I wouldn't be admiting to much of anything, especially concerning breaking any federal laws over the internet or on any computer. It can all be traced, collected, gathered, recorded, and kept for your trial. FYI... there is "NO" 5th Amendment to it, a crime was freely (and openly) admitted.
If you don't think your computer's P2P is being monitored, I HIGHLY suggest you think otherwise. In fact, you might want to download and install the following, just to see WHO is monitoring you RIGHT NOW - You just might be surprised:
http://www.peerblock.com/
Unless, you really know what you are doing and have changed something as addressed below, when you logon to this forum you are giving the server your actual IP Address. The "Fat lady just sung"! As once you do that it is easy for anyone and everyone to obtain all your information, especially government agencies. Another FYI... a subpoena is not needed for any P2P, which is why you can't dowloand or post any copyrighted music or movie material over the interent anymore. For the federal government any needed "subpoena" is a dime a dozen!
Can Someone Find me with my IP Address?
Possibly, but most likely not without a subpoena.
In most cases all that can be easily determined is who the person's ISP is and possibly the state and city they reside in.
In some cases with static IP address DSL or business DSL services the ISP provides IP allocation records to the American Registry for Internet Numbers (
www.arin.net), the non-profit organization responsible for managing Internet numbering resources in North America.
As an example SBC used to include customer information in those allocation records, but due to privacy concerns now uses their own information with a customer reference number.
For users who want to afford themselves some additional level of anonymity we suggest you read about
internet anonymity,
Proxy Servers, and how to
hide your ip address.
Try using
this tool to look up your IP address.
How can someone find out who I am?
A little background first.
IP address allocation is handled by
The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). IANA in turn, delegate authority to
Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). The RIRs, in turn, following their own regional policies, further delegate blocks of IP addresses to their customers, which include Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and end-user organizations.
Each of the RIRs handles a specific geographic area:
- ARIN (North America and portions of the Caribbean)
- AfriNIC (Africa)
- APNIC (Asia and the Pacific region)
- LACNIC (Latin America and portions of the Caribbean)
- RIPE (Europe, Middle East, Central Asia)
Each of these organizations allow lookups to be to that data. Different ISP's segment their blocks of IP addresses by region and you can see that in the lookup. The lookup provides the name and address of the organization the block of IP addresses was allocated to. The ISP's can name these blocks if they choose. The naming often indicates a geographic location, for example, IRV-CA, aka Irvine, California.
Here are links to the URLs where you can lookup an IP address. Be aware that if you lookup an Asian allocated IP address in a different region's RIR it will provide a link to the appropriate RIR.
In general, I start by looking up an IP address with ARIN seeing what geographic location information I can learn from the results.
From there I do a reverse DNS (rDNS) lookup to see what hostname the ISP provides. A hostname is something like
www.example.com, or can be more specific to include regional information.
From there I do a traceroute which displays the hostnames many of the machines in between two points on the internet. (I'm making this *really* none technical here...) Sometimes the rDNS/hostname of a specific IP address will not reveal any location but the rDNS/hostname of the machine next along the path will reveal some.
That's about all the information that can be obtained without a subpoena. In many cases people reveal small amounts of personal information about themselves on forums, chat rooms, blogs, etc that can be used to build a profile of who you might be.
Try using
this tool to look up your IP address.