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udon

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It makes those "How do I secure my computer from hackers?" post an inviting target when the IP is shown. There's too many packet kiddies and other cyberscum out there to be posting IPs.

cv

With my True ADSL resetting my IP address every 12-24 hours (or sooner if I reset the router), I cannot imagine IP identification being useful to track website users. I am impressed that IPv6 has privacy mechanisms in the specification to automatically generate and assign new random addresses for client use.

But aside from anonymity, do people really think IP anonymity gives ANY network host security these days? Most vulnerabilities are exploited randomly rather than as targeted attacks against a particular person.

I have seen too many experiments (both scientific and inadvertent) in the US where unprotected Windows PCs (fresh installs) were placed on a network. The time it takes for addresses to be randomly scanned and attacked is on the order of seconds or minutes from boot!

I was at a technical conference, reading my email on a laptop when a friend walked up with three laptop cases. She had received them from her employer's IT department with fresh installs before her plane flight and needed to configure them for demonstration purposes. She took them out, powered them up, and put each on on the network to begin downloading software she had placed on FTP before leaving home. Five minutes later, a conference network adminstrator came to the show booth, asking whose computers had network addresses X, Y, and Z. All three were her demo laptops, and they had apparently already been compromised and were actively attacking the rest of the machines on the show floor!

After witnessing that, I flatly refuse to use a Windows PC on the Internet, and I am much more paranoid about configuring Linux w/ firewall rules than I once was.

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I've seen it happen many times in other forums. One person posts something that some doofus takes the wrong way and the next thing you know the poster has "connection problems".

It's not perfect security but it makes more sense to hide the IP and give some measure of cloaking to the users than to display the IP for no real gain to anyone.

cv

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