SL Voice Giving Your RL Location?

Last night I was talking in SL voice with a friend when he asked me "Is your internet provider "such & such" and do you live in "This Town"? I said "How do you know my internet provider and where I live?" He told me that my provider was "pinging" his and when he checked it that was the information he got and he was making sure that it was me. He said if he'd been a hacker he might've been able to get more information.

I was absolutely shocked that he could get the information that he did just by me talking on SL voice with him. I talk in voice all the time to friends and sometimes at clubs that I go to. I'm sure a lot of other people do the same thing. Did you know that SL voice can give away your RL internet provider and location? He had where I live down to a couple miles.

A month ago I had someone that was harrassing me and I would NOT have wanted him to know where I lived. Is it common knowledge that using voice given this information?

Definitely makes me happy i don't use voice.

Wow didnt know that.

I usually use skype with my friends since SL voice can be flakey and for some they just cant get it to work.

No kidding. I've NEVER heard this happening before. Could it be something odd with the OP's ISP?

Streaming media doesn't go "through" Second Life, but SL causes a direct connection between your computer and the source. Easy enough therefore, if you're running a music stream into SL, to figure out what ISPs are connected to your music stream.

If voice works the same way (SL creates a direct connection between parties), then yes, I guess it would be easy to get the ISPs of the people connected to your voice chat.

Voice isn't supposed to work this way... it's supposed to go through Vivox' servers... but it's a proprietary protocol so who knows. It would certainly be more efficient for Vivox to route you direct to each other.

Streaming media (audio or video) absolutely can be used to get your IP address.

Oy vey.

This one creepy guy always insisted we use voice. Great. (No, not for THAT reason.)

I wondered how he figured out my city, I don't recall ever telling him!

If this is the case, I don't think I will be voicing out in open chat

Were you on his land, or listening/looking at a media stream of his? That is a much more straightforward way to get someone's IP addr.
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I'm not very technically inclined, but I would think that one way of solving the mystery of whether voice chat can reveal IP addresses it to try oneself. There are probably better tools to do it, but I know my firewall software will log all incoming pings. Next time you are on voice, open up your firewall software and watch who is pinging.

Just so you know, skype does the same thing.

/signed

I've had a stalker before. And I've even said in these forums that that was a reason I felt voice was a bad idea.

Well, Skype *should* do it, or anyway, that's how it's supposed to work. The Vivox stuff surely shouldn't work this way. I wonder if it's really always been doing this on private chats (which I've never used) and not with the estate voice channel (assuming this was a private voice chat).

Given enough time I could probably cobble together something to test this between machines, but others must be more voice-ready and handy with netstat and traceroute.

Maggy, were you listening to the parcel music stream, or watching the media stream at the time? This is a much more likely way for a person to trace your ISP.

My ISP address will place me anywhere within 2 hours of where I really live. Not that a stalker would want to peek in my windows to begin with. Well Scylla might, but I cause her to swoon.

Here is where my IP address geo location code places me:
http://www.annotoole.com/mysecretlocation.jpg

Probably more like where my body would be found if I was stupid enough to use voice.

My ISP don't even show me in the right county even though I live almost next door to one of the world's largest ISP farms.

Most people couldn't stalk you based on knowing your IP address alone.

However, it is one piece of information. All it takes is a few pieces of information that would be otherwise innocuous individually to be put together to locate you.

Being able to put someone in a general geographic location, even if it seems like a pretty big location, can greatly narrow the possibilities of finding one's victim, if a few more pieces of information are available. Put together the information from the IP (say a region in a state) with the knowledge that the victim is majoring in, say, art in college. That could be enough information to not only track down the specific college to which the person goes, but even a specific building the victim frequents (the art department at the college). A stalker is probably about one piece if personal information away from being able to be waiting for you as you walk through a door (of course a picture makes it a dead giveaway; but a not-so-common feature like looking for a redhead could substitute for a picture).

So even if the IP address from voice isn't enough for a stalker to find a target, it certainly provides a huge help for the motivated stalker. And one should at least be aware that this sort of knowledge passes before using voice. It's also a good reason, for the concerned, to be tight-lipped about real life information of any sort; some small fact may seem harmless, but one never knows how that harmless fact can be paired up with the technically-revealed information of which one is unaware.

(Of course, IP address could be enough to find the precise person, if the stalker in question works for, or has a friend who works for, a company that does have detailed information on the IP addresses that are supposed to be protected by privacy policies and laws.)

A friend and I did some logging and we aren't seeing it. Skype was having us send packets directly to one another, but once we closed that, no direct traffic

I also can't find my friend's IP address in any of the slvoice packets, either as a string or as four bytes

I know there's more to these protocols than I'm seeing, but I surely don't see it happening just by watching passively

Is op using skype?

The OP clearly stated she was using SL Voice.

Would it matter if one was only using voice to listen and not to speak?

Given who their VP engineering is, Vivox's proprietary protocol is probably a slightly modified version of SIP. SIP certainly has the ability to hand off a two-person call to direct peer-to-peer streaming, and even limited signaling (this would be between SLVoice.exe clients). There is also a SIP keepalive that could be used in those circumstances, so what this guy says about the pinging COULD be true.

Voice chat, on the other hand, should stay on Vivox's servers, and those would be the only addresses you should see.

You'd have to do a 2-person SLVoice call to test it. My wireshark is a little rusty, Qie, but I could crank it up, if you're really curious.

That is still a point to point connection of a sort i would think.

If someone doesn't figure it out, people are gonna be passing around rumors until the end of time


I meant Skype, wondering if op uses it

Ok I confirmed I see my friend's IP address in a message I get from vivox while establishing a one-on-one call with him...

Given the new plugin API and what that means (i.e.; the VNC plugin will require you to connect directly with the target system for a vnc session) I seriously doubt LL cares about the previously good level of proxy protection anymore.

If you have something to hide then SL is becoming not the place to be I guess.