract

On the Internet one can get a very good idea of where your kennel is, and perhaps even work out where you go for walkies. That's because everywhere you go on the Net you leave a unique scent behind you your IP address. Every time you send an email or browse a website, there it is, and even if you are savvy enough to conceal it by routing your traffic through a proxy server, you are only as safe as your proxy is willing and able to make you. Type an IP address taken from the headers of an incoming email into geoiptool.com, for instance, and this mash-up site will pull up the relevant data and merge it with a Google map, giving you an idea of where your correspondent is based. Most services of that kind called geolocation rely on proprietary databases, but assuming you don't use a proxy,then a basic level of IP location is possible simply using the data in the Internet's domain name service (DNS) databases.