Question for the IT Experts

When posting on message boards what information is available to the owner/operator of the website?

I know that they can tell multiple logins by the IP address or something but does this also give the name of teh company you work for away or does it only give the internet service providers details?

btw, not related to Biggie in case you are wondering MikeM

Yeah, IP numbers ...but from there I wouldn't think it would be too hard to work out which company has a particular IP if you are connecting from there?

Ip's can be easily resolved into a DNS address.. hence

10.10.10.141 can be resolved into proxy.mycompany.co.nz or something like that..

Often dns's are obvious.. like on dialup it could be proxy1.xtra.co.nz

Domain names are also registered and can be looked up to see who their registered to,.. individual or company..

Any WWW stalker know this!

if you're posting from work, and you have a fairly big lan (well, any sort of lan with an internet connection attached), then chances are the IP address you're posting from will have a reverse DNS with at least your ISP's name, if not your company's name.

If you're doing something illegal, or something that violates the terms & conditions of your ISP, the owners of the site can contact the ISP and say "we've got such and such IP address posting at such and such time", and your ISP can find out who the user was. The user was probably your company, and if their logs are half decent, they'll be able to trace it to you directly. (This is all true if you're using personal connections as well).

So yes, it's certainly possible to find out who you are based on IP address. It's sometimes just a matter of glancing at a log, sometimes it takes a bit more effort.

About the only way to aviod detection is to use some sort of anonymous browsing service... not sure how many of these are around anymore.