Find out the Country (Location) of the person you are chatting with.

If you are chatting with a person on Yahoo Messenger, do you know how to find the Location of the person you are chatting with? You can use a simple command and some googling to find out the location of the person you are chatting with.

When ever you use the Internet, in fact any network, the communication should happen between 2 Computers which are uniquely identified by 2 IP Address. But in most cases these IP Address might not be unique for your Computer but unique for your ISP. Simply speaking the router at your ISP is connected to the Internet. The connection between your computer and your ISP is a local network. Your ISP Routers acts as the middle man is making the Internet requests on your behalf and getting the Internet results back to your machine. So you can in most cases trace back an internet connection to the ISP, i.e. to the Country, State, City and ISP.

When ever you chat with a person using Yahoo Messenger your messages are sent to a Yahoo Server and the Server relays the messages to the person you the chatting with. So if you find the IP Address in such a scenario you will find the IP Address of the Server but not of the person who is chatting with you. Yahoo Messenger uses P2p Technology when you transfer a file from your system to the other persons system. So when you find out the IP Address of the Destination Computer when you do a Yahoo File Transfer you can actually find out the IP of the other person and hence the location.

When you are trying to find out the Location of the person chatting with you, you should make him accept a file transfer request, in this way a connection would be established between your computer and his computer. Remember to send a file which is at least 3-4 MB in size so that you have some time to capture the active connections. Once he accepts and the file transfer starts, open command prompt and type the command netstat –n, this would give active TCP Connections on each Port.

C:\Documents and Settings\User Name>netstat –n

Active Connections

  Proto  Local Address          Foreign Address        State

  TCP    10.0.0.9:1101          10.0.0.191:1025      ESTABLISHED

  TCP    10.0.0.59:1881        10.0.0.184:1372      ESTABLISHED

  TCP    10.0.0.59:2301        208.88.182.2:80      ESTABLISHED

  TCP    10.0.0.59:2302        208.88.182.3:80      ESTABLISHED

  TCP    10.0.0.59:2303        208.88.182.3:80      ESTABLISHED

C:\Documents and Settings\User Name>

The out put of netstat –n command would be something similar to the above. From the above list you need to filter the Foreign Address filed to get the IP Address of the Person chatting with you. When you are trying this close all Internet Applications like Messengers and File Sharing application and close all browser windows. Then you would have very few results and you can easily filter the IP Addresses.

You can use the Wiki link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netstat to find more about the Netstat command.

You can use the Wiki link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_TCP_and_UDP_port_numbers to filter the foreign address based on port numbers.

Once you find the IP Address you can go a site like http://tools.whois.net/whoisbyip/  to find who is of that IP Address. Whois basically gives details like the address of registration, company name and contact details.

To find your own IP Address you can use the command ipconfig /all.

If you need any further clarification please get back to me.

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