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Comment by deutronium | Hacker News Reader

I presume this site is created by the Chatroulette people themselves, as surely they'd be the only ones with access to the IPs of users?

[Edit: Just tried Wireshark with chatroulette and you can see the UDP packets going to/from the other user, I guess this isn't always the case if you're both behind NAT gateways]

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I posted a comment to this effect here about 3 weeks ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1128322

I can confirm that the UDP stream is not always available and that I was behind a NAT during my testing.

Apparently Chatroulette involves a direct connection between individuals, so it's possible to determine the IP address of the person you are connected to.

For it not to be a direct connection, Chatroulette would require some pretty heavy resources to stream everyone's video.

As per http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/chatroulettes-found... :

"Network throughput is 7 gigabits a second." which would sort of line up with ~20K users at ~50K video streams.

I have an open Chatroulette session and Wireshark running at the same time. A lot of traffic is running by me in Wireshark as users connect and disconnect. What am looking for that tells me the other person's general location? Which, out of all those scrolling IPs, is the one of interest?

I think it was found that people were directly connected or the ip address was forwarded.

Why would you think that? The domains chatroulette and chatroulettemap don't seem to be related. The real site has is own nameservers and is registered out of the UK. The map is served by Dreamhost and is registered out of Colorado. The real site was created by a talented young person. The map site was probably created by a talentless old person (sorta like the HN demographic).

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