Blogs, forums and bloggers part 4

Locally, there's a well-known character who places an astonishingly (and somewhat uninformed) high degree of trust in something called an 'IP'. He's been known to tell Oscar to check posters' IPs, as though that would impart something significant about the person, and one local forum eliminates members' accounts purely on the basis of the IP.

So what's an IP, then and how much can it tell you?

Try this. Click on this link. This is an example of Geolocation software, and you can see that it places you - well, not exactly near to where you live. In fact, to anyone who really understands them, IP addresses are not that effective. To be truly effective, you have to take a court order out against the ISP concerned to force them to reveal to you who is behind any given IP address, and that's not a process which is either easy or simple. Once you've got the IP address above, you can try this. Here, you can see that it finds out your ISP.

Every device connected to the Internet is assigned a unique number known as an Internet Protocol (IP) address. IP addresses consist of four numbers separated by decimal points and look something like 127.0.0.1.

Since these numbers are usually assigned to internet service providers within region-based blocks, an IP address can only be used to identify the region or country from which a computer is connecting to the Internet. An IP address can sometimes be used to show the user's general location, but nothing more. In fact, the nearest that anyone can tell about you is the ISP you connect through. If you use BT, which most do, then your IP will be the same as or very similar to anyone else who uses BT.

In conclusion, therefore, No one outside of the law courts can tell who you are by your IP. Anyone who tells you otherwise is fibbing.

For the truly paranoid, however, it's possible to conceal your IP address if you really want to, although it should be stressed that for every method of concealment, there's always an expert somewhere that will be trying to overcome it. However, there is really only one way to avoid anyone finding out your IP (which, remember, is only the IP address of your ISP, away:-) and that's to use a proxy server. Unless you own your own proxy server, and you're wealthy enough to have a place somewhere several thousand miles away to keep it, then any proxy server you use could be compromised and your information seen by someone.

All this really means is that the internet is a perfectly safe place and at least as safe as the rest of the real world. The normal forum owner or Blog writer has no more chance of finding out who you really are from your IP address as the man in the moon.