Find Connection Locations

[k@rt]

Hi All,

I was hoping someone could help me to identify a piece of software I used a few years ago, or point me in the direction of a program that does the same thing.

Basically it was a piece of software that showed all ports/connections to the PC but most importantly it showed the geographical location of each connection So if I was chatting with a friend on msn or similar it would show their IP address, where they were in the world and even their ISP operator in some cases.

I don't remember the name of the progam at all but i do remember that it had a simple interface that actually had a map of the world where it displayed the the connections in real time. Also the software was shareware, you got a 30 day free trial.

I can use netstat or software like Port Explorer or Cports to get some info, but they don't seem to relibably give locations.

Any help would be much appriciated

 

[RealBeast]

The only one that I recall with a map was visual whois 2004 ( http://visual-whois-2004.software.informer.com/ ).

 

[k@rt]

Thank you for the link. I will try it out. I did also find this a little while ago:

http://wandering-ips.com/regi.html

Basically I am concerned a person on my yahoo messenger is fraudulent (I meet a lot of people and have a lot of contacts) and I thought that verifying that the person lives where I think they do would be a good way to check their authenticity.

However I am not sure how things like yahoo messenger work... when you talk to someone are you connected directly to them in a p2p system or are you linked through a central yahoo server?

I mean would a program like this actually be able to tell me where the person is that I am talking to?

 

[john-b691]

You can assume almost anything you run does not talk directly to another machine. The ones that do require you to do port forwarding on at least one end. No machine can initiate a session with your machine unless you have port forwarding or you are running without a router.

It is also trivial to hide your IP from anyone with one of the many proxy/vpn servers.

 

[RealBeast]

Thank you for the link. I will try it out. I did also find this a little while ago:

http://wandering-ips.com/regi.html

Basically I am concerned a person on my yahoo messenger is fraudulent (I meet a lot of people and have a lot of contacts) and I thought that verifying that the person lives where I think they do would be a good way to check their authenticity.

However I am not sure how things like yahoo messenger work... when you talk to someone are you connected directly to them in a p2p system or are you linked through a central yahoo server?

I mean would a program like this actually be able to tell me where the person is that I am talking to?

You would just get the address of a Yahoo server, but you could send them a small file and use netstat /n to find out where the file is going and then look up that IP location. While not foolproof, it is better than just accepting what they say.

Another option is to only communicate with people that will exchange e-mail addresses that are not anonymous (hotmail, yahoo, etc.). Again not foolproof, but nothing really is.