Could anything you do(internet wise) on linux be traced as it could be on any other os?
Friday, January 29th, 2010 at
16:27
I’m asking if how you browse the internet on a Linux os different than,let’s say.Windows XP?
Is your IP the same,as traceable,and/or viewable in the same sense as XP or any other well known OS?
Or am I just an uber noob asking a retarded question?Please, go into detail.
Tagged with: ip • Linux • linux os • retarded question • uber • windows xp
Filed under: Linux
Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!
Your OS makes no difference.
Since you ask to go into detail, I’ll go into some superficial detail.
When you are on the Internet, your IP address is seen by all clients you connect to and all clients that connect to you. I say it this way to emphasize that it doesn’t have to be a client that you seek a connection to yourself; they could have been the initiating party.
For example, if you visit a website, your IP address can be seen by various DNS servers and the server that the website is hosted on, as well as by servers at various intermediate hops along the way.
Nobody will know who you are though unless you commit some crime or produce massive amounts of spam. You seem to be forgetting that, although your ISP is perfectly *capable* of handing over the DHCP timestamps that would link your name to an IP address on some specific time of day, but that doesn’t mean that any ISP would *willingly* hand it over.
If I walk on over to your ISP headquarters and demand they tell me the name of the customer who had such-and-such an IP address at such-and-such time on such-and-such day of such-and-such year, they’ll laugh me out of the office or have security escort me out.
It’s not in the best interest of the ISP, to say the least, to hand that information over. All of their customers would terminate their service if an ISP quite that evil existed.
No ISP is heartless or stupid enough to hand that information over unless the agency that is requesting it has a warrant issued by law enforcement. It’s in the best interest of the ISP to preserve their customers’ privacy to at least some degree (or make a pretense of it).
To associate that with your original question though, it’s just as difficult to get that information regardless of what operating system the person of interest happened to be using.