On Wed, 13 Sep 2006 17:53:04 +0200 Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@nic.fr> wrote:
On Wed, Sep 13, 2006 at 11:43:36AM -0400, D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy@druid.net> wrote a message of 20 lines which said:
No one knows me by my IP address. They know me by my email address(es).
Huh? Are you trying to imply something? If your email software automatically adds that statement then please fix it. It's insulting when you trim the message to a shorter statement that you are responding to. The other 18 lines may not have been important to this particular response but they were not content free.
It does not seem true. IP addresses are visible outside in:
* DNS servers when you get a zone delegation (the most important reason why changing IP addresses is a pain),
I reiterate, no one knows me by my IP address. The software (DNS) they use may and some people may need to make a change but the world in general does not need to know that. That's the whole point of DNS. My point is that my friends and aquaintences may remember my number or have it in their Rolodex but no one has to remember my IP address and very few ever have to even deal with it at all and those that do, only for a moment. OK, my real point is that phone numbers are not like IP addresses. You may find a dark corner that exhibits some similarity but the basic analogy is flawed.
* some peer-to-peer networks like Freenet, which do not use the DNS.
I don't know enough about Freenet but I am willing to bet that users don't need to remember IP addresses to get the benefits of it.
(There are also a lof of internal uses of IP addresses for instance in firewalls and SSH caches.)
I never said that IP addresses were never used anywhere. That would be ridiculous. They are entered into firewalls, routers, DNS servers and such. What I said was that users (remember them) don't have to memorize or track them.
So, you actually have:
1) Phone numbers (very visible outside) 2) IP addresses (visible outside) 3) MAC addresses (completely invisible outside except for a few minutes in the ARP caches)
Even number 3 does not leak out of the local area. However, I fail to see what conclusion you wish me to draw from this. I don't know anyone with any modicum of understanding of IP protocols that would dispute these statements other than my nit about number 3. -- D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy@druid.net> | Democracy is three wolves http://www.druid.net/darcy/ | and a sheep voting on +1 416 425 1212 (DoD#0082) (eNTP) | what's for dinner.