Dreamlandresort.com

Rumor has it that FBI raided the home of the guy who runs the dreamlandresort.com website in Rachel Nevada. The site is devoted to all things pertaining to Area 51, you know, the place where the gummit hides the UFO's and the aliens. This piqued my interest because I've seen at least a couple of movies where Area 51 played a part and I enjoyed those movies (Independence Day comes to mind). So let's see what we've got. We've got a Twitter thread offering up the internet's opinion. One of the subjects is whether the FBI has taken down his website (they haven't), but then the issue comes up as to whether then can take it down. Do they even know where it is? So sum dood looks it up and comes up with the latitude and longitude. Hmmph. How he'd do that? Well, it can't be too tough, so I thought I'd give it a go. I opened a terminal window on my Linux box and typed "ping " and then pasted the website's name. You didn't expect me to actually type it, did you? Of course, the Linux terminal window is old, so the standard cut and paste keys (Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V) don't work. You need to right click and select. Still, copy and paste is generally more reliable than my typing, especially for experiments where you don't know whether it is going to work or not.

Anyway, ping returns the IP address along with some gobble-de-gook about once a second. It will keep on doing this until you kill it with a Ctrl-C (yes, the same Ctrl-C you used to copy the URL. Different interpretations for standard commands on different planets). Take that IP address and feed it to iplocation.net and dumps a bunch of valuable data on your screen. Highlight that data, copy and paste it into your text editor, remove all the redundant stuff, Ctrl-A to select all, Ctrl-C to copy, open a spreadsheet on Google Drive, type Ctrl-V to paste it, do a little judicious editing and you get this: 

Geolocation data for IP addess 69.168.83.86
Wall, looky there, we gots sum nummers. Wonder what's actually there. Plotted on a map:

Geolocation data for IP addess 69.168.83.86

Most of the locations are right around Salt Lake City, but there is one in Las Vegas and one in the middle of a small lake in Kansas. Rachel Nevada is about 100 miles north of Las Vegas, about a half an inch on this map.

In the middle of nowhere seems to the unifying element here. Makes me wonder where they got these locations from. Did some computer algorithm generate them by timing how long it takes a packet to make the round trip? Or did someone just give a street address when they signed up? Or did someone just throw darts at a map? Or maybe everything to the right of the decimal point is just garbage and the location is only accurate to plus or minus ten miles.

And how is it we have multiple locations for a single IP address? IP addresses are typically assigned dynamically, so the same address can be assigned to different locations at different times. Haven't figured out what's going on here, except that maybe routers remember having the address at one time.

I don't know if I learned anything here. It did keep me occupied for a couple of hours. Better than playing solitaire I suppose.