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To: queenleah who wrote (29650)	4/2/2007 1:47:27 AM
From: yaetmo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42834

Queen, I think you terribly mis-understand what an IP address tells someone. Yes, the IP address is unique to a user, but only at that moment. You see, most users ( 99.5%+ ) have a "leased" IP address. They don’t own that address. Over weeks or months, your PC will either renew that address, or you ISP ( service provider ) will issue another address. This all happens in the background, and you are most likely not aware of these happenings. The technical term is 'dynamic IP'. The ISP is issued blocks of addresses which they divvy up amongst their user as needed. Businesses and such, have registered fixed IP's that is assigned to them directly. This was originally because Web Servers needed to have fixed address for the system routers to be able to find them. Few regular users have fixed IP addresses, and those that do generally have an address within a block of addresses that is registered to their ISP. An IP address is just a number. Not to unlike a phone number. For network communications to work, each data packet thrown onto the internet includes the source IP and the destination IP. Like a phone number, the system can always read that number. Like with what you know about Caller ID displaying a number, a server can and usually does note any IP address accessing that server placing that info in a server log. OK so much for the simple basics of networking. All that a server log ever sees from the user is that IP address number. Nothing else. No personally identifiable data at all. The server does note what resource the user is connected to. This could be a web page, a picture, or an application such as your online banking. With an IP address, you can go to servers on the web and do a ‘reverse lookups’. The lookup will tell you the owner of the IP address. Wait now and don’t jump the gun. If you remember from the 1st paragraph, most users are not the owners of the address they are using. Their ISP is the owner. So the lookups tell the name of the ISP and maybe the region the ISP is located in. My current IP is 71.198.209.190 If you look that up, you will see that it is ComCast Ca. in San Jose. Check it out: openrbl.org near the top of the page, you will see Host-Name: c-71-198-209-190.hsd1.ca.comcast.net - That's me. The other tool is a whois lookup. dnsstuff.com This tells you that I am in San Jose. Many IP’s and their ISP will not report the city. A PacBell DSL IP around here just returns South SFBAY. An AOL user just returns AOL with no location at all. If you are afraid of clicking those links, let me know and I’ll save the screens as pictures and post them here. Btw, if you strip my IP address out of the URL address, these lookup servers will return your IP info. Try yourself and look. Queen, that is all one can get. Knowing a user's IP does not get you any private information . Maybe the Gov't can match an IP to private records the ISP maintains of who by name/rank/serialnumber is assigned to which address, but the you's and me's of the world just can't. So there Queen, the very most I can get from most users is their city, and frequently it’s just the region.

To: queenleah who wrote (29650)	4/2/2007 10:38:48 AM
From: Kirk ©	Respond to of 42834

"But I still don't understand how anyone can believe it to be ok that some ordinary citizen like you or I can make a practice of gathering such information from other ordinary and unsuspecting law-abiding citizens for no reason other than the purely personal." Think of it as standing outside a nightclub taking a picture of everyone who goes inside. Nothing illegal about it, just ask those who sell pictures of stars they catch going into the popular clubs in LA for thousands. The internet is a public place. If you go out in public then you should expect to be seen.