<p>What is an IP address, and is it something that you shouldn’t let other people know what yours is, or what?</p>
<p>An IP adress is a way to differientiate computers and severs on the internet.</p>
<p>I dunno how dangerous it is, but it’s kind of easy for website owners to figure it out and stuff (like I could find out the IP adresses of who was visitng my xanga and stuff), and you can change it too if you needed to.</p>
<p>Like if you post on wikipedia and it puts up your IP with your post, is that bad? And what does it mean if wiki puts up a totally different IP as yours?</p>
<p>Usually, one does not have a fixed IP address. The IP stands for Internet Protocol.
Having the possesion of an IP address does not necessarily mean you can be harmed, or harm others, in any way. Unless, you send them a trojan with an automatically installing remote administrator program. Then, you could remotely access their computer with total control as long as the program is installed in the host aswell. But thats something else.
There are two IP addresses - The Dynamic address, which changes each time you log in and out, and your static one, which stays the same.
With an IP address, you can also trace it back to the computer’s location. There are special commands for this that can be typed into the command prompt (run - > cmd). The most common is netstat -n, which scans all the IP addresses in a direct connection with your computer. If you opened up a file transfer through AIM, for example, you have opened a direct connection between two computers. If you type in netstat - n while the connection is open, you can find out the other computer’s IP address.
This all goes back to networking and such, but I hope this cleared a few things up. :)</p>
<p>So does that mean that if your IP is out there on Wiki or whatever that someone could send you a trojan and hack into your computer? Or do you have to open a file sent by the person for that to happen? And does a firewall protect against that?</p>
<p>No, usually, if you have Norton or ADWareSE, etc., you should be fine. Make sure to update your antivirus programs however - newer viruses may break through an older Norton.</p>
<p>In some very special cases, trojans can be encrypted into a picture, and sent. The trojan will automatically open up and infect the target computer once the picture is opened. But, this is very rare. If you make sure of who is sending you what, you should be fine.</p>
<p>Aaah, I myself am on the pursuit of the title ‘Hacker’, my friend ;)</p>
<p>So posting on wikipedia shouldn’t make me any more likely to get a virus or anything, right?</p>
<p>No, definitely not.</p>
<p>Awsome, thanks for the help.</p>
<p>My pleasure :)</p>
<p>Your IP is also logged every time you post on this site, and on basically any other site. This is essentially done so that the admins can IP ban you if you cause problems and stuff, or to monitor an IP address, or to match 2+ usernames to a single IP if necessary.</p>
<p>Check out <a href=“Geo Data Tool - View my IP information: 184.105.99.68”>Geo Data Tool - View my IP information: 184.105.99.68; and forget about giving out personal IP to public access.</p>
<p>Eh… according to that site I’m in Belmont, Mass, but I’m in southwest CT.</p>
<p>Take a peek at the size of Greenland :)</p>
<p>It’s a Mercator projection map.</p>
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<p>Forgot about that one.</p>
<p>Firewalls now tend to do a good job of blocking ports and being wary of information being sent to the user without the user’s action (e.g. something trying to open a connection with you). Zonealarm has a pretty good firewall. Using Firefox for a browser will also help guard you against virus attacks. But I wouldn’t worry – just knowing someone’s IP address won’t mean much. Most of the time you’ll get a trojan or virus by either downloading or executing something with those things embedded within, or you’ll be cruising the net and suddenly some code on a webpage executes and nails you with some rather nasty shizznat. But of course, as long as you’ve got the proper software, most of these can be deflected quite easily. Zonealarm, Norton, Firefox, Spybot, and Spysweeper are all good programs that, when working together, will keep you safe from most of the crap out there. Besides, most trojans are incredibly easy to spot by most anti-spyware programs and will usually get quarantined/deleted immediately if they happen to land on your system.</p>
<p>Regardless, the odds are that unless you’re screwing around with the wrong crowds online, or putting personal information out in the open for people to take advantage of (say, credit card numbers), nobody’s going to have any real reason to try to hack you, and even if they did, they’d most likely be unable to do anything to you unless you facilitated the process by opening up an executable or attachment or ANYTHING basically created by that hacker with the intent to gain access to your system or whatever.</p>