On Fri, January 25, 2008 6:33 am, Owen DeLong wrote:
In order to be using the license plate, you had to be physically present in the car.
Or in any car displaying the same identifier.
In order to be on the telephone number, you (almost always) need to be present at the site where that phone number is terminated.
Or calling from any line that presents the same identifier. It's generally true that if you're calling from a POTS line (or BRI, for the most part), you'll either present correct CLI, or some flavour of 'unavailable' or 'witheld'. Start buying PRI service, however, and there's not a shortage of telcos where you can inject whatever CLI you like. BCP38 is no more universal in the phone network than it is in the IP one.
I don't know about your IP addresses, but, people can use my IP addresses from a number of locations which are nowhere near the jurisdiction in which my network operates, so, I don't really see the correlation here with license plates or phone numbers.
I'm not clear if you mean legitimately here, or not. If you've authorised people to relay traffic through you in some way, you'd be the right first contact. If you're talking about unauthorised spoofing, it's a lot like the first two cases (I'd say a fair bit easier / cheaper than the second, not substantially more so than the first). Those looking to reach a person should be aware of the possibility that any of these presented identifiers could be forged. That doesn't mean that the owner of the identifier isn't a useful person to talk to in the first instance - and hence they all, to a first approximation, function as personal identifiers. Regards, Tim.