Remember When ...

[Angie McGregor]

... you could wander around with your music player open as you wandered the grid, without worrying about exposing your IP address and other details? I was exposed to so much music that way, purely by chance. It added something extra to the inworld experience.

[Rat Luv]

I still do sometimes  I'm not sure people can get more than your IP that way, though? And isn't that just landowners?

I agree though, I discovered some great music through SL.

I also heard enough of "Poker Face" by Lady Gaga,  "Alcohol" by Millionaires and that "Wanna be an avatar" song to last me a lifetime 

 

 

[Fritigern Gothly]

3 hours ago, Creve Coeur said:

without worrying about exposing your IP address

However, it always did expose your IP address but only when RedZone started to abuse this did that become a problem.

[Coffee Pancake]

3 hours ago, Creve Coeur said:

... you could wander around with your music player open as you wandered the grid, without worrying about exposing your IP address and other details? I was exposed to so much music that way, purely by chance. It added something extra to the inworld experience.

Your IP address is always exposed when listening to external streams, the same as every website you visit.

This is fine and how the internet works.

Your IP address can be used to roughly identify where in the world you are and who your ISP is. This is not really a huge deal, not nearly detailed enough to identify exactly where you live and could easily be shared / change depending on your ISP. While it is possible to track IP addresses to identify patterns of internet usage, in practice that's an ISP/google tier trick and beyond the means of some SL rando with a radio stream. 

There was a system in SL called RedZone that attempted to identify people by IP address and match alts, which all ended when LL nuked it from orbit in March 2011 ... the creator went to jail in August .

 

Put your media player back on and wander just like you used to.

 

If you're concerned about internet privacy, worry more about what the likes of Google and Facebook are up to. Add uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger to your web browser, turn that spare Raspberry Pi into a PiHole and donate to the EFF. 

[Amanda Crisp]

Would a VPN not also be helpful?

 

[Coffee Pancake]

55 minutes ago, Amanda Crisp said:

Would a VPN not also be helpful?

VPN's are oversold. 

Your IP address can be masked, how useful this actually turns out greatly depends on what you're doing. Streaming video sites aren't guaranteed to work, search results from another region wont be as useful (or even intelligible), and routing traffic half way round the world and back is a great way to make the internet feel like it's 2002 all over again. It certainly wont do SL lag any favors.

VPN's do add an additional layer of security when connecting to sensitive services via a public network, but shouldn't really be doing banking over McWiFi anyway. If paying for a VPN is an acceptable option, so is more actual mobile data. (A free VPN is worth exactly what it costs)

They can assist in protecting anonymity online as part of a robust set of general practices, most of which depend on a deep obsessive paranoia and make much of the modern internet impractical. An IP address alone is a small part of an online footprint and is expected to change.

They can hide actions from ISPs / governments / motion picture / music industry / etc (assuming the aforementioned paranoia is successfully applied) .. which begs the question, why would you need to (obviously if you know why, then by all means get a VPN). Most claim not to keep logs, this is generally a barefaced lie.

 

All this and the additional expense to stop some SL rando knowing an IP address ... seems like a lot of messing about, additional expense and lag when 5 seconds reading profiles often delivers a wealth of real life information (lets not even mention the privacy risks of actually conversing!)

[Alwin Alcott]

6 hours ago, Creve Coeur said:

and other details?

eh.. what details? ... credit card, color of you hair or undies?

[Phil Deakins]

5 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

turn that spare Raspberry Pi into a PiHole and donate to the EFF. 

Interesting. I run a webserver on one Raspberry Pi and I have another one that's never done anything. I think I'll use that one to have a play with what you suggest.

[Love Zhaoying]

6 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

..turn that spare Raspberry Pi into a PiHole 

Shut the front d..I mean shut your piHole, that's awesome! 

[Jaylinbridges]

12 hours ago, Creve Coeur said:

... you could wander around with your music player open as you wandered the grid, without worrying about exposing your IP address and other details? I was exposed to so much music that way, purely by chance. It added something extra to the inworld experience.

And nothing has changed since then.  Are you looking at Q-anon websites?  Bill Gates and George Soros are watching you !

If anything it's harder to even figure out your correct city now, than it was "back then".

 

 

 

[Ceka Cianci]

Your IP and everyone else that's listening to the stream shows up on the server, but they can't tell which one is you..

 

[Angie McGregor]

On 4/14/2021 at 1:48 AM, Alwin Alcott said:

eh.. what details? ... credit card, color of you hair or undies?

Ridicule! Thanks. Always a good way to make a new person feel welcome. ♥

This was a serious issue several years ago. And history tends to repeat.

https://modemworld.me/2011/03/12/time-to-end-the-whack-a-mole/

[Phil Deakins]

1 hour ago, Creve Coeur said:

This was a serious issue several years ago.

That was 10 years ago. I don't think that those things have existed in SL since then.

 

On 4/14/2021 at 1:03 AM, Creve Coeur said:

exposing your IP address

Ever since the internet began, IP address have been exposed to the world. They have to be or the internet can't work. It actually works on the passing of IP addresses. It's like ordering something from a company. You need to give them your address so they can deliver it to you. The internet is exactly like that. If you want anything delivered to you, such as webpages, you have to provide the address to deliver it to - your IP address.

 

So your concern isn't with passing your IP address (and other details, such as the browser you use) to others. Or it shouldn't be because you have to do it, or you can't use the internet. Your concern is with the idea that some SL user is collecting that data for some reason. But, since we haven't heard of any RedZone type of systems for 10 years, it's reasonable to suppose that they don't currently exist, and you can happily go about SL listening to the various streams.

Incidentally, the only thing you needed to be concerned about with what Redzone did was identifying multiple avatars as being operated by one person, and sharing that information. It was never merely passing your IP address to it.

If you want to, you can go around SL, without media playing, thinking that there is bound to be another RedZone operating, but, if there is one, then it's kept private, just like the data collected in the logs of all websites. More realistically, you could use SL, knowing that, as long as you receive anything from a URL, that URL has your IP address. It's the way the internet works.

Edited April 17, 2021 by Phil Deakins

[Adam Spark]

On 4/13/2021 at 9:33 PM, Creve Coeur said:

... you could wander around with your music player open as you wandered the grid, without worrying about exposing your IP address and other details? I was exposed to so much music that way, purely by chance. It added something extra to the inworld experience.

Your IP address is not a privacy breach. Having your IP address would tell me a tiny bit about your ISP and that is pretty much it. I wouldn't be able to find you or encroach on anything you'd ever be aware of or concerned about. It could be used to match up one avatar with another if you had alts, but that has been squashed.

You can still do that. As a matter of fact, its safer today than it used to be.

[Drake1 Nightfire]

On 4/13/2021 at 8:03 PM, Creve Coeur said:

... you could wander around with your music player open as you wandered the grid, without worrying about exposing your IP address and other details? I was exposed to so much music that way, purely by chance. It added something extra to the inworld experience.

OMG they know what county i live in!!!! 

Every isp tracker that has ever popped up on the internet has gotten that very wrong.. Probably because Xfinitys closest server is two counties over. 

[Evah Baxton]

1 hour ago, Adam Spark said:

Your IP address is not a privacy breach. Having your IP address would tell me a tiny bit about your ISP and that is pretty much it. I wouldn't be able to find you or encroach on anything you'd ever be aware of or concerned about. It could be used to match up one avatar with another if you had alts, but that has been squashed.

You can still do that. As a matter of fact, its safer today than it used to be.

If your router allows for external access and your firmware can be exploited or your password is default / terrible, then you are subject to phishing with an IP alone.

If you use your service provider's router / modem then you shouldn't worry about being hacked. Far worse is happening to you already.

https://gizmodo.com/scientists-are-turning-wifi-routers-into-creepy-radar-c-1794961990

Edited April 17, 2021 by Evah Baxton

[Gabriele Graves]

Meh, I'd rather listen to my own music and keep parcel music in SL off most of the time.

[Adam Spark]

11 hours ago, Evah Baxton said:

If your router allows for external access and your firmware can be exploited or your password is default / terrible, then you are subject to phishing with an IP alone.

If you use your service provider's router / modem then you shouldn't worry about being hacked. Far worse is happening to you already.

https://gizmodo.com/scientists-are-turning-wifi-routers-into-creepy-radar-c-1794961990

1) Yeah, but this topic is about IP alone. I'd recommend doing that stuff regardless.

2) Maybe, maybe not. If far worse is happening to me already, I've not been made aware of it and it is not impacting me in any way I've noticed, and I have been using my ISP's equipment for 20+years. I really don't subscribe to the theory that scientists doing things that could have negative results must mean that negative motives are behind it.