Lee Munsick wrote in 020122 MMDigest:

> Could we all please so indicate our homelands

We already do this in a more or less explicit way: you can conclude
from my email-address that the country-specific extension ".at" is
Austria.  A 'whois' query will even deliver you more information.

Okay, suppose your provider is "earthlink.net".  To detect the
location someone has to execute a little program named 'traceroute'.
('tracert.exe' is a valid name on most operating systems from a certain
software company located in Redmond, WA.)

"Visual Route" could be another program where you can spot the location
on a geographical map, but pay attention when you use it: it belongs to
the rapid growing sort of 'phone home' software.

With kind regards

Claus Kucher     [ "Vienna.at"  ;-)  -- Robbie

 [ Editor's note:
 [
 [ The Internet is often overloaded and extremely slow during "rush
 [ hours" and, in addition, malicious programs are attacking servers,
 [ attempting to disrupt service.  Here's a simple test you can perform
 [ to check if your own ISP is performing okay or not.
 [
 [ Launch MS-DOS prompt from the Start button of Windows and type
 [ C:\>tracert 207.212.80.187  This is the numerical IP address
 [ equating to mmd.foxtail.com, the Foxtail HTML web server.  The
 [ returned list shows all the routers that the 'ping' message packets
 [ passed through.
 [
 [ But why does your web browser report "Cannot connect to ..."?
 [ Now type  C:\>ping mmd.foxtail.com    If replies are not returned
 [ then you can suspect that your ISP's DNS (Domain Name Server) has
 [ failed, so contact your ISP and complain!  The DNS is the service
 [ which looks up 'foxtail.com' and returns the numerical IP address.
 [
 [ One of the 'Whois' services which shows USA registrations is Network
 [ Solutions, at  http://www.networksolutions.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois
 [ Enter the domain name foxtail.com and you will see our registration
 [ data.  For domains in Europe try http://www.internic.net/whois.html
 [
 [ -- Robbie