Most of you spend most of your time on the internet, but yet don’t have a basic understanding of how the internet works. Today, we are going to clear this up… again.
IP Addresses
IP Addresses are an essential part of the internet. Much like how your home address is a positive location that people can send mail or pizza delivery drivers to, an IP Address designates where a computer is located on the internet. Without an address, you can’t receive mail or your pizza, and without an IP Address, you computer is unable to communicate with the internet at all.
Think pre-internet days. If you sent out a check to Sears with an order for some products from their catalog, but never left your return address, you would not get your products.
If you want to use ANY service on the internet, that service NEEDS to know your IP Address or it CANNOT send you the data that you are requesting. This goes for EVERYTHING, not limited to email, viewing websites, online games, android and iPhone apps, your favorite social media services…..
EVERYTHING.
The misconception
There have been a bunch of people spreading false info to the general public. This has been going on for a long time. People are stating that NetPredators tracks it’s visitors IP Addresses. This is %100 false and goes against my support of net neutrality and support for the second amendment. Let me clear this up.
As stated above, if you want to visit our website, it is absolutely necessary for the webserver to know the IP Address to send the webpage data to so you can actually load and view the website on your phone, computer, or other internet connected device.
Every web server software, by default, will log this information including the 2 most used web server applications NGINX and Apache, which is used by nearly every website that you visit. Yes, your IP Address gets logged. This is FAR different than “getting tracked”.
“Getting tracked” would involve me running an IP Address through an IP lookup service, which is all public anyways. But I don’t do that.
Do you know who does actually track your IP Address? Google, Facebook, FBI, NSA, CIA, KGB, ….
Why do we log your IP Address?
The main reason is because I can’t be bothered to figure out how to disable the default setting that does the logging. Disabling the logging can create some issues on linux servers, especially if I run into some strange connection issue or I have to diagnose some other problem.
Now, that is just in regards to the default logging that the webserver software does.
I also do purposely log IP Addresses as well. Why? Mostly to know if an IP address is causing an attack on the website or if a user makes a threat in the comments to another person. If the police come to me and request logs on an illegal activity that a user is doing, I have to comply or risk the courts holding me criminally liable.
What exactly do we log
The following code is run whenever someone accesses a page on our website
<?php
$home_ip = "X.X.X.X"; /**Blanked for obvious reasons**/
$local_ip = "X.X.X.X";
$remote_ip = getenv('REMOTE_ADDR');
$forward_ip = getenv('HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR');
if (fnmatch($home_ip, $remote_ip) OR fnmatch($home_ip, $forward_ip) OR fnmatch($local_ip, $remote_ip) OR fnmatch($local_ip, $forward_ip)) {
} else {
$line = date('Y/m/d g:i:s a',mktime(date('H'),date('i'),date('s'),date("m"),date("d"),date("Y"))) . " - $_SERVER[REMOTE_ADDR] - $_SERVER[HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR] - $_SERVER[REQUEST_URI]";
file_put_contents('logs/visitors-' . date('m-d-Y',mktime(date("m"),date("d"),date("Y"))) . '.log', $line . PHP_EOL, FILE_APPEND);
}
?>That code creates an entry in a log file. Each entry looks similar to this:
2023/01/13 1:07:50 am - 162.158.62.212 - 66.249.66.20 - /matthew-tobias-erickson/What you see here is the date and time the pages was accessed, The IP Address of the cloudflare server that proxies our website, the IP Address of the remote client (you), and then the page that was accessed. In the above example, that is just google crawling and indexing our website.
Are you alarmed?
Please, you can not seriously tell me that you are concerned about me logging that tiny bit of data, all while you are posting photos of your family on Instagram, chronicling your life on Facebook, and sharing all your information with every site out there that you visit while most of them just hand your info straight over to the government or advertisers.
Notice, the only information that I purposely log is just your IP address. All those other services purposely log your user agent information which includes everything about which OS you are using, which browser and version numbers, window resolution and much more. On top of that, there is also the Facebook Pixel which tracks you across the internet to nearly every website that you visit so that they can create an in depth profile on you that includes your browsing habits, search queries, likes and dislikes, relationships… etc.
Most of you people use social media like an addiction and have all the intrusive apps on your phone, all of which is crazy spyware that tracks your every activity on the internet and in real life as well.
…but then you are going to worry about me logging one piece of data?
I don’t even advertise on the website or use google analytics like nearly everyone else does. I try my best to be the least intrusive as possible while also legally protecting myself. I capture less information than any other website or service out there.
You people that are getting all bent out of shape over this really need to stop listening to the ignorance of other people that do not understand what they are talking about.
The absolute irony of it is the people that are making these complaints are doing it using google owned services, which is one of the top 2 data harvesting tech conglomerates out there! The vast contrast and irony is palpable!
Quite honestly, I could find out more information about my viewers if I were to post videos on YouTube and view those analytics. Your favorite catcher knows more about you than I do!
Aren’t you using safe browsing habits anyways?
Everyone knows that you should only be accessing the internet through a means of protection like a VPN, TOR, Tails, a proxy, a neighbors open wifi, and turning off javascript, using a safe browser, having a good HOSTS file, an adblocker, customized PFSense router, Pi-Hole, etc.
You are protecting yourself, right? So what are you worried about anyways?
The people that were making these baseless claims could have gone a step further and looked at the developer console of their browser or ran wireshark to see what our website actually does for any extra or background activity.
Conclusions
Folks, trust me, I have way way way way way more important things to do than to methodologically scour through these logs and try to figure out who any of you are or anything like that from tens of thousands of entries each day. I do not give a rats ass about digging up info about my viewers. Sorry, but none of your drama is as invigorating as watching a pred get arrested and exposed.
My sole purpose here is to protect children. I don’t waste my time with all these panel chats and drama that many of you thrive off of.
The way that I look at things is that if my effort in what I am doing is not for the purpose of helping to protect children, then I don’t care to be a part of it.
It’s amazing that enough people go and complain, and then go and visit certain websites where you will inevitably be placed on a government watch list just for visiting the site.
In the end though, it does not hurt my feelings if you don’t want to visit our website. I just don’t like people continuing to spread lies. I will continue to do what I feel is right.
Thank you.
–NetPredators
