313
votes
Accepted
How does Google know where I am?
Google uses BSSID information from your WLAN Access Point to get an approximation of where you are located, even with GPS and WiFi turned off. Taken from “How does Google Maps estimate my location ...
- 3,987
184
votes
Accepted
How does DuckDuckGo know my native language even though I am using a VPN in a country with a different language?
One possible explanation is that DuckDuckGo is using the headers that are sent in your request to determine their display. For example, it is very common to use the Accept-Language header to ...
- 1,385
168
votes
Accepted
Is there any actual security benefit to restricting foreign IP addresses?
The concept is "reducing the threat surface". If there is an expectation that no connections will be made from a certain geographic area, then it makes sense to block that area, because, by definition,...
- 127k
159
votes
Accepted
Should I contact the manufacturer if their product allows access to other users' location information?
Yes, you should notify the problem to the company - with caution.
Update: a shorter, very complete answer was supplied by @crovers. But if you have patience...
...the problem here is not simply the ...
- 22.7k
115
votes
Should I contact the manufacturer if their product allows access to other users' location information?
Yes. They ought to be using a long, unguessable string instead of a predictable, short one.
I would consider this a security flaw that is relatively simple for them to fix.
However, I would caution ...
- 6,371
89
votes
Find IM user location via netstat?
That article is wrong and that website in general seems like a very unreliable source for anything.
With the netstat tool, among other stuff, you can see established TCP connections.
When you use ...
- 1,008
77
votes
Is the UK Parliament e-petition system trustworthy?
The petitions site is purely a mechanism to see whether there may be high enough numbers to support something, and if so, that something will be discussed in Parliament.
There are some checks and ...
- 61.5k
74
votes
Can someone get my home address if I click on a link to a IP logger?
First: almost every single site out there is an "IP logger". Every server logs at least this information:
IP address of the client
Browser type and version
Operating system
Which site they came from (...
- 52.8k
58
votes
How does Google know where I am?
You disabled WiFi and GPS, but you still have cellular data turned on. That means that the phone is in communication with the local cell towers. Android uses cell tower geolocation to estimate your ...
- 34.1k
49
votes
Accepted
How can you fake geolocation in Firefox?
Faking the Geolocation
You can spoof the location provided via the HTML5 Geolocation API this way:
Go to about:config.
Type in geo.provider.network.url (or geo.wifi.uri in older versions)
Change ...
- 44.5k
47
votes
How can html5 geolocalisation bypass my vpn?
I just checked this with my VPN in http://html5demos.com/geo
Although I VPN through Germany, it still shows my nearby location in London.
If you read https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/...
- 661
47
votes
How does DuckDuckGo know my native language even though I am using a VPN in a country with a different language?
I had the same problem: Google always responding in my native language, even though I used a VPN elsewhere in the world. I wiped all cookies and so on....to no avail... and then I found that I had an ...
- 1,017
44
votes
Should I contact the manufacturer if their product allows access to other users' location information?
To add to the other answers - be aware of the risks of reporting the problem yourself:
If you're inexperienced with reporting security issues, you might come across to them as dodgy and potentially ...
- 44.5k
42
votes
Accepted
Is it practical to pre-blacklist certain GeoIP regions?
It's essentially a business decision, rather than a security one. The risks from a business perspective are that you lose users from that country, or who are accessing the site from VPNs located in ...
- 27.3k
23
votes
Should I contact the manufacturer if their product allows access to other users' location information?
If I were you, I would say something like
Hello,
I have mistyped my ID (e.g. 12345) and pressed enter instead of backspace,
and I was dumbfounded to find that the page loaded and found
the location ...
- 433
21
votes
How can html5 geolocalisation bypass my vpn?
A VPN masks your IP address. But the HTML5 geolocation API isn't based on your IP address. It is a Javascript API which can be used to ask the web browser directly where it thinks it is located ...
- 49.2k
20
votes
Is the UK Parliament e-petition system trustworthy?
General comments
Can you be 100% sure that every signature is from a real person? No. Can you take some precautions to make it harder to cheat? Yes.
Here are some things that the British government ...
- 65.2k
18
votes
Is it practical to pre-blacklist certain GeoIP regions?
Banning ranges of IPs is generally not a good idea. You should only do this if a range is consistently a big problem for you. Here's why:
Many people use VPNs or anonymizing networks such as TOR, ...
- 289
17
votes
Find IM user location via netstat?
In addition to @skooog's answer which states that the IP address that you are detecting is not that of the user:
IP address geolocation is, at least for IPv4, doomed to fail except in specific edge-...
- 275
17
votes
Can someone get my home address if I click on a link to a IP logger?
Any web page you load will have your IP address
In order for your browser to download the content associated with a website, your computer will send requests which include your IP address (this is ...
- 3,951
16
votes
Can employer see which state you are in if logged into their VPN?
They would be able to see the IP address of the incoming VPN connection (where you're dialing in from) and can perform lookups to see where that IP is registered.
This won't give them an exact ...
- 9,227
15
votes
Is the UK Parliament e-petition system trustworthy?
I don't know if this is how things are done in Britain, but this is how things are done in the Netherlands whenever a petition is submitted to the government:
A random sample of the signatures is ...
- 2,776
14
votes
Someone detected my location on Omegle
TL;DR - No, this is common on omegle..
In order for Omegle to work. It connects every pair via UDP. This exposes the currently paired client's ip address. They were simply running wireshark, found ...
- 3,186
13
votes
Accepted
How was The Pirate Bay datacenter kept hidden?
The pirate bay used multiple proxies around the world. As soon as one got detected, they switched over to another one. They used preinstalled encrypted images that they deployed at numerous cloud ...
- 1,593
13
votes
How can html5 geolocalisation bypass my vpn?
Try disabling HTML5 geolocation if you don't use it. In Firefox, set geo.enabled to false in about:config.
There have been bugs, and there will be again, example 1 and example 2.
- 238
11
votes
Can I know who tried to login to my Google account?
No, there is no way for you to know who it was. Might not even be a person, could just as well be a hacked computer that is part of a botnet trying to brute force random accounts.
The IP could tell ...
- 65.2k
10
votes
How does DuckDuckGo know my native language even though I am using a VPN in a country with a different language?
I think @punpun1000 is right, you can easily test your browser language by visiting this website - https://browserleaks.com/ip or just simply run this JavaScript code:
alert(navigator.language);//...
- 10.1k
10
votes
Can someone get my home address if I click on a link to a IP logger?
Unlike on TV, it's not easy to track an IP address to a physical address without getting the ISP involved.
So don't worry about that.
VPN's are always a good idea. My personal kit is always on ...
- 316
9
votes
Is there any actual security benefit to restricting foreign IP addresses?
One thing to consider: there are many countries in which the state, or maybe shady Internet providers, snoop on Internet traffic.
Even if your health care provider's website uses TLS (which I assume)...
- 1,977
8
votes
Is it practical to pre-blacklist certain GeoIP regions?
Don't waste your time trying to maintain GeoIP blacklists. It's a kneejerk response, and is shortsighted and ineffective in practice.
Think of it like terrorism-- Timothy McVeigh detonates a bomb in ...
- 6,338
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible