off topic what on my pc might identify where I used to live several years ago to

As an example on the home page on TUSCL, under local attractions, I see clubs in NC not SC for an area I used to live in several years ago. Where is this info being picked up from?

We use your ip address and a service that tells us approx where that IP adress is located. My guess is that the database is wrong or that your ISP is located in the area that you're seeing on the local attractions.

There is really only two places that a website can get this information. As founder noted, the most common is resolving the IP address to a ISP and the region it serves. Depending on the ISP the region can be quite broad. Since you are resolving to somewhere within a couple hundred miles (guessing) this is probably the best bet. BTW for those that do not know - IP is Internet Protocol, the IP address is what uniquely identifies every computer on the Internet. You can not avoid sending out your IP because this is the way the web server knows how to send information back to you (you can get a proxy service that 'hides' your IP by acting as an intermediary - some protection privacy wise but little protection legally in general).

The second way is to use 'cookies' that can store information that can be used to customize your content. I think this is unlikely in this case but you should clear your cookies periodically anyway.

Here is another odd one. When I read Yahoo news, one paragraph is devoted to Columbia SC local news and weather. Is it tied to searches? I do many more searches for the area in which I live. Puzzled!

Yahoo local is tied to Yahoo weather. If you did happen to look up the weather in Columbia for some strange reason, that would trigger an assumption that you are local to Columbia.

I guess that explains it. I have weather.com bookmarked and under recent searches is Columbia SC. Thanks.

1. Wipe cookies, history, all that stuff.

2. Check to see if your browser is using a "proxy server." One easy way, is to go here ...

http://whatismyipaddress.com/

That page identifies my location accurately to within about 4 miles (residential New Orleans), since my internet connection is in an urban area and the provider is accurate and truthful about which wires are going where.

To the contrary, when I visit that page with the browser on my cell phone, it says I'm (a) on several proxies and (b) in Waterloo Ontario. That's because the Blackberry company proxies all internet connections on Blackberries all over the world through Waterloo. Canadian pricks ...

Why care that spammers aren't able to keep track of where you currently live?

Thanks for those answers. It was always a mystery to me if there was something on my pc the ads were picking up on. I guess not since I clear cookies on a regular basis. Even though I live in western SC, the http://whatismyipaddress.com/ shows my location as near the outer banks of NC just about 300 to 400 miles away. Seems kind of funny when I occasionally see an ad for something like "meet local girls now" and they are in some far off location.

Lol, I guess my local isp lies routinely about my location or keeps listing somewhere in the boondocks, NC.

It's not unusual, Casualguy. Now that you've got a handle on what an "IP address" and "proxy server" can do about location, you might double-check it now and again from different locations, just to see what the many internet companies in your region are doing about "IP accuracy." There's a small grass-roots move among some savvy computer users, to try to establish greater accuracy and transparency in that kind of trail-making. I guess there's probably also a civil libertarian move in the other direction, to keep that kind of trail-making as opaque and unfathomable as possible.

I like that my where-abouts are accurately identified on my home computer -- it's on my desk, and I want it to act like it's on my desk, rather than acting like it's in Canada every time I hit Google. But I also kind of like that my Blackberry's where-abouts are inaccurate, and always identified as in Canada, since I carry that thing around and don't want people tracking me with it. If I want tracking possibilities, I turn on one of the many applications that runs a GPS monitor (like the Google Maps "latitude" function which you can have your mobile phone JOIN or OPT OUT of at any time). So, I'm kind of a fence-sitter on this issue.

And, by the way, you can make many web pages get your location "correct" by telling it NOT to redirect you. For example, at Google, if you go simply to "google.com" you will go to whichever LOCAL Google searcher that the Google company thinks your location would best be served by. If your IP identifies you as in Argentina, it will send you to Google Argentina when you type "google.com" into the browser. Etc. But if you type "google.com/ncr" (which stands for No Country Redirect) then you'll get "main" Google no matter what country you're in. Other websites have similar hacks.

Just some thoughts ...

I just checked my ISP location. I'm supposedly somewhere between Fayetteville and Raleigh, NC. It's only off somewhere like 200 to 300 miles. I once lived in NC so I kept wondering if all these ads kept picking up on some info on my pc I didn't delete. If these random locations make me somewhat anonymous, I don't mind that much.

OK computer guru's,answer this. I have about 240 pornos on my hard drive. They were all complete when I saved them. Recently about 20% of them have gone bad. They stop playing after a minute or 2. They were originally 15-30 minute movies. I have updated windows media player to the latest version. No help. Puzzled!