ip tracing - forums - privacy

[heath61701]

i work for a large employer and read a news article on the local newpaper's website. There is a comment section for readers to post opinions, comments, etc.

i did not post anything to personally identify me, nor did i post any information proprietary to the company, trade secrets, or anything like that. what i did post was a critical opinion of how the company was run (my opinion as a longtime employee). used my own computer and not work computer.

i had second thoughts on what i posted, but my question is -- can the company find out who i am by obtaining ip info from the newspaper site? or some other way?

thanks in advance.

 

[FlightSimBoy]

It's a long process to obtain an IP. They'd have to get a court order first, and even then they'd need probable cause.

I think as long as you posted no vital information about the company or anything in a threatening demeanor - they can't do anything about it.

Long story short, they could obtain your IP and trace it down, but it'd probably be pointless and too costly for them to do so.

 

[~Darkseeker~]

the IP address of my PC right now is 192.168.0.6.

doesnt matter that i just put it on the internet, because it's private range.

millions of LAN computers have the same IP address, aslong as they are on different LANs. You need a router's IP to get to any PCs on its network.

 

[detox1]

i thought an IP worked like a postal/zip code. its good for a general area

 

[~Darkseeker~]

if you go into CMD and type

tracert google.com

it will send an echo (a 'ping') to google and tell you all the routers the packets travel through to get there.

The private range addresses within a LAN are

10.x.y.z (Class A private range)

172.16.x.y up to 172.32.x.y (class B private)

192.168.x.y (Class C private).

Public IPs can be any combination of classful dotted decimal numbers, up to a maximum number per octet of 255.

Most home LANs use class C addressing since it has a greater number of subnets and fewer hosts per subnet, since home LANs dont usually need more than 1-5 hosts per subnet. Most medium companies use Class B addressing for an almost identical number of hosts to subnets (allowing around 16,000 hosts i think?). Class A has so few subnets (254 compared to 16m on class C) and so many hosts, it is rarely used.

The internet is a big mesh of routers connected together in what we would call a WAN. When you send packets to a URL, the packets 'hop' from one router to the next until it reaches the destination, or it's maximum number of allowed hops (TTL)

giving someone your private IP is useless, they'd need th public IP of the router. Anywaym IPv4 addresses ran out about a week ago. The transition to IPv6 should be well underway. Private will become Link Local (FE80) i believe.


as FlightSim said, it's made very difficult to get router and home IPs maliciously, since all sorts of firewall technology, masking and IPSec technology exists to get in the way.

 

[root]

the IP address of my PC right now is 192.168.0.6.

doesnt matter that i just put it on the internet, because it's private range.

millions of LAN computers have the same IP address, aslong as they are on different LANs. You need a router's IP to get to any PCs on its network.

this is true, your private lan address may be that, but it doesn't change the fact that you have a public address as well.

From your public address (that is recorded everytime you post).
I can tell you the rough area that you live in, where your local excahge is.
and I know who your ISP is...

check here to see just how much informationm you're giving away.

208.43.112.132 IP Map Location | Website & Domain Value

 

[~Darkseeker~]

i've got no problems with you knowing my ISP

btw they suck lol.

 

[root]

you completely miss the point then...

firstly, your address isn't 192.168.anything
all that really matters is your external IP address.

the website has this.

regardless of what I can say from your IP address -which is limited to knowing your ISP and thanks to the ISP's lovel node naming policy with reverse pointers, I can see your local exchange.

doesn't mean a lot I'll admit... but the point is what can be gotten from that.


Right, I've got your internet IP address, now I know who your ISP is,
I go to your ISP and ask them who owned this IP address at this time and they will hand it over.

(ok, so they wouldn't hand it over to me, but they would hand it over to the police) -and depending on what you said slander/liable etc it might not be difficult to generate poice interest.

as for requiring a warrant, different organisations require different things.

some people would just hand over information when asked
some organisations require a warrant,
some organisations (twitter for example) are known to fight the terms of warrants and not hand over user information.


Basically, don't think just because there are a few machines on your internal network that you won't be found out.

in the case of this, it doesn't matter that there wouldn't be enough evidence to bring court proceedings, the fact that it could be linked to your place of residence might be enough for your company to just get rid of you.

 

[IknowLITTLE]

Thats depressing ^