Posted by Ueli (212.28.158.154) on January 05, 2000 at 20:33:52:
In Reply to: Susan? Want to know ..... posted by Doug L on January 05, 2000 at 15:23:28:
For heavens sake, don't start accusing people as a result of shoddy detective work.
If you want to use IP numbers for such purposes, get a little bit more familiar with them.
Here's a short summary:
The form of of the IP number is xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, where each group xxx can take a value from 0 to 255. The whole IP number does uniquely identify a user, but only as long as he/she is online!!!.
There are a few people on the board with their own IP: those with a direct connection to the net. But he majority of us, all those dialing in to ISP (Internet Service Provider), get assigned a new IP number every time they log in.
You can check this if you go back to your previous messages.
So Doug had recently 152.163.207.193 and 152.163.207.181, the last group is different, only the first 3 groups match, but they also match to 152.163.207.197 of Anon. Is this a coincidence or something more ? :^)
In fact the number 152.163.207.xxx had been used about 70 times in the last 30 days, and by more than a dozen different people. And the solution of this puzzle? - They all are subscribers of AOL.
And since AOL is a rather big ISP, the number 152.163.207.xxx does not provide enough different values, only 256. So the only thing you can say of the user with an IP number starting with 152.163........ is that he logged in with AOL somewhere in the U.S.
PFNAD's, Ueli