Hi all...

Is it possible to hide my IP address when I am on the net? How is it done? Is it worth doing ?

Thanks...

It depends on what you want to do. It's certainly possible to stop your IP being logged on forums by using open proxies on the net, but it's impossible to completely mask your IP as it's used by remote systems to send information to your computer (or gateway).

Is it worth doing? Unless you're trying to troll sites or rip somebody off, I'd say no.

There are various ways to simply hide an IP:

http://www.anonymizer.com/

A hit via there shows as follows in my Apache log (rather than my real IP):

207.195.241.46 - - [22/Apr/2006:11:42:34 +1000] "GET /images/links.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 4660 "-" "Mozilla/4.78 (TuringOS; Turing Machine; 0.0)"

So (as the receiving end) I know the hit comes from an anonymized connection, but not where.

Another is: https://proxify.com/ (also available as a Dashboard Widget)

A hit from there shows as:

66.98.130.120 - - [22/Apr/2006:11:46:33 +1000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 9811 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/412.6.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/412.2.2"

Another way is via The Onion Router: http://tor.eff.org/

Each has pros and cons and all have a speed penalty.

Of course, you do need to understand that if you are an ISP who controls the router, you have greater levels of information about where packets are coming from, so some of the above tools may prove illusory and give you a false sense of privacy.

See: http://privacy.net/ if you are interested in how much you are disclosing about yourself.

How much does all this matter? Who knows!

Thanks I have a lot to learn...

Interestingly, this technology is being used to circumvent censorship in countries that attempt to control what their citizens are reading on the net, notably China and Iran

http://www.ghandchi.com/271-Censorship.htm

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/04...nymizer_china/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/08/29/us...nymiser_if_you/

try here. http://tor.eff.org/
Really good but chews your bandwidth
edit:
I should say slows down your connection speed, rather than chews your bandwidth, as you get hopped from anonymous server to anonymous server.

And soon Australia, with the Tasmanian trial...