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.