HIDING YOUR IDENTITY

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Share a copyrighted file or two and you’re breaking the law. Share a few hundred and you’ll likely attract the attention of the authorities.

The first step people take when they are worried that the police may raid their house because of their file sharing activities is to mask their identity online so that nobody will know who is doing the illegal file sharing. The first way of masking your identity is to keep your real email address secret; the second is to mask your IP (Internet Protocol) address.

HIDING YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS

Once the authorities know an email address, they can monitor the account holder’s activity to see what the person does and receives over the Internet, much the same way they can tap a telephone line and eavesdrop on telephone conversations.

The simplest way to keep your email address a secret is to never share it with anyone you don’t trust. An email address can identify either the company that you work for (such as [e-mail]), the Internet service provider (ISP) you use (such as [e-mail]), or the company that hosts your email account (such as [e-mail]).

Many people skirt this problem by using a free email account on Hotmail (http://www.hotmail.com) or Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com). Unlike ordinary email accounts that can link you to a specific company or ISP, web-based email accounts can be created anonymously (just type in a false name and address when you create the initial email account) and can be accessed by any computer (such as a public Internet kiosk), anywhere in the world. To ensure their anonymity, many file sharers abandon their free email accounts periodically and create new ones.

MASKING YOUR IP ADDRESS

An IP address is a unique string of numbers, such as 65.3.158.155, that identifies your particular computer on the Internet, much like a street address can identify your specific location in a city.

Hiding your IP address can be tricky, because every time you connect to a website, a file sharing network, or even an IRC chat room, your computer sends your IP address so other computers will know where to send the information you request. As a result, your computer constantly broadcasts your IP address to dozens of different computers every time you access the Internet, and once someone knows your IP address, they can find you.

Don’t believe us? Visit the Shields UP website (http://www.grc.com), shown in Figure 6-1, to see the information your computer is sending. (You may have to click around a bit to reach the right page on the site.)

Figure 6-1: The Shields UP website can show you the type of information that your computer sends out over the Internet, such as your IP address.

Dynamic and static IP addresses

Depending on your type of Internet connection, you may have a dynamic or a static IP address. If you connect to the Internet through a telephone line, you have a dynamic IP address. If you connect to the Internet using a cable or DSL modem, you may have either a static or dynamic IP address.

As the names imply, a dynamic IP address changes each time you connect,-while a static IP address is always the same each time you connect. If yours is a dynamic address, every time you connect to your ISP, they assign you a randomly selected IP address. When you disconnect and then reconnect, your computer gets a totally new IP address.

If yours is a static IP address, it’s always the same when you connect to the Internet, much like your street address remains the same as long as you live at that location. It shouldn’t surprise you then that once someone knows your static IP address, they can easily find your computer on the Internet. But it may surprise you to learn that they can track down a dynamic IP address, too.

While dynamic IP addresses might seem to hide your identity, don’t count on it. Why? Your ISP likely keeps records on who used which particular IP address at any given time, and if the authorities suspect a specific IP address at some particular time, all they have to do is view your ISP’s records to see who was using that particular dynamic IP address at that time, which will probably lead them right back to you.

Similarly, when you use a file sharing program, you probably won’t be able to hide your IP address because the computer you’re communicating with needs to know where to send that file. It knows where to send it because your computer tells it, and that makes the file sharer an easy target for the major music companies who hire people to search these networks for IP addresses that are sharing large numbers of files (say 1,000 or more), or that are sharing popular music. Once they find that IP address, they can eventually track it down to the offending computer.

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