We collect the IP addresses of anyone that submits an online app to apply for our service. My question is from a technical perspective, is it possible for someone in the US to get on the Internet, go to a web site and submit an online form, such as ours and their IP address show up as one coming from another country? I can see an International person hiding or spoofing their IP for one being in the US, but I have a very hard time seeing any US visitor showing up with an International IP.
I received an app for isubmit.com, which has been registered sine 1998. The email they used was xxx@isubmit.com. Something doesn’t seem right though as the IP showed up as http://whois.domaintools.com/122.55.1.242 (Philippines) and they claim to not be accepting credit cards at the moment, but have an existing Authorize.net account…
There are different kinds of proxy servers, but what you’re thinking about usually is, yes. I can’t think of any legitimate reasons for using one, but there might be I suppose.
Can you please explain? I’m trying to find out if I should bother with this lead or not. If it is someone overseas pretending to be someone in the US, I don’t want to bother…
Military personnel abroad may show up with a non us IP. There may be other legitimate reasons for this as well but they were the first to come to mind. I am wondering why you would not want any customers outside the USA tho?
Valid point. But I’d say statisticaly it’s more reliable than using IP addresses.
I live in West Springfield MA, AFAIK my ISP is Boston MA, and my site is California, or Arizona. I can’t keep up as they move every once in a while.
It is as easy to lie with the IP address as with entering a street address. Plus the street address will be the location of your visitor rather than the location of their ISP.
[ot]We use proxies kinda regularly for some sites that the Dutch government has told them to block us. Never mind that even if you’re a few meters away from the German border and Germany may access it. Also, proxies help you avoid really annoying things like search results assuming you want local results. If I type in Google.com, they will shunt me to Google.nl even though google.nl never gives me as good web design results as google.com does. Now, at our house I can type google.us and get American google but at other people’s houses you still get redirected. And google’s not the only one. I’ve used proxies when I knew I’d be going to a lot of sites giving me false results.
Also when you are traveling there are very annoying sites who will shunt you to the language of the country you are traveling in. So when I was in Portugal for the Perl conference there were sites who gave me everything in Portuguese, which is not close enough to Spanish to be useful to me. Proxies for the win.
I have not (yet) ever used a proxy to hide my identity or to scam anyone (I would not use a proxy to view Hula for instance, an US-only web tv thingie… though that might be because I don’t watch web tv). I use it to get around annoying geo-BS. Let the user state where they want to get results from searches or which language they want to read the site in.[/ot]
Not true.
Some corporate networks use proxy servers to reduce bandwidth and provide faster access. I believe some mobile operators also run through a proxy server in order to optimise the site for mobile use.
Proxy Servers can do various things as was stated; mine usually compress images.
Proxy servers enhance security by hiding the individual host address. When a server receives the request, the server sees only one address: the address of the proxy server, not the individual host. They can also enhance throughput in a network by caching requests any sizeable organisation will use them. Some Firewalls are very similar in principle to proxy servers.
You were meaning “Anonymous” Open/Public Servers… Although if they do use one; they themselves are at risk of losing their details to the open proxy. There is something called “Proxy Check” that can help detect them.
Proxy servers can also provide a bit of security. Where I work, we need to put in our login and password to get to the Internet. This can be a pain with some applications that don’t recognize that people can use proxies, but at the same time it can prevent viruses, trojans, etc. from phoning home.