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 |
I asked google what my IP address is and it gave it to me, along with a link to whatismyIPaddress.com.
ReplyDeleteAt that site they give me the IP address for IPv4 and IPv6, and the location of my internet provider.
They say if you do an IP address search through them you won't get a person's name, the exact location or street address, a phone number, or their email address, for security reasons.
I take that to mean they can get those things but won’t disclose them unless you’ve got a badge, court order, or a buddy that works there.