A reason to block pings?

Your address may be found within a kilometer.

^{http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/04/pinpoi...}
Pinpointing a Computer to Within 690 Meters

This is impressive, and scary:

Every computer connected to the web has an internet protocol (IP) address, but there is no simple way to map this to a physical location. The current best system can be out by as much as 35 kilometres...

Considering my jitter is 8ms or ~ 50% of the ping to presumably my nearest pingtest.net server I'm not quaking in my boots.

http://www.pingtest.net/result/38440334.png

This is impressive, and scary

No it isn't.

For me, it only gives them about 5,000 addresses to choose from

I'm on the run though, so am more concerned about being tracked by the powers that be!

Not relevant to you (as you are retired).

But someone posting from work and home could well be uniquely identified.

My IP address at work would probably be registered to the company I worked for, so a quick whois would sort that out¹... and what would it have to do with my IP address at home, which would be registered to an ISP?


¹ but only for the company, as an individual I assume my computer would be behind a NAT firewall.

The linked article shows how a ping may provide a location better than the ISP.

A combination of home and work location uniquely identifies many people, perhaps the majority in the UK.

Also a lot will depend on if you isp updates the Geo location of the ip address it assigns you, with ukonline it was more accurate than it currently is with my current isp, it's either 80miles out or over 150 miles out, so it ain't reliable

In reply to a post by john2007:

The linked article shows how a ping may provide a location better than the ISP.

My ping time (from the tbb servers) varies between ~9ms and ~18ms depending whether interleave is off or on.

I obviously move about a lot

In reply to a post by john2007:

A combination of home and work location uniquely identifies many people, perhaps the majority in the UK.

On the basis that most people live fairly close to where they work I wouldn't agree with that... especially with a location accuracy as poor as half a mile.

Certainly not a majority.