Conflicting IP addresses

I recently got a lifetime ban from a discussion forum!!**?? Although I can be a bit hasty with comments sometime I never offend so this rather confused me. On making contact it appeared that the culprit was not me but somebody using the same IP address. I know IPs are variable but I thought that they only changed following a full log off.

What worries me is that if an IP is used to trace a serious crime I could have spent the last week in Strangeways, or even longer. A bit worrying.

Meldrew

There is no reason for an IP address to stay fixed for the entire session, though there may be a tendency to do so - but if a piece of equipment needs to be taken out/rebooted in ISP then connections may be dropped and re-connected.

if the police were seeking the location behind the IP address, then they would go to PlusNet and get the account at the time - PlusNet's systems record when the IP address was re-assigned, so unlikely you'd get a visit.

Discussion forums don't have access to that information and are unlikely be able to do much with it - where as banning an IP address is easy, but often futile as it is often easy to work around.

Assuming the person isn't on your connection, other than the odd pain dealing with such bans there isn't a huge amount to worry about - personally I got a fixed IP address from PlusNet which would generally stop such things, but I got it so I can remote access home

IP address spoofing wiki.

Apparently Digital Spy ban people on the basis of their IP address and then link it to the user name. Clearly it is possible to get them mixed up.

In reply to a post by meldrew:

Apparently Digital Spy ban people on the basis of their IP address and then link it to the user name. Clearly it is possible to get them mixed up.

True, but other than IP addresses, websites have little else to work with. Cookies can be set, but are just as easily deleted, so IP addresses are the best identifier, but far from perfect.

In reply to a post by meldrew:

Apparently Digital Spy ban people on the basis of their IP address and then link it to the user name. Clearly it is possible to get them mixed up.

DS banning people? Wow. There's a novelty

This was not a case of "spoofing", there is not much point spoofing the source address of a TCP connection. As he suggested it looks like he unfortunately ended up with the same dynamic IP of a banned member after reassignment.

Same IP but *not* at the same time. Unles you are on a fixed IP then the it's just one of a pool of addresses allocated to an ISP (isn't it?)

That is opinion. Not fact.

I'd have to agree with Spud2003, spoofing is pretty much impossible with TCP since it's like holding a telephone conversation where the replies are sent to someone else's telephone, and the connection has to be established in the first place via a three-way handshake, SYN, SYN-ACK, ACK. TCP connections are well protected against spoofing.