The owner of ip4.me/ip6.me, Kevin Loch, has died • Hacker News Board

Re: The owner of ip4.me/ip6.me, Kevin Loch, has died

#91

Post by cjcampbell » Thu, Mar 06, 2025, 4:46 AM UTC

lemcoe9 wrote: post #79

ip4.me and related websites actually inspired me to create a more-whimsical version of the website, which I call ipkitten.com. Not only do you get your IP address, User Agent, and approximate geolocation, but you also get a kitten GIF! It also works from the command line, like this: $ curl ipkitten.com 4.2.2.2 I am sure that Kevin has saved engineers and other IT people tons of headache and time with his simple, help…

Don’t know where I first discovered it, but I have been using ipkitten for years when working with non-tech friends, family, and clients. It seems to help with the intimidation filter of getting into the weeds, so thank you!

I didn’t realize it was command line friendly!

Re: The owner of ip4.me/ip6.me, Kevin Loch, has died

#92

Post by rrr_oh_man » Thu, Mar 06, 2025, 9:41 AM UTC

x______________ wrote: post #61

volemo wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lego turned evil Could you elaborate?

My guess would be a post from 13 years ago with 283 comments but I'm also curious. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3357522

Nah :) See above

Re: The owner of ip4.me/ip6.me, Kevin Loch, has died

#93

Post by rrr_oh_man » Thu, Mar 06, 2025, 10:00 AM UTC

rrr_oh_man wrote: post #86

reincoder wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our priority is always the developer experience and I apologize for the friction you are seeing here. The issue is that we are truly in a unique space when it comes to internet data. We have gone through several iterations on how to present the full extent of data and not just your public IP address. If you are a regular user of our service, you know that we have a very open access approach to our data. We provide mo…

Hello, AT&T.

Or, to be more helpful: please speak like a human being, not like a corporate chat bot. Would be much, much appreciated.

Re: The owner of ip4.me/ip6.me, Kevin Loch, has died

#94

Post by reincoder » Thu, Mar 06, 2025, 5:00 PM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #84

reincoder wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our priority is always the developer experience and I apologize for the friction you are seeing here. The issue is that we are truly in a unique space when it comes to internet data. We have gone through several iterations on how to present the full extent of data and not just your public IP address. If you are a regular user of our service, you know that we have a very open access approach to our data. We provide mo…

> The issue is that we are truly in a unique space when it comes to internet data. You serve people their IP address. There’s tens of sites doing the same in this very thread.

Yes, but we also operate 1,000 servers across 400 cities in 130 countries to generate one of the most comprehensive internet measurement datasets possible and process more than 2 trillion yearly API requests.

Still, we really appreciate users and software that only use our service to get their public IP address.

Re: The owner of ip4.me/ip6.me, Kevin Loch, has died

#95

Post by reincoder » Thu, Mar 06, 2025, 6:07 PM UTC

rrr_oh_man wrote: post #93

rrr_oh_man wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello, AT&T.

Or, to be more helpful: please speak like a human being, not like a corporate chat bot. Would be much, much appreciated.

My apologies if it seems like I'm speaking like a corporate bot. I always try to be as respectful as possible. To be completely honest, the decision to make changes to the homepage was quite difficult for us, but we are trying to figure out what we can do to improve adoption as we evolve.

I largely own the free product/service side of IPinfo, and it’s common for me to hear from developers that they didn’t know we have a free database they can download or we literally have this database for free on GCP and Snowflake. This happens with a lot of our products. For example, many of our users may even do not know we have a residential proxy detection database that we worked really hard to launch.

How can we improve the adoption of our service here? We would like users to explore the site and, at the same time, give us feedback on the areas where they’re facing friction.

Re: The owner of ip4.me/ip6.me, Kevin Loch, has died

#96

Post by roygbiv2 » Fri, Mar 07, 2025, 5:56 AM UTC

homebrewer wrote: post #23

A reminder that you do not need websites or an HTTP client to learn your public IP: dig @resolver1.opendns.com myip.opendns.com TXT +short dig @ns1.google.com o-o.myaddr.l.google.com TXT +short dig can be replaced with any DNS lookup utility (nslookup, drill, etc).

Really rolls off the tongue, going to put it with my useful numbers like 0118 999 881 99 9119 725 3.

Re: The owner of ip4.me/ip6.me, Kevin Loch, has died

#97

Post by rrr_oh_man » Fri, Mar 07, 2025, 9:17 PM UTC

reincoder wrote: post #94

Aeolun wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The issue is that we are truly in a unique space when it comes to internet data. You serve people their IP address. There’s tens of sites doing the same in this very thread.

Yes, but we also operate 1,000 servers across 400 cities in 130 countries to generate one of the most comprehensive internet measurement datasets possible and process more than 2 trillion yearly API requests. Still, we really appreciate users and software that only use our service to get their public IP address.

That is insane! Kudos!