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My friend's iPhone 4 has a strange behavior. When on 3G, going to an IP detection website, his IP seems to be changing pretty much on every request! His phone is supposedly traveling all over the world at every http request.

It's not the carrier, because we tried to switch SIM cards and the issue is attached to the phone.

On Wi-Fi it seems to be OK.

His phone is jailbroken, however I couldn't see anything installed regarding this. But I'm no expert.

Anyone has seen this before? Is there a known application or setting that may create this? Where should he look?

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Which IP addresses, how did you determine they are supposedly geolocalized across the world? Also which IP detection site did you use? – Gerry Nov 7 '12 at 11:24
whatismyipaddress.com The IP address and geolocation shown on this page keep changing. – nute Nov 7 '12 at 12:14

1 Answer

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The IP address will change as you move base stations or your data requests are load balanced by your provider. This is because it is not your IP address but the IP address used by the provider to service the internet request.

It will be the same when on Wifi since your routers external IP address will persist for its connection to the outside world. However if that changed (if you rebooted your router and don't have a statically assigned IP) then you would observe the same behaviour.

These changes should happen over half hour or longer intervals, so if you are seeing changes that are minutes apart, then the traffic is being routed to a service that is anonymizing the source IP and/or potentially being tampered with.

See the tor project for a description of how this works when people want to show up in web server logs as coming from many diverse IP addresses.

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I am remaining static. It changes at every single refresh of the page. Plus, how do you explain that this behavior is NOT observed when using another iPhone, with the same SIM card? – nute Nov 7 '12 at 12:25
Also the IP changes completely, not just the last few digits (hence the geolocation telling me I'm once in the US, then Australia... while really I'm in Israel). – nute Nov 7 '12 at 12:51
If you need to see if the behavior is the software or the phone, restore the original firmware and see if it functions like before or like the other phone. – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen Nov 12 '12 at 5:19

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