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