Gandalf, Thank you for your reply. I have been chatting now for a couple of days with a girl that I dated a while ago. She tells me she is currently in a certain country in the Middle East and I do not believe her.
So all I really want is to know what country she is in. Well, I was so determined, that I did another "extensive search" on the Internet and found a few intersting things. All you have stated is aboslutely correct but allow me to tell everyone what I have found-out
- On another post on this same discussion baord, someone posted the following link: www(dot)checkim(dot)com but they charge $2.99 a week for providing the service and - being cheap as I am - I did not go for it.
- While chatting with her, I sent her a music file and she started to download it, but it was done using Yahoo Messenger's "Send File" icon, so all I got when I ran netstat was an IP address in the US for that file transfer (and I know certainly she can not be in the US). I ran netstat immediately before starting the file transfer and during the transfer and compared the netstat results (by the way, you can direct the result of the command to a text file by adding ">filename.txt" - without the quotation marks - to the end of the command).
I guess the file transfer through that icon just establishes a connection between your PC and some Yahoo server that handles the transfer. I also had my webcam on and she was watching it and for that I had a different IP address in the US
To get HER IP address, I obviously had to establish a "direct" file transfer between my PC and hers. Well... everyone talks about that wholy grail of "direct" connection but how do you actually do it? I am not sure, but maybe if you ran a personal FTP or web server on your PC? I didn't look any deeper into it.
- I found a post somewhere (that I cannot find again right this moment) where someone gave a few lines of PHP code to insert into a page on a web site and then direct the person you are chatting with to. When the code executes, it reads the IP address of the visitor to the page and emails it to you. I tried that and waited... and waited, then waited some more for the email message to arrive, it never did. But I was intrigued by that and did further search and found www(dot)plus2net(dot)com/php_tutorial/php_ip.php
So if you are handy with programming in PHP (I am not!), here's the solution, simple, easy and obvious!
- Luckily, I have a web site to which I have access and I can modify its content, so I finally found the solution
www(dot)tracemyip(dot)org offers a free service to those who want to track visitors to a web site (for marketing purposes). And it's FREE for up to 3 projects. How does it work: You set-up the free account, you download some HTML code that you insert into your web site and when a person visits the web site, the code displays the vistor's IP address (on the same page he/she is visitig) and *LOGS* their IP address and some other useful info used for marketing purposes (such as referring site, how long they stayed on a page, where did they navigate next etc...)
Well... after I set-up a web page that contained some jokes, I added the HTML code to it at the very bottom of the page and asked my ex-girlfriend to visit the page to read some funny jokes. Well.. she got a kick out of the jokes and I got the information I needed
Actually, when I checked tracemyip(dot)org immediately after she visited the page, I almost fell off my chair. Not only my suspicion was confirmed, but I also got the exact city where she is located (which is the city where I know she lived when we dated) and more information that I needed.
Finally, one last note... I now live in a different country other than the one she lives in (it was a long-distance relationship before we met), and we are separated by thousands of miles, so I did not have any harrassment intentions when I set out to find what country she lives in