To most people, an IP address is just that—the address of a device on the internet. But for application developers, it is an incredibly valuable piece of information. Over the years, countless bytes of information have been collected and cataloged about almost every device that has accessed the internet, and by using ipdata’s API, application developers can access a tremendous amount of location-oriented data to enhance their users’ experience. But of course, you need an IP address before you can use the wealth of information provided by ipdata. In this article, you will learn how to retrieve ..read more

You already know that Elasticsearch excels at searching. The way they managed to simplify queries and information is amazing. While databases are good at storing data, search engines are good at … well … searching, of course. In our particular case, we won’t be talking about searching, phrase matching, filtering, or retrieving data. This post is about how ELK’s Logstash geoip-filter can read and parse geographic data out of IP addresses (GeoIP). I know, magic! Later in the post, we’ll discuss what to do when you don’t have ELK available or when a quicker solution is needed. I’m going to assume ..read more

What is ASN data and why is it useful? Autonomous Systems (AS) are used in BGP to route traffic to the correct network. ASNs are the notation for identifying a given AS and ASN data is stored by Regional Internet Registries (RIRs), which are used to look up where to route traffic. Outside of BGP routing, they may sound useless, but they’re actually great sources of data and they can be used to identify the organisation which controls a set of IP addresses. There are currently over 92,000 registered ASNs. Which organisations use ASNs? Internet Service Providers The most well-known users of ASNs ..read more

Detecting and optimising your site for bot traffic Bots come in all shapes and sizes. Many are legitimate, such as Search Engine bots (or spiders), which crawl your website to include pages on search engines like Google. There are plenty of illegitimate bots too – one common issue is referral spam, advertising sites by making them show up in your web analytics, consuming your resources and usage limits. Detecting bots Legitimate bots Legitimate bots will send a User-Agent which indicates that they’re a bot. Most of these include bot in them, such as Googlebot, but there’s a long list of rules ..read more

The web revolutionized the way business is conducted around the world. But as with all revolutions, there are casualties. Small and family-owned businesses had to face the hard reality that most consumers prefer convenience over community, and many of those businesses closed their doors. Many others, however, embraced the opportunity and potential the Internet promises and expanded their consumer base across city, state, and even country lines. Today, it’s easier than ever for local businesses to not only reach new customers through the Internet, but to also cater to their local customer-base ..read more

Proxies come in many different shapes and sizes, some of them are easy to detect, others much harder. Some are used for illegitimate purposes, others are used as standard practise by corporations. In this post, we’ll explore the different types of proxies, what they can be used for, and how to detect them. What is a proxy? A proxy is a simple server which forwards requests on your behalf. For example, if you’re using a proxy to access google.com, your request will first be sent to the proxy server, which will then in turn make the actual request to google.com, and return the result back to you ..read more