Privacy/Security: How to change my IP address daily or weekly on DSL

Nope, the IP of your router is the one you need to refresh.

FCOL this is pointless stuff to worry about.

If you phone someone up, they know which town you're in, and your IP will do no better for them. You can tell from mine I'm in Oxford. But where? There's 100,000 people here. And who cares about your ISP or newsreader?

And nobody can tell your MAC by the way. Except your ISP, who needs to know.

Sure but this isn't a security measure.

Eh? This is NOT a security feature at all. You've been reading the wrong books. #

Yes

Again, no. Whoever said this is clueless.

(snip examples of real actual privacy measures).

They can't figure any of that out from an IP, no matter how hard they try. The best someone can do from your IP is work out which town you're posting from. Unless you're the only guy in town with a net connection, thats useless to them.

Stop chasing chimeras and please read some proper literature about this stuff.

Nope.

I'm beginning to wonder if your'e paranoid. Who the heck would want to do this? And bear in mind that anyone that obsessive isn't going to be stopped by trivia like your IP.

Nope.

Can't work any of that out from IP address or any other public info, unless you delivberately publish it.

Prodigy apparently. So you're one of how many tens of thousands of customers? Hardly earth shattering revelation.

Can't work out any of that either, unless you deliberately post it.

Yes (guess: 69.110.12.220, Windows) but what concievable use is that?

Nope.

Nope.

So what? I know you're a computer illiterate too (no offense, you really are) but its not useful info for anything at all.

You have absolutely no clue at all. From an IP address you can possibly determine the town someone is in, at most. From the newsreader you can determine the approximate OS. Thats it. End. Finito. To find out where you live, your real name, your age etc I'd have to subpoena your ISP.

Total paranoia. See a doctor. Seriously.

The question is, why do you care? There are two possible answers:

I can't currently think of a third.

Not really. Anyone who REALLY wanted to track you would monitor posts for your characteristic posting style, and would catch you very quickly.

I don't. I'm not paranoid.

Uh oh. I sense a new entry to my kill-file coming ...

Hi Mark McIntyre, Yes. I am. That's why I'm asking for this kind of help.

Pretty much I've learned a lot from all of you.

For example, that TEMPEST stuff is real scary.

I'm ready to shroud my computer in a wire mesh now!

:)

I'm trying to gain 'free' anonimity. That's all. It's not the end all to privacy.

It's just an ounce more of privacy.

Just like we do when we lick and seal an envelope. Or when we close the curtain at the voting booth. Or when we close the bathroom door.

It's not that we are all criminals for doing these things. And it's not that we 'expect' someone to be peeking in on us.

It's just normal to expect an ounce of privacy even on the Internet. That's all I want to achieve.

Yes. Indeed. I read that stuff about driving around sniffing everyone's WEP security out. Apparently it's trivial for my neighbor to read all my communications. Sigh.

Oh my.

Apparently, unless I drape a wire mesh over my computer monitor, anyone can read what I am typing from 300 yards away with just 100 dollars of common equipment!

Wouldn't a simple wire-mesh screen suffice?

Luckily, most of the radiation eminates from monitors (according to what I just read), and not from portable PC screens without any wires attached to act as antennae.

Seems to me we could create a light conductive cloth (carbon fiber?) which we could drape over the screen to prevent these tell tale emissions.

I'm going outside now to check the trucks parked on the street to see if any have an antenna ... :)

Hi Mark, Thanks for the advice that the ROUTER is the IP I need to refresh.

That must be why I have to unplug the router and plug it back in after leaving the dsl modem off for a few hours. The ppoe (or whatever it's called) must kick in when I plug it in.

I wonder if we can kick off the ppoe (or whatever it is) login to the ISP from the winXP PC?

Hi Warren Oates,

I guess I was wrong.

I was told by a friend that even when I use NetZero, they can track all my communications by my MAC address. Is that true?

If so, changing the MAC address would add a level of privacy (just like closing the bathroom door adds a level of privacy).

It's not that we expect everyone to duck their head under the IP packet to look at us, but, we still close the door so as to have a modicum of privacy.

Hi Mark,

I agree if you phone someone they can get your telephone number and do a reverse lookup on the Internet to find not only where they live, but the price of their house and that of their neighbors (I've done it at times myself to see who called me).

However, you don't phone ten thousand people at a time (which is what we are doing here on the Internet).

Having one person be able to identify you vs having ten thousand be able to identify you lets in a lot of kooks, don't you think?

Hi Greg,

I read the reference article but I must agree with Mark that I am nearly clueless.

For example, this key sentence was supposed to make sense but it didn't/

For example, the article stated: " ... it replicated data which was apparently being submitted to the host via an HTTP cookie so it seemed that the idea was to have the cookie travel to the unwitting Tor user and be sent back via DNS tunnel to an external host to confirm the real identity of the host. "

Unfortunately, to me, these are too complicated. Sorry.

Hi Dana,

Thanks again for providing useful information that works toward a solution fo the technical problem, which, I didn't realize before, but is really all about remaining as anonymous as possible, for free, when posting on the Internet.

The main problem (and I know that's not your fault) is that the access costs, essentially, $250 dollars a year for the same access that I have today already paid for.

I think, if the choice is to figure out how to send a wake-up signal to my linksys router or pay the $250 per year to usenet.com, I'll try to see if I can figure out (somehow) how to send a wake-up signal to my router without having to literally unplug it.

If there is a 'free' usenet news service out there ... then that would solve the problem though.

Hi John, Again, I thank you for your advice but this one I don't understand.

When I look at the header of my posts I can easily see my router's IP address in the header ...

If I kept the same IP address for, say, a year, wouldn't ALL my posts in that year have the same IP address on it?

If anyone wanted to gather up all my posts (no matter what name or newsreader I used), wouldn't keeping the same IP address make that task trivial?

Sort of like someone gathering up all my snail mail and reading it if they felt like it without having to bother opening the letters.

Hi Dana,

Thanks for the warning but I wasn't at all worried about the law. If they wanted to get to me, they would. If they wanted to get you, they would. Nothing you could do would stop them as your ISP knows everything.

It's the same with my car keys. Nothing I do is going to stop the law from towing my car away even if I lock it up with chains around it.

But, I don't lock my car door to keep the cops away. I lock my car door to keep some kid in the neighborhood from rifling through my purse and makeup I keep in the glove compartment.

I'm just trying to gain a modicum of privacy on the internet by switching my identity and any connecting factors.

Do you know if there is a way to send a wake-up signal to make the Linksys router send the ppoe (or whatever it is) signal to dial back into an ISP once I plug the dsl router back in?