Real-Time Tor Detection on ippages.com

Yesterday we rolled out Real-Time Tor Network detection to our HTML pages on ippages.com so that anyone using the Tor Network can go to http://www.ippages.com/ and see something like the following at the top of the page:

84.19.182.23 is a Tor Network exit node (nickname wormhole)
at Host Name wormhole.vnfonatic.de (running Tor 0.1.1.22 on Linux i686)
so you appear to be in DE-Germany (verified) (Thuringen)
through Internet Service Provider (ISP) Keyweb AG (or possibly Keyweb Ag Ip Network)

Further down the page there will also be a "Tor Network node:" section where further details are displayed, and your Country will be shown as "A3-Anonymous Tor Network Proxy (in DE-Germany)".

Why have we done this? Because one of the purposes of our showmyip.com and ippages.com web sites is to show users what web site operators know about you, or believe to be true about you. And when you are using the Tor Network, they can now know all this information about you. Note that they cannot tell what country you are actually in, or what ISP, etc. you are actually using.

If you are a web site operator, and wonder how you can get this same information about your visitors, you can subscribe to our IP Address Lookup service and get all this. Details are available at https://www.ippages.com/lookups/.

One last note about the way the Country is displayed above as "DE-Germany (verified)" and the ISP is displayed as "Keyweb AG (or possibly Keyweb Ag Ip Network)". The word "verified" indicates that both the IP/Geo-location databases we subscribe to give the same result, so it is most likely accurate. The phrase "or possibly ..." indicates that the databases give different results, so one or the other is likely accurate.

We are still working on adding Real-Time Tor Detection to our SOAP interfaces, which will come next. After that our simple text interface will be done, then the CVS format and bulk upload interface. And after that we will start adding all this to showmyip.com!

showmyip.com online again

We are glad to advise that showmyip.com is now back online. Late Wednesday afternoon the problem was fixed by either eNom or Verisign (we've not been able to find out exactly which of them), and from that point the fix gradually was populated to all DNS servers globally. We found things working again late yesterday afternoon, PDT. No one seems to know how it got started, but somehow the DNS root servers started advising showmyip.com as a status NXDOMAIN, meaning there were no records for this domain. This was not correct, and our name servers were fine, and had not been changed in the last few months. Anyone using our IP Address as in http://67.15.225.36/ would have found that everything was working fine. But http://www.showmyip.com/ was definitely not working. It was a nasty feeling of helplessness we suffered from Tuesday morning, until Wednesday afternoon as we attempted to get in touch with someone who could get this fixed, because nothing we had control over would resolve this.

How can this be prevented from ever happening again? I wish we knew. We have setup lookupip.com to point to the same IP Address 67.15.225.36 so that if showmyip.com ever goes off line again like this, users could get the same results from using http://www.lookupip.com/ instead of http://www.showmyip.com/ but we wonder if anyone is going to remember to do that. Likely not. We would have liked to have changed our showmyip.com DNS records to point to our ippages.com server, which we have occasionally done in the past, but we were not able to do this because of the NXDOMAIN status that was stopping everything we tried. Gads. Is there comfort in knowing that this could have happened to anyone's domain name?

RSS/Atom feed now available

We created an RSS/Atom feed yesterday for these blog entries: http://privacy-ecosystem.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Real-Time Tor Detection Service for XML

We added Real-Time Tor Detection to our XML interface on ippages.com yesterday. Users of our IP Address Lookup service on ippages.com can now get XML data elements returned about the Tor network properties of the IP Address, if it is a router/node on the Tor network. Full details are listed on http://whatsnew.ippages.com/.

We believe that we now offer the only publicly available geo-lookup service with this feature, meaning that we can give the greatest degree of accurate results about the country that an IP Address is located in. Specifically, if the IP Address of a user is 134.60.103.42 for example, the Maxmind, Ip2location and Geobytes databases and lookup web services would all tell you this user is in Germany, whereas we correctly identify this user as an "Anonymous Tor Network Proxy (in DE-Germany)" to which we assign country code "A3" rather than "DE".

There are a growing number of Tor servers/nodes currently in use (see http://serifos.eecs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/exit.pl for a list of all Tor network servers) and hundreds of thousands of users of the Tor network, so this capability we now provide is of great value to web site owners and operators.

We will roll out this service to our free showmyip.com site soon, and add it to our SOAP, simple text, HTML, and CSV interfaces.

Note to users: we are not just enabling web site owners and operators. We are close to launching our Cloak On! privacy service which will allow anyone to get a secure SSL connection to one of our servers and then out to the Tor network, so you can maintain your privacy while browsing and doing ftp file transfers! Check out http://www.privacy-ecosystem.com/ for more details, or check back here on this blog.

Real-Time Tor Detection Service

We will be launching our Real-Time Tor Detection Service over the next few weeks, so that users of our showmyip.com and ippages.com IP Address Lookup service will be able to determine in real-time whether a user of their web site is making use of the Tor network.

In case you are not up to speed yet on Tor, check out one of the following for details:
> http://tor.eff.org/
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)