I am trying to write a query to get every active host on my network using the GET /devices/entities/online-state/v1 endpoint, however this endpoint requires a specific host's ID as a filter - meaning I would first have to query out to another API functionality to get the host ID, then hard code them into my initial query. Furthermore this API endpoint limits the amount of host Id's to 100 per query. I work on a network with 10's of thousands of endpoints, so this is not practical. I know there has to be a way to blanketly grab every host & its associated status, but I am still very new to the CS API and do not know what function to use. If anyone knows a solution - be it through a CS API endpoint I am unware of, or through syntactical corrections, (for example a wildcard I could use,) to my original query, I would really appreciate some help.
Suppose you wanna analyze your access log files in order to check users activities. One common way is to assume that a same IP address corresponds to a same user.
However, several internet providers use CGNAT. Which, briefly, allows multiple end users to use a common public IP address.
In that case, users behind a CGNAT and sharing the same public address might be confused with each other. Therefore, causing problems to calculate view counts and to ban disruptive traffic.
Question
Any alternative to mitigate that?
(Preferably using only Apache)
You could consider unique users are unique combinations of IP+user-agent. It would be a bit better but still wouldn't be able to differentiate users on the same IP and using the same browser, on the same platform.
Other than that, you'd need to use a server side scripting technology and track sessions. That would require cookies tho, which is not too much of a biggie. You can't track static assets using that method tho.
I want to validate that the postal address filled in by a user is correct.
Assuming that we have the fields street, street_number, postal_code, city and country
How can show errors when the user, types in that his country is France and is city is New York?
or
How can I detect that a postal code doesn't correspond to the city?
Is there a strategy to address this issue with Ruby On Rails or shall I just trust the user entries ?
There are several companies that publish US ZIP code directories, typically not terribly expensive, and some even come with lat/lon data. This is the most common way of validating city and state in the US or North America. Worldwide postal codes to country and city is likely to be a harder problem, or at least a more expensive one.
Another approach would be to use the Google Maps API, perhaps in conjunction with the data you can get from location-aware browsers (all modern ones). To be honest, it's been a while since I have used the API, but seem to recall you can get pretty detailed information given a lat/lon. Google now charges for high use of the Maps API, but if your site has even moderate traffic, you're probably still in the free zone.
At some level, you'll have to trust users. I remember a while back we found anomalies in user reported zipcodes in our database -- seemed like everyone lived in Beverly Hills, CA. This was around 2000, when the original version of the TV show "90210" was still around -- that's the zipcode :-).
Have you considered just a jQuery plugin to verify addresses for you? It's free for many users, up to 250 lookups/mo, and is always current (no need for you to maintain a database).
Incidentally, I work at SmartyStreets. There's also a ZIP code API to look up if cities match ZIP codes and vice-versa. Either way, we've put a lot of effort into making the user experience positive, even when the address they type isn't totally valid.
In my community, every user should only have one account.
So I need a solution to verify that the specific account is the only one the user owns. For the time being, I use email verification. But I don't really need the users' email adresses. I just try to prevent multiple accounts per person.
But this doesn't work, of course. People create temporary email addresses or they own several addresses, anyway. So they register using different email addresses and so they get more than one account - which is not allowed.
So I need a better solution than the (easy to circumvent) email verification. By the way, I do not want to use OpenID, Facebook Connect etc.
The requirements:
verification method must be accessible for all users
there should be no costs for the user (at least 1$)
the verification has to be safe (safer than the email approach)
the user should not be demanded to expose too much private details
...
Do you have ideas for good approaches? Thank you very much in advance!
Additional information:
My community is a browser game, namely a soccer manager game. The thing which makes multiple accounts attractive is that users can trade their players. So if you have two accounts, you can buy weak players for excessive prices which no "real" buyer would pay. So your "first account" gets huge amounts of money while the "second account" becomes poor. But you don't have to care: Just create another account to make the first one richer.
You should ask for something more unique than an email. But there is no way to be absolutly sure a player don't own two account.
The IP solution is not a solution, as people playing from a compagny/school/3G will have the same IP. Also, Changing IP is easy (reset the router, proxy, use your 3G vs wifi)
Some web site (job-offer, ...) ask you for an official ID number (ID, passport, social security, driver licence, visa (without the security number, so peolple will feel safe that you won't charge them), ...)
This solution got a few draw back:
minor don't always have an ID / visa
pepole don't like to give away this kind of info. (in fact, depending where you live: in spain for example, it is very common to ask for ID number)
people own more than one visa.
it is possible to generate valide ID/visa number.
Alternative way:
ask for a fee of 1$
to be allow to trade more than X players / spend more than X money.
people that pay the fee got some advantage : less ads, extra players, ...
paying a fee, will limitate creation of multiple account.
fee can be payed using taxed phone number (some compagny provide international system)
the payment medium could be use as an ID (visa number)
put some restriction in new account (like SO).
eg: "you have to play at least 1 hour before trading a player"
eg: "you have to play at least 3 hour before trading more than 3 players"
Use logic to detect multiple account
use cookie to detect multiple account
check last connection time of both player before a transaction. (if player A logout 1 minute before player B login : somethings is going on)
My recommandation :
Use a mix of all thoses methode, but keep the user experience fluide without "form to fill now to continue"
Very interesting question! The basic problem here is multi-part -
Opening an account is trivial (because creating new email IDs is trivial).
But the effect of opening an account in the game is NOT trivial. Opening a new account basically gives you a certain sum of money with which to buy players.
Transferring money to another account is trivial (by trading players).
Combining 1 & 2, you have the problem that new players have an unfair advantage (which they would not have in the real world). This is probably okay, as it drives new users to your site.
However adding 3 to the mix, you have the problem that new players are easily able to transfer their advantage to the old players. This allows old users to game the system, ruining fun for others.
The solution can be removing either 1,2,3.
Remove 1 - This is the part you are focusing on. As others have suggested, this is impossible to do with 100% accuracy. But there are ways that will be good enough, depending on how stringent your criterion for "good enough" is. I think the best compromise is to ask the user for their mobile phone numbers. It's effective and allows you to contact your users in one more way. Another way would be to make your service "invite only" - assuring that there is a well defined "trail" of invites that can uniquely identify users.
Remove 2 - No one has suggested this which is a bit surprising. Don't give new users a bunch of money just for signing up! Make them work for it, similar to raising seed capital in the real world. Does your soccer simulation have social aspects? How about only giving the users money once their "friend" count goes above a certain number (increasing the number of potential investors who will give them money)?
Remove 3 - Someone else has already posted the best solution for this. Adopt an SO like strategy where a new user has to play for 3 hours before they are allowed to transfer players. Or maybe add a "training" stage to your game which forces a new player to prove their worth by making enough money in a simulated environment before they are allowed to play with the real users.
Or any combination of the above! Combined with heuristics like matching IP addresses and looking for suspicious transactions, it is possible to make cheating on the game completely unviable.
Of course a final thing you need to keep in mind is that it is just a game. If someone goes to a lot of trouble just to gain a little bit of advantage in your simulation, they probably deserve to keep it. As long as everyone is having fun!
I know this is probably nothing you have expected, but...
My suggestion would be to discourage people from creating another account by offering some bonus values if they use the same account for a longer period, a kind of loyalty program. For some reason using a new account gives some advantages. Let's eliminate them. There are a lot of smart people here, so if you share more details on the advantages someone could come up with some idea. I am fully convinced this is on-topic on SO though.
We have implemented this by hiding the registration form. Our customers only see the login form where we use their mobile number as username and send the password by text message.
The backend systems match the mobile number to our master customer database which enforces that the mobile number is unique.
Here is an idea:
Store UUID in a cookie at clients. Each user login store the UUID from Cookie in relation to the account entity in the databse.
Do the same with the IP adresses instead of UUID.
After that write a program interface for your game masters that:
Show up different account names but same IP (within last x hours)
Show up different account names but same UUID (nevertheless how long ago)
Highlight datasets from the two point above where actions (like player transfers) happened which can be abused by using multiple accounts
I do not think you should solve that problem by preventing people having two or more accounts. This is not possible and ineffective. Make it easier to find that evil activities and (automatically temporarly) ban these people.
It's impossible to accomplish this with a program.
The closest you can do is to check the ip address. But it can change, and proxies exist.
Then you could get the computer MAC address, but a network card can be changed. And a computer too.
Then, there is one way to do this, but you need to see the people face to face. Hand them a piece of paper with a unique code. They can only subscribe if they have the code.
The most effective solution might be the use of keystroke biometrics. A person can be identified by the way the person writes a sentence.
This company provides a product which can be used to implement your requirements: http://www.psylock.com/en
I think 1 account per email address should be good enough for your needs. After all, account verification doesn't have to end right after signup.
You can publish the IP address of the computer each message was posted from to help your users detect when someone is using multiple accounts from the same computer, and you can use a ranking system to discourage people from using temporary accounts.
Do your game dynamics allow for you to require that both users be online for a trade to occur? If so, you can verify the IP addresses of both users involved in a trade, which would be the same unless the user was paying for multiple internet connections and accessing two accounts from separate machines.
Address the exact scenario that you're saying is a problem.
Keep track of the expected/fair trade value of players and prevent blatantly lope-sided trades, esp. for new accounts. Assume the vast majority of users in your system are non-cheaters.
You can also do things like trickle in funds/points for non-trading actions/automatically overtime, etc.
Have them enter their phone number and send a text message to it. Then, keep a unique of all the cell phone numbers. Most people have one cell phone, and aren't going to ask their friend to borrow it just to create a second account.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SMS_gateways
I would suggest an approach using two initiatives:
1) Don't allow brand new accounts to perform trades. Accounts must go through a waiting period and prove that the account is legitimate by performing some non-trade actions.
2) Publicize the fact that cheaters will be disqualified and punished. Periodically perform searches for accounts being used to dump bad players and investigate. Ban/disqualify cheaters and publicize the bans so that people know the rules are being enforced.
No method would be foolproof but the threat of punishment should minimize cheating.
actually you can use fingerprintjs to track every user, use js encrypt the fingerprint in browser and decrypt in server
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We are implementing an IP based geolocation service, and we need to find some IP's from various markets (LA, NY etc) to fully test the service.
Does anybody know of a directory where we could find what IP ranges are used where?
EDIT: We have already implemented the system, it uses a 3rd party DB and a webservice. We just want some IP's from known markets to verify its working properly.
I'm going to see if I can get what I need from the free maxmind database.
Not sure if cost is a factor but there are a few open source databases knocking about. This one claims 99.3% accuracy on its free version with 99.8% for its paid version. They've also got a Free & Open Source City Database (76% accuracy at city level).
They're both available as CSV-based databases so you can easily take a known location and get an IP range for ISPs in the area.
The tougher part is getting access to a computer in that IP range.
Try looking for sites providing lists of anonymizers. They usually list the countries for the anonymizer sites. Then either use the IP provided or do a lookup on the anonymizer name.
Also try searching for lists of anonymous proxies.
We trawled the logs for our huge web site and built up a test collection.
Sorry I can't pass it on. )-:
cheers,
Rob
maybe this database will be useful for you:
http://www.hostip.info/dl/index.html
it's a collection of ip adresses with countries and cities.
Many open source projects have worldwide mirrors; you can find a country-indexed list of Debian mirrors and kernel.org mirrors. (Note that kernel.org specifically has many mirrors per country; there are eleven United States mirrors, which are located in different regions of the country and would give different information.)
You could try using an automation tool, such as AutoIT, to fire off a series of IP addresses at a whois database service such as arin or RIPE, and harvest the addressed responses, probably just varying the first two parts of the IP.
Use Tor with a strict exit node.
You'll need to use these options in your config:
ExitNodes server1, server2, server3
StrictExitNodes 1
You'll also need to identify exit nodes that work for you in the region that you want. I suggest using the Search Whois feature at ARIN to see it's location if the Tor country icon isn't good enough. It can be a bit of a pain to identify working Tor nodes in each region that you wish to test, but it's possible and free.