IRC and IP addresses

[krapp]

What are your feelings about having your IP address visible for all to see in an IRC chatroom? It's the only thing really keeping me from using IRC, which is a pity as there seems to be a lot of good open source talk on freenode.

[Lucradia]

In Pidgin IRC, it shows <username>@<ISP Service DNS> and not the IP.

[juancarlospaco]

Public IP Address are kinda... you know... Public

[wilee-nilee]

What are your feelings about having your IP address visible for all to see in an IRC chatroom? It's the only thing really keeping me from using IRC, which is a pity as there seems to be a lot of good open source talk on freenode.

Go to #ubuntu-beginners and ask how to join and cloak your IP.

[lloyd_b]

What are your feelings about having your IP address visible for all to see in an IRC chatroom? It's the only thing really keeping me from using IRC, which is a pity as there seems to be a lot of good open source talk on freenode.

Frankly, you are, in my opinion, worrying about the wrong thing. The fact that someone can know what IP address you're connecting from doesn't give them a whole lot of information about you - at best, a rough idea (as in what city) you're in, and that's about it.

If someone can make use of having that IP address against you (for instance, to hack into your machine), then there's a problem at *your* end - any decent firewall will give the average home user all the protection from such hacking that he'll ever need.

(If a home user's system is properly updated and has a good firewall running, the only real chance a hacker has of getting in is by tricking the user into running some sort of Trojan program to open a port for the hacker.)

Finally, if you're connecting via cable or DSL, you're probably getting a "Dynamic IP address" anyway - each time you reboot the modem/router, it'll pick up a different IP address. So the association between you and a given IP address is quite temporary.

So I believe you're worrying about a non-issue.

Lloyd B.

[krapp]

Go to #ubuntu-beginners and ask how to join and cloak your IP.

Well that would be counterproductive. Not funny.

[llua+]

http://freenode.net/faq.shtml#cloaks

[wilee-nilee]

Well that would be counterproductive. Not funny.

You make no sense, you don't understand, that is how you do it. <snip>

[Elfy]

You make no sense.

Makes sense to me - I think the OP is commenting on going on irc (and showing IP address) to get help to not show the IP.

As it is the link from llua+ covers it - but you will have to go there uncloaked to start with.

Make sure you've done this before you go for the cloak http://freenode.net/faq.shtml#nicksetup

You can do all of that without going to any channel - then just go to the #freenode channel and ask.

No way around it that I know of.