Hello,
Up front, please forgive me if this question has been asked & answered already, I searched but didn’t find anything directly relating to it.
I run a website and discussion board, and recently I’ve been getting people visiting & posting that have caused some trouble. Tracing their IPs comes up with little sometimes, especially when they appear to be using AOL.
Additionally, and more to the point, there are some users on my message board who deliberately use proxy servers (and have told me so) because they wish to remain anonymous from other users. BTW, I have the “display IP address” turned off on user’s posts, so they can’t see each other’s IP addresses… or so we thought.
Someone now claims they can see some of these users’ “real IP” address, as well as their computer name, even though the public display of IPs is turned off!
To figure this out, I’ve come across www.getip.com, which from my tests, shows not only the public IP that my connection broadcasts, but also the internal IP that the connection’s router is handing my PC, AND that connection’s “real IP”. I’ve tried this out with different types of public proxy servers, but regardless of type, this website still displays my connection’s real IP in their “real IP” section, the valid DHCP address in the “internal IP”, and the proxy server’s IP in the “external IP” line.
Thanks for muddling through my explanation, just to get to this question: can anyone out there tell me HOW these people, and “getip.com”, doing this? Is there some sort of javascript or ActiveX control doing this, or is it some sort of server-side script polling the connection for different ports? And — how can I advise my “anonymity seekers” on my board to protect themselves from people looking at their posts and grabbing (though I fail to see how) their IPs and from that, their “real IP” through their proxy servers, as well as their DHCP addresses and computer names?
Thanks much!
