Re: Protecting my identity from websites
- From: Tim McNamara <timmcn@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 14:58:18 -0500
In article <fmmck-F709F9.12070023042007@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Fred McKenzie <fmmck@xxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <timmcn-E91FCB.09132623042007@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Tim McNamara <timmcn@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In terms of the name of your Mac, it's not visible to the Internet.
OK. How about this one:
I found I could access a neighbor's wireless system. When connected,
my IP address was assigned by their base station using DHCP.
Out of curiosity, I connected to the base station's web page using
its IP address as a URL. Guess what? I found an activity log with
"Freds Macintosh" listed! I don't recall, but may have been using OS
9 at the time. How is that different from connecting to a web site
on the internet?
In this example, you are connecting to an unprotected LAN via a wireless
router. Your computer became a peer member of the LAN. It's very
common for people to leave their wireless LANs open like this, BTW, to
the extent that it's a standing joke that public wireless networking is
offered by Linksys. Running iStumbler I find that 25% of the wireless
networks I can find from my living room sofa are unprotected. By
getting a DHCP address from the router, you are connecting through the
LAN port; the Internet comes in through the WAN port.
That's different than connecting to a Web server on the Internet. A Web
site can't reverse-connect to your computer like this unless it can
manage to get the router to assign it an IP address within the range
used by the LAN. AFAIK routers won't do that when the request comes in
via the WAN port.
I can look at my logs and find the IP addresses of every computer than
accesses the Web sites on my server. I don't get the name of the
computer, the name of the account on the computer, etc. If I am really
interested I can do a whois or reverse lookup and see if I can find
information about the computer that way. (I've done this to try to
identify computers attacking my Web server). I can find out the
registered name of the owner of that IP address, but it is usually an
ISP and very rarely the name of the person using the computer. Almost
never can one look up the name of Joe or Jane Everidge just from getting
their IP address off of my Web site logs.
.
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