Public IP shows strange characters and Facebook registers logged-in session to a different location
- by Stuart Kershaw
I'm encountering some IP strangeness today and hoping to find an explanation.
In short, I'm based in Seattle, WA with my ISP being Comcast.
While browsing Facebook's account settings, I noticed that my active session was located to Mount Laurel, NJ.
At that point I ran a search in Google for 'my public IP', which returned an interesting result: a string of characters in the following format:
2601:8:b000:xxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx
Normally, a search for my IP returns something like:
67.xxx.xx.xxx
A phone call to Comcast got me nowhere, but using Comcast's phone-menu debugging tools, I was able to send a 'refresh signal' to my modem. After that, the search for 'my public IP' yielded the expected result... for about 5 minutes, and then it returned to the new string of characters.
Does anyone know of an explanation for this?