golfmom said:
misterallgood, could you explain IP address to us and how they work. Could someone in Florida somehow show up as someone in Ohio for example?
Yes -- for instance, webmasters hate AOL for that reason -- if I'm surfing via AOL from Georgia, it will show up as coming from Manassas, Virginia. An AOL surfer in Texas looks like they are coming from Kansas.
There are two types of IP address -- static and dynamic. AOL's are dynamic, meaning they shift constantly, though I've found that the first set of numbers will often stay the same, and because of the way you access AOL's servers to use the net, where ever their server farm is will show up as the geographic destination.
Basically IP means Internet Protocol number, and every machine has one. AOL is still more an exception than a rule as to skewing geographic locations, though -- for instance, a place I used to work had a fixed IP -- always the same set of numbers -- and since the server that accessed the internet was onsite, if I did a geographic trace it would show me my work location. Generally you can guarantee, outside of AOL, if someone shows up as being in the Charlotte or Memphis area, they are probably in the Charlotte or Memphis area. There's a utility called a ping that basically sends a packet of data back along the route the computer traveled through various servers, and this is how a geotrace is done.
IP detection is still a lot of guesswork, though -- with telecommuting, people using their work's service for all their surfing, war-driving, etc, you can't guarantee that people are always surfing from where it looks like they are surfing from. Kinko's is another instance -- my computer was down one day and I stopped in at a Kinko's near my house to check my e-mail. While there I looked at my blog. Later the Kinko's hit showed up as coming from California, even though I'm in Georgia. Basically that meant that even Kinko's computers in Georgia have access the internet through a server in Cali.
I don't feel like I've explained it very well, but it's actually pretty confusing and complex no matter how you slice it.
Mr. A.