Any way the Society could ever get the IP addresses of those of us that are still active?
Scary stuff!
I.P. Address
by 5thGeneration 19 Replies latest jw friends
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KW13
It doesn't matter if they somehow got it, they'd be unable to identify you from it without approaching your internet host, and then they'd need a VERY VERY GOOD REASON.
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What-A-Coincidence
If your I.P. address is static (meaning it doesn't change - easier to track to the service provider + city where located) or is dynamic (it changes everytime you log on) check here ... http://www.showmyip.com/
If yours is static ... use this ...
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under_believer
I know a great deal of these matters--enough said about that.
It is conceivable that SOMEHOW the Society could get ahold of the IP addresses of the people that post on this board. This forum software logs the IP address each post comes from. It then encrypts them in hash form (you can see the hash next to each post, actually.) They can't do anything with that hash, but it's possible through social engineering, outright skullduggery (hacking,) or betrayal on the part of the proprieters, that they could get the addresses. I'm not saying likely--in fact it's very, very unlikely. Just not completely impossible.
The next question you should ask is -- could they do anything with those addresses? Yes, in fact they really could. There is a branch of network analysis called "geolocation." Geolocation basically takes your IP address and looks through databases to figure out where you are coming from. At the very least, geolocation will yeild your hometown. In many cases, it will reveal your actual neighborhood.
Don't take my word for it. Try a couple of experiments. First of all, go to http://www.hostip.info/index.html. This page will take your IP address and tell you, at least, your hometown. Now, if you'd like to REALLY freak out, copy your IP address off of that page, and go to http://www.parsec.it/whereis/. Paste your address in there, and hit "locate." Not too scary yet, right? Well, switch to "map" and use the little plus button to zoom in. In my case, this pinpointed a location about half a mile from where I am physically located.
Someone could conceivably take that information, plus clues you left in posts and so on, and possibly figure out who you were.
Now a final question--would anybody do this? That's a judgement call on your part. I dunno. If you were still anonymous, like a lot of us are, and were particularly pugnacious, and made the Society really angry, like that Quotes guy did, maybe they would.
There are ways around this. They are far beyond the scope of this post. Some are quite technical. If you really want to be anonymous on the Internet, well forget it. It's impossible. You can get pretty close to true anonymity with a tool called Tor, however. Free software available for townload at http://tor.eff.org/. You also might want to check out torpark, at http://torpark.nfshost.com/, which makes Tor a bit easier to use. -
Jourles
Do a seach on "web browsing proxy" if you're that worried.
For the conspiracy theorists, chew on this --- I did a small experiment a couple of years ago and found that it worked pretty well. It involved inserting a small 'invisible' gif file into a few of my replies. I hosted that gif file on a web server from one of my home computers(I did it from home because I could trust the time stamps over a remote webhost). Then when someone would reply to the thread, if my message appeared on the same screen as their reply window, a referal link with that person's IP address would show up in my web server log(anytime someone looked at the thread I got their IP address, but there was no way to tell who they were - this way matched up the poster to a specific IP). I could then look at the timestamp of the final reply and correlate it to the time of the referal in my web log. From there it's pretty easy to match up the poster with their IP address. City/state-to-IP-address resolution is a snap after that.
I wouldn't be surprised if the WTS was already doing this in some form or another. If you don't believe it can be done, care to make a wager? For those now worried even more, this is just another reason to look into using a proxy service(one that Simon doesn't block).
Just as an example, if you're reading this post right now, I know your IP address(but I don't know who is who - it's only when you reply). This whole post looks like plain ol' text, right? It does, but something is hidden, and it's right here --->
Don't worry. I promise I won't do anything elicit with anyone's IP address. It's merely for educational use.
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Jourles
And as a show of good faith, DTTOa2qLsng22NLU equates to 24 dot 11 dot 209 dot 172. But you could have figured that out from reading the html source.
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Jourles
LOL - and that ladies and gentlemen, is how you kill a thread!
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inbyathread
Hasn't killed it yet. Took my IP address from the web site that U/B suggested. Two locator sites located me some 15 to 30 miles away from my real location. I'm not worried. Bring it on WTS.
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fleaman uk
mine put me in 600 miles away!
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Jourles
Geolocation via IP isn't an exact science. IP address ranges are broken down into countries, regions, cities, and eventually, ISP's. So if you dial up to your ISP who happens to be based 100 miles away from you, chances are that is where you will appear to be "coming from." If you work for a large corporation that is based on the west coast but you live on the east coast, chances are good that your internet connection traverses the entire USA across your company's WAN before it gets passed on to a local ISP near your company's HQ(this is true for my connection right now). Cable and DSL address space are much closer to your actual location - probably within 5-10 miles, typical for an average size town. Dialup can be scattered depending on where your ISP is based.