FAQs |
Q. Help! My lappy is gone and I have a bunch of IP numbers, whatever they are, now what I do?
A. Take a printout of the numbers and the Computer details section of your account to the nearest police station and explain the situation. They will take it from there.
Q. Well, ok, but what are those numbers, anyway?
A. Briefly, Every computer on the internet is assigned an address so that the traffic to and from that computer can find its way through the various routers that connect all of the computers. Because all computers are not connected all the time, internet providers may change an individual computer's address from one session to the next in order to reuse their available pool of addresses. For this reason, in order to locate a given IP address it is necessary to contact the provider to whom it belongs to discover to whom it was assigned at a particular time. This is also why internet sites that look up the geographic locations of IP addresses are often very imprecise. Those are the basics but a more thorough discussion of IP addresses is available here.
Q. Where can I see some of these "imprecise" IP locations?
A. A couple of good places are Geobytes and CheckIP. You will notice that although the locations are often inaccurate, the internet service provider (ISP) is easily determined from the IP address and it is trivial for them to determine the actual street address of the customer who has that IP at any given time.
Q. My LappyTrack was working fine and then suddenly stopped. What happened?
A. If you were using LappyTrack without enjoying the advantages offered to our subscribers, your test account was probably deleted after a week. You are welcome to open another account and reinstall LappyTrack (you should uninstall the old one first) but it, too, will only work for a week unless you subscribe and receive the full benefits described elsewhere. For other possibilities, please check the forums.