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ABC Showed IPs of Chatroom Participants
Blob Pet writes "The Associated Press reports that ABC News published the IP addresses of those who participated in an 'Internet news broadcast' Monday with Sam Donaldson. It prevents someone like Bill Clinton from pretending to be an average American and preaching how great the President is on an online forum hehe."
There's also a privacy concern or two here, as the article points out, and IMO ABC booted it on this one. Would "Mark from DC" have been as free with his opinions if he'd known his bosses could easily trace him? I doubt it.
I have discovered something about myself recently. I don't care that much about privacy. For some reason, I can't make myself be neurotic about my SSN. I freely give it out to anyone in "authority" who asks for it. Hell, I even say it outloud. Sometimes, I've been known to walk down the street repeating it over and over again.
Seriously. You bring up the point that any goober can spoof his IP. And anybody serious about doing some harm to your system can see right through that. While that doesn't (usually) stop me from doing something with my IP, I find that the best way for someone with a leased line/Cable modem/xDSL line and static IP is to simply remain anonymous. Don't do any of those "bad" things.
I want a rock.
... that your IP is easily found out if your participiating in IRC and that has been so for ages. Also, you all know of course, that your IP shows up in web logs, and has been from the very beginning of the web.
You all know as well that you need to use some kind of cryptographically hard anonymizing service for better protection.
I can see the byline now when these people find out about the existance of IRC: "Massive privacy concern's discovered using popular IRC program!". Like it or not, people using IRC have their IP address made available, but it's consentual, in a way. Everyone can see your IP address, by you can see everyone's IP address too. But of course, only the really stupid packet warriors smurf someone from their own dialup.
The close to 500k people who use the various IRC networks around don't seem to complain about their IP's being shown.
Ok, actually yes quiet a few of them they do, and it's something I think IRC networks should really get their butts into gear over somehow masking. Knowing who to email when some butthead floods you on IRC is all well and good, but in these modern days of packet warriors, showing the whole IP address is less than wise. Rumour is that a near-future version of a certain-network's ircd will employ some form of hostmasking technique.
Disclaimer: I don't represent Undernet Administration as a whole.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I happen to be using a cable modem...and the mental giants that set up the network decided to name every single host name by it's physical location. Which means if someone does a reverse-DNS lookup on my IP, they will get...
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customer.city.region.state.country.home.com
Plus, my since my customer number is first, if the person has any amount of human engineering skills, they will have my street address in no time. I can't tell you how many times I've had @Home reps read aloud my home address and THEN ask me for my security passcode. Failing that, since they have my city and state, if they get my last name they have a better-than-average chance of finding me listed in a phone directory. =\
Obviously, my complaints fall on deaf ears since @Home is not going to change their idiotic naming scheme any time soon. So, that means I must use the utmost caution when allowing my IP to be posted somewhere online. You people think that only e-mail address are harvested from public discussion groups? Wrong. For several weeks following a posting to a beginners help forum (that listed my IP) I was bombarded with signals on port 31337 and 12345. I actually had to threaten @Home with legal action to get them to change my IP and ever since I haven't let that thing get out of my sight.
If you have a cable modem, especially @Home, I strongly suggest you be just as careful.
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Some things to check out:
The Anonymizer
Surf the Web anonymously
Replays Anonymous Remailers
Send email anonymously
Onion Routing
Onion Routing allows you to send IP packets anonymously.
SSonet
Multilevel security in computer networks.
Unless the spammer's "ISP" *is* the spammer, or the ISP is spam-friendly. At that point you have little choice but to go up another level. I've had to do that quite frequently.