DSL & Privacy

Ant sends a Wired story about DSL subscribers whose company set up their IP's to reverse to their full names - ostensibly to prove that the company needed more IP addresses. I'm not sure that the Wired author is on the ball for part of his story; it's not really very likely that anyone is going to target junkmail based on your third-level domain name unless the practice becomes terribly widespread. But certainly it makes the user's name available in any circumstance where the IP is normally exposed, which can't be a good idea. This is a specific case that relates to the more general set of naming exposing information about your network topology. -- michael

Comments

NEEDED to assign customer names to numbers?

[Seth Finkelstein]

Fastpoint's Arnold said that the company wrote a script to assign names to the numbers to prove to ARIN that the company's addresses were in use by actual customers.

Maybe there is sense to this, but it seems very odd to me. If there are N addresses in use, there is no need to have each showing the customer's name to the world. And mapping any single address to a customer name doesn't establish how many are being used. It sounds like someone found a horribly kludged way to do a usage report

- The Boston Lunatic

xDSL and dynamic IP addresses

[spyke]

I personally use ADSL, purchased from my local monopolistic telephone company. While they're known for being stupid, they decided to go with dynamic IP addresses for their DSL service. Granted, this isn't too fun for users, as they can't set up dedicated servers like some cable and DSL users, but it's proved convenient, and fairly secure (except for that DHCP exploit, but I haven't seen any evidence of it). Assigning names to IP addresses just uses up resources, and with dynamic IPs, you've always got enough to go around, and it keeps everything secure. Why don't all xDSL providers do this?

"No servers"

[Demona]

Isn't it funny how internet/connectivity providers expect you to just blithely hook up your personal box directly with absolutely no protection? With all the script kiddies and even more nefarious elements out there, anyone with a static IP who doesn't put a good solid firewall on it is painting a big red bullseye on themselves. I consider it the height of corporate arrogance and irresponsibility to both fail to provide at least adequate security for a customer and tell the customer they are prohibited from protecting themselves. This may be semi- related to the all-too-common "no servers" policies so many providers have, either implied or explicit.

I shudder to think of all the people who don't have sufficient competition in their area yet, and have no choice but to go with a provider who enforces these asinine, destructive rules. Some choice -- sit around waiting to get screwed, or try to protect yourself and hope the provider doesn't notice and cancel your account. I'd go with the second, and go all the way to the top demanding an explanation; at least it's more palatable than the alternative of getting cracked.

Is it really that big of a deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't anything very new, to begin with. I have a static IP from my ISP (ordinary dialup, not DSL), and the official hostname for the IP is $USERNAME.dialup.access.net. It's this way for all dialup customers of the ISP, and it's pretty easy to find out a real name, given a username. This is a pretty savvy ISP, in general, with pretty savvy customers, but no one's complained - mostly because it doesn't seem to have been a problem. Maybe it's the constant connection that makes the difference...