The task is simple, and the answers might be many.
But here goes: On my website I'll make an InfoAboutYou.aspx page. So far i got the IP and the browser name and version, but ill like to expand, with just about every thing i can look up about the curret user/ip and hes Browser/OS
Does it exists any free webservices that kan lookup more information about a specific IP?
The idea is to see how specific a random user can be pin pointet
Thank you
You can use various service to determine a geographic location.
One example is:-
http://www.ipgeo.com/
There are plenty of things that you can determine by using JavaScript and having it post back to the server like some of the stats that Google Analytics does. You can determine screen size, etc.
Related
I am looking to create a website that generates content depending on your city location. The best Example I found was Craigslit.They generate a web domain name like https://yourcity.craigslist.org/ when you either click on the city or it locates where you are. I was just wondering if I could get some help on how to build something like that.
The web pages are created using a template that doesn't change, populated with data that is selected from a database server, using your location to lookup appropriate items.
The subdomain (your city) is usually defined in the DNS record, just like www. There would be an entry for chicago.craigslist.org, for example.
edit
If you're asking how they know where you are, they can take a guess based on your IP address, however this isn't very reliable. Google does this also, when getting you search results that could be localized.
So yeah, it is expected of you to type some stuff into google to (try) find your answer (like detect city from javascript will bring up a lot of results for your problem.)
But yeah you would use a service like https://ipstack.com/ to detect where you live, depending on where you live the accuracy increases. (EU has some rules and regulations that make it a lot less accurate than if you would be living in the US)
Once you have a database with content - For example craigslist has a database of second hand items sold by people from all over. When you connect to craigslist they ask a service where your request came from - then use some filter function based on your location to match the results.
Good luck
Your IP address can be used to make an educated guess as to where you are, but it's not very accurate. When providing you with search results that might be localised, Google also does this.To know more about creating a website like craigslist follow here
https://www.yarddiant.com/blog/classifieds/how-to-build-a-website-like-craigslist.html
So the following which I'm writing is just to discuss whether something like this is even possible or if any of you would have any better ideas/suggestions or understanding how this might work. I thank anyone who takes time to read this in advance and I hope I don't explain myself too incoherently:
Let's say I have a page in WordPress which has a little bit of text and a video. Basicly I would like to share that page's link or I'd want to forward that page via e-mail to a certain group of people (let's say 10-50 specifically chosen people) and I want to track who of them opened the link and for how long they were on the page or watched the video.
I would like to make this happen in a way that I wouldn't have to make 50 different pages or 50 different URLs for each person (or 50 different tracking strings for that matter). Or that I wouldn't have to take a newsletter-mailer type page in between this process.
Basicly, I would like to make the sharing/forwarding and analytics overview process as easy as possible, so that an admin or moderator wouldn't have to check too many different pages to get the info.
I really appreciate any and all feedback.
[Also really sorry if I posted this in the wrong place. Please feel free to redirect me to a corresponding slot].
Technically, Google Analytics isn't meant to be used to track this specifically- it's typically meant to track groups of anonymized users. That being said, it is capable of doing this (but may not be as automated as you had hoped).
You are correct in thinking that you'd either need to duplicate the pages or create multiple different campaign URLs.
The other thing to keep in mind is that as emails are forwarded, there is no way to update the URL after the email has been sent, so if you email me and I forward it to someone else who clicks through, you're going to think someone else is me.
One way around this would be if you know your users IP addresses (not only is that a big "if", but it can also be spoofed), or some other uniquely identifying feature (any chance these people have signed-up through your website and have actual user IDs? That'd make things infinitely easier!).
Maybe you could customize the email to add their email address as a query string? That could still require a lot of work (and you couldn't just share a single link).
Now, you can not store personally identifiable info in GA (including IP and email addresses), but at the server-level you could assign a custom dimension with a uniquely generated ID and send that to GA. Now you've got all the info you need!
Unfortunately this method only works if you can detect some kind of "fingerprint" of your users.
Unfortunately what you described isn't quite what Google Analytics was designed to do. If you wanted to get into detailed user-specific tracking, I'd advise you look into a CRM. Those systems are designed specifically for user tracking as you described.
Hope that gets you pointed in the right direction.
google has an API for downloading search suggestions:
https://www.google.com/support/enterprise/static/gsa/docs/admin/70/gsa_doc_set/xml_reference/query_suggestion.html
unfortunately, as far as i can tell, these results are specific to your location. for an analysis, i would like to be able to define the city/location that google thinks it is making the suggestion to. here's what happens when i scrape from dar es salaam, tanzania:
http://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search?client=firefox&q=insurance
["insurance",["insurance","insurance companies in tanzania","insurance group of tanzania","insurance principles","insurance act","insurance policy","insurance act tanzania","insurance act 2009","insurance definition","insurance industry in tanzania"]]
i understand that a vpn would partially solve this issue, but only by giving me a different location and not lots of locations. is there a reasonable way to replicate this sort of thing quickly and easily from, say, the 100 largest cities in the united states?
confirmation that results differ within the usa-
thanks!
Google will use your IP and your location history (if turned on) to determine your location.
To be able to go around it, you can spoof your IP while logged off your google account (but I don't know if google will consider it a trial of hacking no matter what your intentions are).
Another way is to use Tor browser (even though it is not it's original purpose). You can configure tor to exit from a certain country using the Exitnode parameter in the torrc config file
As found in the docs:
ExitNodes node,node,…
A list of identity fingerprints, country codes, and address patterns of nodes to use as exit node
But if you want a fast way to do it, I don't think that's possible since google wants to know the real location of the users and have put a lot of effort into making such tricks fail.
The hl param for interface language changes the search results, but I can't tell if it's actually changing the location. For example:
http://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search?client=chrome&q=why&hl=FR
Here's an example with 5 different values of hl:
http://jsbin.com/tusacufaza/edit?js,output
It seems that each time I see an ad that is served by an ad manager application there is always a bunch of parameters added to the URL of the product.
Say for instance one random stackoverflow ad :
http://ads.stackoverflow.com/a.aspx?Task=Click&ZoneID=4&CampaignID=474&AdvertiserID=5&BannerID=408&SiteID=1&RandomNumber=464183249&Keywords=
or this one:
http://ads.stackoverflow.com/a.aspx?Task=Click&ZoneID=4&CampaignID=474&AdvertiserID=5&BannerID=408&SiteID=1&RandomNumber=2039490120&Keywords=http-1.1%2ccaching%2ccache%2chttp-header-fields%2cheader%2cx-user-registered
If I go with the logic of the things, when you register a click to a banner, you would normally need a few info : "how many times it has been clicked", "by who" (ip/registered account/...), "when".
Now if we look at the parameters there are a lot more informations to this. OpenX adds a lot more on top of that :
http://ox.jeuxonline.info/www/delivery/ck.php?oaparams=2&bannerid=244&zoneid=7&cb=1264705683&maxdest=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.smartadserver.com%2Fcall%2Fcliccommand%2F3141468%2F1264705683
The only reason I can think of this is to save call to the db, other than that I really can't see.
Any hint or ideas ?
Tracking.
The parameters are used to identify you, where you're clicking from, what you're clicking on, which ad campaign your click should go to, etc.
Usually ad requests contain a size code, sometimes a location code (where on the page the ad appears), and audience segmentation information, which is information the content provider knows (or has guessed) about you and is used by the network to figure out what kinds of ads should be served to you. Most audience segmentation is proprietary, either to the ad network or to the content provider. Some ad networks have special features to support segmentation based on content you've recently searched for (keywords, search_terms, etc.).
Most of the time the name/value pairs will be completely unintelligible to people not familiar with the segmentation rules. You could have something like il=5, which could mean income level is in category 5, which might mean $120,000/yr on some arbitrary network.
The actual image served may repeat some of the information in the original ad request, either for tracking actual ads served or, in some cases, because the image server needs some of the same information to serve the right image.
Well they also need to give analytics to their advertisers. You'll see that the URL identifies who the advertiser is, what campaign it's for, etc. All that stuff is used to know who to bill, and how effective the ad is (ie is the picture of the girl more effective then the unicorn).
I'm working on a web-based contest which is supposed to allow anonymous users to vote, but we want to prevent them from voting more than once. IP based limits can be bypassed with anonymous proxies, users can clear cookies, etc. It's possible to use a Silverlight application, which would have access to isolated storage, but users can still clear that.
I don't think it's possible to do this without some joker voting himself up with a bot or something. Got an idea?
The short answer is: no. The longer answer is: but you can make it arbitrarily difficult. What I would do:
Voting requires solving a captcha (to avoid as much as possible automated voting). To be even more effective I would recommend to have prepared multiple types of simple captchas (like "pick the photo with the cat", "what is 2+2", "type in the word", etc) and rotate them both by the time of the day and by IP, which should make automatic systems ineffective (ie if somebody using IP A creates a bot to solve the captcha, this will become useless the next day or if s/he distributes it onto other computers/uses proxies)
When filtering by IP you should be careful to consider situations where multiple hosts are behind one public IP (AFAIK AOL proxies all of their customers through a few IPs - so such a limitation would effectively ban AOL users). Also, many proxies send along headers pointing to the original IP (like X-Forwarded-For), so you can take a look at that too.
Finally, using something like FSO (Flash Shared Objects - "Flash cookies") is obscure enough for 99.99% of the people not to know about. Silverlight is even more obscure. To be even sneakier, you could buy an other domain and set the FSO from that domain (so, if the user is looking for FSO's set by your domain, they won't see any)
None of these methods is 100%, but hopefully combined they give you the level of assurance you need. If you want to take this a level higher, you need to add some kind of user registration (which can be as simple as asking a valid e-mail address when the vote occurs and sending a confirmation link to the given address and not counting the votes for which the link wasn't clicked - so it doesn't need to be a full-fledged "create an account with username / password / firs name / last name / etc").
No, you can't, and it only takes one person and a willing forum to change the outcome of an online vote.
You have to realize the inherent flaws of an online vote and rather than attempting to get around them try to use them to your advantage.
-Adam
You can certainly make it difficult.
What about building a user profile with such things as ip address, browser useragent, machine name, and whatever other information you can get.
Store the profile for each user, then if you receive a profile which is similar enough to one already in the database (you'll have to tweak that) you can throw out that vote.
I imagine you can probably build a better profile using silverlight, though I'm not sure what information that gives you access to.
Client-side solutions are out for the reasons you listed -- they can be manipulated by the user. Server-side solutions -- as you said -- can be fooled and bypassed.
If you're willing to accept the fact that you can't really be 100% sure that you're getting exactly one vote per person, then there are some measures you can take to reduce the noise.
Use a CAPTCHA in your vote-submission form to make it harder for bots and scripts to vote.
Limit the number of votes per IP address to one.
Consider requiring registration in order to vote. (I know this defeats part of your original question, but it gives you a greater degree of control over the voting.)
That's a good start.
my personal experience in contest developing and monitoring tells me that no, there is no reliable way to avoid cheating if you let anonymous users vote (or do anything that lets them participate in the contest).
you could play with IP, introduce delays between an action and the next, but it's really difficult: the best way is introduce a captcha or something similar, if applicable in your particular situation.
best of all, don't let anonymous users participate: let them "play" and access to a simulation, but the contest needs a login.
Nope, it's the user's computer and they're in control.
Unfortunately the only solution is to bring it back on your court so to speak and require authentication.
However, a CAPTCHA helps limit the votes to human users at least.
Of course even with authentication you can't enforce single voting because then they teach the bots to register...
I have to agree that the short answer is no...though if you look at my recent answer here: How to anonymously identify a user and store that information you certainly can get it within a 6 percent margin of error.