I have a stat counter on my blog and I get hundreds of hits a week from Reston Virginia. It’s not all the same person. Does the whole city of Reston love me, or is there an easier explanation?
AOL
Everyone using AOL will show up as coming from Reston?
Isn’t that where the NSA or some other spook agency is located?
Pretty much, yep.
Check out the stats for this site for the state of Texas. 24k hits from Virginia, 13k from Texas and the rest are piddly. The most active city is Reston, Virginia with over 17k. The second active city has just 6k.
IP addresses are owned by entities and the entities are located in particular places. When you use dialup you are dialing in to someone else’s network and you’re being assigned an IP address that belongs to the entity, not to you. When you connect to AOL you’re connecting to a network in Virginia (where AOL is located) and using AOL’s network to go to sites on the Web. So traffic from AOL users will be shown as originating in Virginia.
Reston, Virginia is where there was an outbreak of a form of the Ebola virus, as detailed in Richard Preson’s book The Hot Zone.
Say, jsgoddess…is your anti-virus software up to date?
Knowing what type of site you have might narrow it down a bit.
It is highly improbably it is NSA - if you were a spying organization, wouldn’t one of the first things you do is mask where your traffic originates? I’m no genious but I am sure a smart person would think of that - particularly of the world’s premier technology/crypto/eavesdropping agency.
Also, GE, American Express, Exon Mobile, Dyncorp, Sallie Mae and numerous other companies have headquarters (or a very large presence) in the area…
It’s also very close to Dulles Internation Airport, isn’t it?? Is there wireless available at Dulles? Perhaps a lot of international travelers??
Uh, given the list of known mistakes that they’ve made, I wouldn’t be so sure of that.
Not that it necessarily means anything, but Reston’s Wiki entry does not indicate any government agency located there besides the USGS and National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (almost, but not quite, spooks). Perhaps Tuckerfan was thinking of Langley?
One possible significant point from that entry: Reston is home to the world HQ of Sprint/Nextel.
You might be thinking of Quantico. Unless you’re kidding and I’m blowing it.
The NSA is in Fort Meade, MD, and the CIA is in Langley, VA.
(At least, that’s what they want you to believe.)
IIRC, Reston, VA is a significant communications gateway, with lots of satellite downlink stations there, but I was sort of having fun with the whole spooks thing.
Actually, AOL is in Ashburn, VA (or recently they created the postal city name Dulles, so it might be in Dulles now.) I’m from that immediate area. Maybe, though, AOLs servers or whatever are in another building in Reston.
=FBI center.
A whole lot of the internet’s backbone is in Reston. Any proxy hits on your page are very likely coming from there.
I used to work in the NOC (Network Operations Center) at AOL. 45,000+ servers were in production at the time. It is in Reston. AOL had a couple different buildings, some rented, in the Reston area and they built a huge building out a ways (maybe Ashton? It’s been a while and I don’t remember).
On the same block as AOL were two backbone providers, can’t remember the names of them right now. The block that AOL sat on had an enormous amount of the US internet traffic go through it. At the time I worked there if you were to blow up that block or otherwise interrupt the traffic that went through it, the internet in the US would have a pretty major problem, at least until they routed around the issue. I believe that all the companies beefed up equipment in other areas to avoid that partiular problem.
Slee