Change IP Address?

Browsing through the internet it is slightly scary how sites can just pluck out the location that you live in. I personally do not like that, and I'm looking for a freeware security program that would allow me to spoof the IP address of my computer.

Any suggestions and has anyone had success with a particular program? I know there was a security minded USB stick review recently that listed a for pay program, so I know these things are out there. Any open source stuff?

 

take a read in this:
http://www.livinginternet.com/i/is_anon_work.htm

tried these freeware?
http://www.freeproxy.ru/en/free_proxy/cgi-proxy.htm

cheers ...

 

Perhaps this would help?

http://www.torrify.com/

 

They can't *just* pluck out the location you live in.
They can get a reasonably reliable estimate, but no more than that. They can technically see which ISP you use, except that sometimes ISP's lease IP's off each others, so that's no guarantee. Occasionally you'll see german PC's with US ip addresses, or vice versa. It's not particularly common, but it happens.

In any case, the best you can do with an ip is tell which ISP it's coming from. Sometimes, if the ISP has assigned nice and friendly dns names to each ip, you'll also get an indication of which area the user is located in. But never specific addresses or anything like that. And it's never 100% reliable (other than the ISP bit)

 

Um why not just use a router? People can't really do anything with the IP that the router generates...they can't reach your PC's ports. Trust me, we did a coding project on this and there's no way to circumvent it.

On the IP subject though: you can tell a whole heck of a lot if you know someone's IP using WHOIS or other DNS lookup tools. It's just not commonly known, and I hope it stays that way. I'm not going to advertise this because it is way too powerful a tool if you ask me, and can be abused fairly easily. But suffice it is to say I can find the registrant name and address, along with a phone number and any other information (such as domain registration/expiration dates) they registered very easily using these tools.

 

^ yes they can

this is because a router uses the IP that the cable company gives to you, and you interface with the router though a IP address that the router gives you


i use a wifi router and sites can detect my IP no problem



you can use some free proxy server to hide your real IP, though running internet through a proxy server is most likely going to be a lot slower

EDIT: people can't do jack with the IP address that the router gives you cause its only valid on the home network created by the router.

connect to the internet because you assign the IP the cable company gave you to the router, and the router uses that IP for all the computers you connect to it. so for example you were to get IP banned by this site, then if you had a brother that used internet through the router would also be banned by this site

 

That's the thing. The IP your router broadcasts is not the IP of your computer. Attacks on vulnerable ports on your computer (common before SP2, and still common) will go into the ether due to the fact that your router will not relay this information unless you explicitly tell it to. So having a router is much safer, at the cost of some convenience (P2P apps for example have to go thru extensive lengths to circumvent this).

 

That's when someone has registered a domain, yes. (Although I believe you can get that information anonymized). But that IP is not going to randomly access websites that may snoop the IP, because it's (usually) a server that just sits there and accepts incoming requests.

But the IP you use to access the internet from at home? No, you can't get any personal information from that. If you do a dns lookup or WHOIS, you get your ISP's information. Not any personal info on you.

Of course, if you have a static IP at home, and use that to register a domain you host yourself, on the same IP, then any sites you visit can do a dns lookup and find the information you registered the domain with.

 

I guess that begs the question, what category does our beloved moderator fall under?

 

hide ip platinum. google it

 

ProxyWay is a nice free anon tool, not open source though
http://www.proxyway.com/www/free-proxy-tool/free-proxy-server-tools.html

TOR is a nice alternative http://tor.eff.org/ and is used in combination with privoxy (open source) http://www.privoxy.org/
wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privoxy

 

So concept-wise, do all of these tools just connect you to some third party server who then takes your request (and personal information) and relay it to the destination? Also, won't adding this leg to your connections slow you down?

 

Yes. The concept is to route your traffic through a chain of proxy servers, thereby making it harder to find your real ip. The challenge here is to find reliable anonymous proxy servers. Connection will slow down significantly as you have to piggy back on the proxy server's connection. Your RTT (round trip time) is increased as you now have to hop from one proxy server to another until you reach your final destination.