How did he do that in a chat room?

[ustelepunch]

Hello all,

I am indeed what you call, a noob. It's a little embarrassing, but we all have to start somewhere.

I was playing a game on Pogo recently and conversing with a few other users in the chat area. One user, who may or may not have been upset about a comment I made about his face, decided he was going to be the big man on the virtual campus and "threaten" me with his knowledge of the internet. He, let's call him Bob, asked me and another user to check our emails, then restart our computers. I did not, the other user who was physically sitting next to me did, just to see what would happen (his computer is a POS and worth scrapping). When my friend logged back into Pogo, Bob declared that he now owned that computer and yelled at me for not restarting mine. Bob knew what OS I was running and knew that my friend had restarted his computer and I had not. I'd like to know how he did that. We have no personal information posted and didn't click on any links or have any direct connection with him. Just in the same chat/game room. I've been told that information is relatively easy to acquire, and is obviously not damning, but how did he do it??

Additional information: We were attached to a public wireless network at a hotel, I use a Mac OS X (I think that offends some people here and I'm sorry...but really I'm not) and my friend was using XP.

Bob was subsequently abused beyond belief by...someone...and has since not returned to Pogo, at least under that username.

[Moonbat]

I don't know anything about this Pogo site, but I can tell you that it's easy to find out what OS the person is using. This information can be found using the user agent of your browser. For instance, a Mac OS X user who is browsing with Safari would have a user agent very similar or exactly like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X *0_5_2; en-au) AppleWebKit/525.*8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/*.*.* Safari/525.*8
You can find out your user agent by going to this website:

http://www.useragent.org/

Also, I'm not sure of the exact method your "Bob" guy used, but you can easily ping a computer to see if it is online or not. Most of the time if you are using a DSL or cable connection, you will always be online unless your computer is off.

[ustelepunch]

Thanks for the quick response.

So I now understand the concept of checking to see if a computer went offline or not, and how to read the code to determine the OS being used. I guess my question goes to how could he target me specifically without knowing my IP address beforehand? I've read a few of the other threads concerning finding IP addresses from chat rooms, and I haven't noticed, or at least understood, anything to describe how that information is obtained. I can open my terminal and see what IP addresses are linked to me, but how could he look at all those addresses (there were approx *5 people in the room) and know which was me? Educated guess, specific application, or is there some way that I'm missing?

Of course I'd love to know how to do it so that I can mess with people I know, however I'm not looking for a detailed step-by-step of something basic if someone doesn't have the time to describe it to me. Just a ***** punt in the right direction.

Thanks again.

[Moonbat]

Is there any sort of 'whois' function in Pogo? He could use that to find out which IP was yours.

[ustelepunch]

Not that I can find. You can select the person's username and check their profile (mine is empty), add them to your friends list to see which room they're in, and that's about it. I've tried all I can to find anything within Pogo that will let you see an IP address, but I can't find it. I've seen chat rooms (not Pogo) that have this sort of question/answer:

Q: How do I find someone on (Chat-Room)?
A: Use the command /whois nickname to find someone.

Is that what you are referring to? I haven't seen anything like that available on this particular site.

Any other s***estions?

Thanks

[Moonbat]

Not that I can find. You can select the person's username and check their profile (mine is empty), add them to your friends list to see which room they're in, and that's about it. I've tried all I can to find anything within Pogo that will let you see an IP address, but I can't find it. I've seen chat rooms (not Pogo) that have this sort of question/answer:

Q: How do I find someone on (Chat-Room)?
A: Use the command /whois nickname to find someone.

Is that what you are referring to? I haven't seen anything like that available on this particular site.

Any other s***estions?

Thanks
That /whois command is exactly what I'm talking about. But if your Pogo thing doesn't have it, then I'm sorry to say I can't figure out how 'Bob' got your IP.