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I just went to a web site called fwix.com
I noticed that the page geolocates me based on my IP extremely quickly. At first, I simply thought they were doing this via Google Maps built in ClientLocation feature BUT it doesn’t appear they are doing that.
Instead, looking at the source for the page, I see that my IP address has been injected into the <HEAD> as <meta name="client_ip" content="123.456.789.123" />
Question: How is fwix.com getting my IP and generating the web page accordingly?
Getting the IP is trivial. The web server has to know your IP address in order to send you a response. There’s no magic going on there, it’s part of the TCP/IP protocol.
There are services that map known IP addresses or address blocks to geographic locations. They’re simply looking up if there’s a known location for your IP address in a big database. One such service is MaxMind. They even have a free database you can download and play around with.