Mynick@MyIpAddress has joined the channel reddit / irc ---------------------------------------------------------------------- _raGa_ · 2019-12-28 08:45 Just installed an epic4 irc client to connect to a channel which is on Efnet, things went smooth, but upon my entry to the channel I see a banner message (?) gets printed: Mynick@MyIpAddress has joined the channel-- shows my IP (not felt comfortable) Just for a sake of privacy, I want to hide my IP, any suggestions on "how to .." is appreciated ---------------------------------------------------------------------- LordGarak · 2019-12-28 10:55 EFnet doesn't hide IP's but most other networks do. Your IP should be dynamic and should change over time. Only your ISP can tell who has what IP at what time. I wouldn't worry about it. The most it will tell anyone is maybe what neighborhood in what city your in. Often not even that. The IP's from my ISP place me in a neighborhood on the other end of the city. 20 years ago when IRC was in it's day it was normal to see everyone's IP/hostname. Denial of service attacks were pretty common and it didn't take much to take someone offline. Most people were just on dialup. DSL was available in some places. But to get hit with a DoS attack you generally had to piss someone off (or just be in a channel they wanted OPs in). There were ways around showing your home IP. You could get a shell account on a server somewhere and run a bounce. The bounce would relay your connection so that you appear to be connecting from that server's IP. It would just hide what ISP your using at home and you would be seen on IRC from the same IP all the time. These days you can get a full virtual private server(VPS) for $5/month. I have one just to maintain connections to IRC(among other things). I can ssh in from anywhere and reattach to a screen session running irssi. They also give you control of the reverse dns so it shows me as user@mydomain.ca on IRC. If you own a domain you can set it to what.ever.you.want.yourdomain.com Honestly if your worried about privacy showing your home IP is likely safer than going with a bounce or VPS as those IP's are static. Your home IP will likely change every time you reset your router. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- eskimo_dev · 2019-12-28 15:42 The biggest threat when showing your IP is someone social engineering the ISP to give them info about you. If your ISP just gives out your name and city that could be enough to find out everything about you just from an IP. It's happened a million times and it'll happen a million more. Employees are stupid. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ProgVal · 2019-12-28 20:33 You should also consider that whenever you open an URL, the server you connect to gets your IP address. If someone sends you a link (via IRC, Discord, Slack, mail, ...) to a server they control and you click it, then they can also have your IP address. So you probably want to use proxies for both your IRC client and web browser.