| If privacy is of any concern to you (and it should be
if you are on the internet), then you should consider masking your TCP/IP
address. This is important if you are using a dialup connection,
and it is absolutely essential if you are connected via DSL or cable modem.
Your TCP/IP address identifies your machine to the internet.
Web sites commonly store this address in their log files. Most of
the time the log files are deleted after a brief time as they tend to get
very large. Some sites mine these log files and save the data for
use later. Still others may directly store the TCP/IP addresses in
various reports and databases.
Why is this a problem? First, you can be identified
by your TCP/IP address. If you are surfing to sites you would rather
not have announced to the world, you had better hide your TCP/IP address.
Second, if someone has your TCP/IP address they can find
your machine and attack it in various ways. If you don't have a good firewall
set up, your system could be damaged or data could be stolen.
In addition, some web sites have installed various security
measures to prevent hacking. One story I read recently involved a teenager
who purchased a product to allow him to download an entire web site for
offline viewing. There is nothing wrong with this ... in fact, it can be
very useful to keep an offline copy of a web site for quick viewing.
The teenager set up his program to copy down an entire
website over night and went to sleep. When he woke up he had the entire
site on his hard drive and was happily looking at what he had received
when he was visited by some unpleasant lawyers. These creeps wanted to
know why he had deleted their client's entire database! It turned out that
the administrative functions of the website were wide open, and one of
the buttons was a "delete" record function. By downloading the entire site,
the teenager's program had inadvertently "pressed" the button for each
record.
Now, if the teenager had been surfing anonymously, he
would never had had this problem. Oh yeah, he would have deleted the database,
but this is most definitely the fault of the web designer for not securing
their administrative functions. But the company could not have traced the
issue back to the teenager, thus avoiding a useless lawsuit and much embarrassment
for the young man.
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