The owner of ip4.me/ip6.me, Kevin Loch, has died
ip4only.me> In Kevin’s own words on kevinloch.com: “I am also an amateur physicist, programmer, photographer, independent film producer (at WTF Productions) and AFOL (Adult Fan of Lego).” Kevin was also passionate about any and all things space related: the sky, the stars, and beyond; trying to find the meaning in how things work, why they work, and what would make them work better. His latest passion after moving back to Reston was soaking in the skyline from the rooftop of his apartment building and bicycling the paths of Reston and beyond.
https://www.loudounfuneralchapel.com/obituaries/Kevin-Loch/#...
Also you can watch his memorial service here: https://www.youtube.com/live/YbnPeUgHGu8?t=1271
I’m not anti-religion in any way, but this left a really bad taste in my mouth. Loch’s nephew (the pastor who led the service) kept saying that Loch wasn’t religious. Then he’d go straight back to talking about Christ, and reminiscing about times when Loch had participated in Christian ritual!
It’s one thing to volunteer your religious organization as a venue for a memorial, even for someone who wasn’t religious. It’s another to memorialize the person with an explicitly religious service.
Maybe Loch wouldn't have minded? I'm not religious, but I don't really care if I were memorialized with a religious service. My belief is that service is more for the people left behind than the one who died anyway.
"To honor Kevin’s “You be you” attitude, a “Come As You Are” Memorial Service will be held on Wednesday, July 3, 2024, at 11:00 a.m. at Fairfax Church of Christ. 3901 Rugby Road, Fairfax, VA 22033. A reception will follow at the church where you will be able to assemble your own Lego tribute to Kevin to take home. Lego bricks will be provided."
"In lieu of traditional flowers, you may bring or send Lego flowers. Those assembled before the service will be part of the Memorial display. Assembly space will be provided for any unassembled flowers. Traditional and Lego flowers can be sent to the church 7/2 between 9-4."
PSA: Lego turned evil, unfortunately. There are much better alternatives on the market these days.
Just let the man have his legos sheesh. Pick a better time.
What is your definition of evil?
> Lego turned evil
Could you elaborate?
Suing small creators and businesses out of existence, scammy pricing policies (anything with the Star Wars license is overpriced 2-4x), increasing quality problems, very little in terms of own IP (in contrast to the 90s).
McKinsey types have taken over.
Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20884542 The "Held der Steine" logo lawsuit story is what has made me aware of their practices.
My guess would be a post from 13 years ago with 283 comments but I'm also curious.
Nah :) See above
What would you recommend instead?
If bought new:
Lidl (if you live in a country where they are active), BlueBricks, or Cobi. But there are half a dozen others which are excellent.
Used Lego is fine, though.
Evil... When? How?
Seems like he passed away in June but maybe the Estate didn't sort out everything until recently?
https://www.brickfanatics.com/tributes-for-founder-lego-webs...
It takes time (typically some number of months) to get appointed as the executor of an estate, and then even more time for the executor to get effective control over the estate's assets.
Ah yeah, I missed part of my response I think. I was trying to say that he didn't pass away recently, but maybe we just noticed it because the estate (or the executor) just started to manage this asset and left that message in the domain.
Oh no, this has been my go-to site for connectivity tests (as example.com seems to be cached fairly aggressively by my browsers and that has misled me in the past). Ad-free, minimal, does exactly what it needs to and nothing more.
Rest in peace!
Edit: All these (great and much appreciated!) responses of alternatives are making me wonder if this should in fact be a standardized service that could then be offered as a public good in a similar way as pool.ntp.org.
Checking for generic Internet connectivity (i.e. not only having an IP address, but being able to reach public sites, these sites being non-cached, not-captive-portaled etc.) seems like a problem that too many apps, scripts, and devices are solving again and again.
ifconfig.me is a similar service which I often use. It has a nice feature that if you do "curl ifconfig.me", you'll get only a string with the ip address, no markup.
This site is behind cloudflare and has captcha-blocked my queries more than once.
ifconfig.me is not behind Cloudflare, at least currently.
On a Reddit post, someone mentioned ip.wtf that they created as a similar service. Aside from using it in a browser, it also provides a single IP address with curl ip.wtf, with less typing. I also like getting more information by using this: curl --json "" ip.wtf
Me too, but that's a whopping 5 characters more. Think of all the extra keyboard wear!
I do like the curl-ability of that one a lot, though, and on my own computer I can just configure an alias or shell function for it :)
Try "curl ip.wtf" to save your keyboard :)
I've been using ipinfo.io now for several years and have been very pleased with them.
You can `curl https://ipinfo.io/` and get a JSON blob back with info on your current IP. If you pass an IP explicitly you can get info back on it, for example `curl https://ipinfo.io/104.26.7.98`. Easy to combine with jq also for use in scripts: `curl https://ipinfo.io/104.26.7.98 | jq -r '.ip'`
For personal use it's free, and they have reasonable pricing for large volume. No affiliation on my part, just a happy user.
Instead of jq .ip, please use https://ipinfo.io/ip
This API endpoint has its dedicated stack and infrastructure to support unlimited lookups.
Also, for IPv6 connection use: https://v6.ipinfo.io/ip
PS: I am the DevRel of IPinfo.
Annoyingly, they no longer show your IP on their web homepage.
We are experimenting with some design choices as we try to highlight all the IP metadata we have and move towards being an "internet data" company instead of just an IP location company.
I highly recommend you check out the page: https://ipinfo.io/myip
I understand the data we have for your IP address is not front and center anymore. We have gone through several iterations of designs for our homepage, so if you have any suggestions, I will relay them to our team.
"I don’t want anyone to see our address and opening hours without also reading through our values, our mission statement, and board of directors"
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 most of our data for free through our website, we have a generous API, and we have a fully accurate open access licensed database. We also have more free services to be released!
Due to the open data approach, developers appreciate us. We are not trying to create any barriers or friction here, but we are trying to find a balance. If you have any suggestions that can encourage users to explore our data while simultaneously providing everyone with a frictionless experience with our data, please let me know.
> 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!
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.
It's a service that shows visitors their own address and metadata about it. Seems fair to not want to provide that for free without some advertisement for the paid version or the company?
Absolutely. Actively degrading the user experience might have the opposite effect, though.
If you have the resources to maintain it, you can contact the estate. (They'd like to sell the domains, so unless they're bundled with Brickshelf the highest bidder will probably be a traffic-farming company or something, but you never know.)
For services like this, I always use my own domain which can easily be re-mapped or hosted myself. E.g. "checkip.mydomain.com"
icanhazip.com provides a similar service and has a good story behind it [0]
[0] https://blog.apnic.net/2021/06/17/how-a-small-free-ip-tool-s...
I use ip.me it's not add free, but in curl you can have an ad free version by doing curl -4 ip.me or curl -6 ip.me since it will only send the ip when it detects curl I guess.
I'll just.. leave this here
That’s a lot worse to type, but good to know.
You can also use dig to get your external ipv4. That prevents reliance on smaller sites
Don’t have the command on hand but easily searchable
How so? Getting your public/external IP does not seem possible behind a NAT without an external service.
No idea. All I can tell you is that it works and if I need to hard code a IP check like this then I’d rather rely on a big player like Google or cloudflare ns than someone’s project site
Not sure if I'd trust an undocumented Google feature without any SLA more, to be honest. Rumor has it that Google have discontinued a service or two before.
What command line do you use?
dig whoami.cloudflare ch txt @1.1.1.1 +short
You can use dig:
(still an external service, but not reliant on a website)dig +short -4 myip.opendns.com @resolver1.opendns.comThat's just another protocol in the end (DNS vs. HTTP), or am I missing something?
DNS also runs a higher risk of being cached or mangled somewhere along the way by middleboxes. HTTPS avoids that problem.
I usually use `curl ifconfig.me`
checkip.amazonaws.com is my goto, not as short tho :/
I was recently looking for IPv4/IPv6-only HTTP services hosted by major CDNs (for https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo/issues/60), and found these:
Cloudflare: https://ipv4.icanhazip.com + https://ipv6.icanhazip.com
Akamai: https://ipv4.whatismyip.akamai.com + https://ipv6.whatismyip.akamai.com
The problem with https://checkip.amazonaws.com is that it neither supports IPv6, nor claims that it will remain IPv4-only, so it's not clear what you'll get in the future.
ip.guide is also a great one. Provides a json payload with relevant information. I have no affiliation with it, just happy user!
I never knew of him from ip4.me, but I definitely visited his Lego site Brickshelf (https://brickshelf.com/).
Thanks Kevin.
A small thread from long ago:
Massive Aircraft Carrier made of Lego, 200,000 bricks, 350LB - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=415448 - Dec 2008 (3 comments)
He was also known in the LEGO community: https://www.brickfanatics.com/tributes-for-founder-lego-webs...
RIP
> Note: This website will be disabled by 3/1/2025. Website content will be relocated to nensus.com/kl-net
So much for leaving a legacy with your domain name.
I never heard of ip[46].me but the site is very informative.
RIP Kevin Loch
RIP Kevin, thanks for the fish!
He was relatively young; what was the cause of death?
RIP Kevin. These websites no doubt helped thousands of people over the years.
If anyone is looking for an alternative site to check their v6 and v4 addresses, check out this one here:
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
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!
I like that this prints the IP address followed by a newline. some similar services don't and it's sort of annoying.
Kudos for his contributions.
Lots of solutions out there. I like wasab.is https://wasab.is
curl wasab.is curl wasab.is/json
RIP Kevin. Used these sites a lot!
I hope they give then to a charity/charitable person. I proposed to continue the service ad free, for free to them. Hopefully they accept my proposal. It would be such a shame for the service to become "enshittified" by some greedy company
RIP silent hero
5 points on that some scammer is going to buy the domains and doing shady things with it.
5ad::
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
The former should be
dig -4 @resolver1.opendns.com myip.opendns.com A +short dig -6 @resolver1.opendns.com myip.opendns.com AAAA +shortUnless you're on a network that blocks all dns traffic not to their own dns servers.
The open DNS query failed for me with: "Query A or AAAA for your source address as seen by the resolver" But, the google nameserver did work. Thanks!
Really rolls off the tongue, going to put it with my useful numbers like 0118 999 881 99 9119 725 3.
> The Kevin M Loch Estate will be shutting down Kevin's websites in the near future (4/1/2025).
All respect to the deceased, but there's always at least a tiny part of me that is suspicious of anything taking place on April 1.
Could simply be that a bunch of invoices/billing are connected to months and they don't want to pay beyond the current month (to make sure they get their money for the domains).
Were those addresses used for anything or simple domain squatting?
They were great memorable and ad-free sites that simply showed you your own (or your NAT's) public IP, as seen by the HTTP server.
Looks like he had useful info up for people.... I never heard of it before today either: https://ip4only.me/home.cgi
To know your IP
I'm puzzled why you have been downvoted for asking a genuine question (and all credit to those who have taken time to respond to you).
Perhaps the downvoters would care to explain their actions?
The question may be genuine but its phrasing probably suggests an allegation to most readers.
I didn't downvote, but the question was answerable by simply visiting the domains typed into the comment.