So, all of our neighbors shares IPs or are within a range. It is fun knowing what all of my neighbors and the a few blocks away are all downloading.
If my memory serves me well, the book mentions that, for a while, Amazon had "the most read books in your zip code", until someone realized some corporations were so large a zip code was basically just them. So that became "the most read books at Intel's research department", and the entire thing was scrapped.
In that sense, it’s just as bad privacy wise, just a better use of a finite resource.
If the gp you're replying to is talking about CG-NAT[1] (which is common in India), the privacy leak is not the same.
With CG-NAT, a hundred homes simultaneously share the same public-facing IP address at the same time. That's different from Verizon or Comcast in the USA where each house has a different temporary public ip address rotating from a pool of ip addresses.
But yeah, this thing shows other CGNAT consumers for me, with some questionable taste in books.
A couple of years later my house was raided by the police.
I don't know if the two are related though, but within a couple of months after the raid my IP address changed for the first time since I noticed it being "static". Likely to be pure coincidence, but after that particular experience there are all sorts of different things that could be "putting two and two together"-type paranoia.
It's back to being reliably static at the moment... brb, someone at the door ;)
They took about $10k worth of my home lab gear. After eight months I was told I could go collect it back after they found nothing.
It was pretty traumatic. I still need to write down the complete summary. I've got about 50 pages of notes.
Knowing I was innocent was a certain comfort, but I really didn't know if there were going to be other motivations to manufacture something. Thankfully that didn't happen.
Just getting raided for something like that, or accused without evidence, is enough to destroy a person's life.
At the time of the raid, and when I rang the lead investigator (roughly once a month) to get a status update and ask a couple of questions, the only answer I ever got was that the IP address of my household was flagged a number of times over the course of a few years.
Similarly to this "I know what you download" site listing something I definitely haven't downloaded, it makes me very skeptical of the thoroughness of both the Police's source information and their ability to understand what it actually means (and therefore any ability to apply logical reasoning to implications of it - such as it's potential fallibility).
All information I've received has been because I asked questions. Nothing was given voluntarily.
Upon asking "whether this was over", the lead Investigator gave me the impression I was still a suspicious character because:
- I had "tor" on one of my computers
- I had visited and downloaded things from Mega (apparently frequently used for such materials)
- I had virtual machines.
This is the Police's level of understanding of technology. It's scary, it's sad, and it's disappointing, and I fucking hope I never get caught in their web of incompetence ever again.
I actually viscerally feel like I'm still under some amount of surveillance. But that might be just standard background paranoia (refer: Slartibartfast).
I'm not a lawyer, but my business is networking hardware and monitoring software. My company has worked with law-enforcement in the past, so take this with a grain of salt…
My opinion is that you are still absolutely under a cloud of suspicion, and I would not rule out the possibility that there is a flag on your ISP account, police are continuing to actively monitor your traffic, and hopefully you don't have to undergo a background check anytime soon because it will probably come up.
I suggest you speak to a lawyer, maybe even send a freedom of information request to the police department, and to the FBI for your file, and a direct question if you are currently under investigation.
My guess is that they will lie and say no, but at least you have it in writing for someone else. You might get a Glomar which is the same as a yes. Either way you will have some insight.
But, after 12 months I had to re-do a police check, and I thought that was normal for the industry, but one of my co-workers who started around the same time as me didn't have to re-do any police check.
Maybe nothing, but maybe there is a little bit of a stain that just will not come out.
We have attempted follow ups with the police ombudsman and local politicians regarding this, but there's little recourse unless it's police misconduct as opposed to "the system is shit". Beyond that it becomes expensive and time consuming and I really, honesty, truly do not want this to consume me or become my life's purpose.
I'm still planning on pursuing various other (limited) avenues, but I'm at a point in my life where personal free time is at a minimum due to the age of my family, so the pursuit of this is a backlog item.
(the effect on my family is also a strong motivating factor - side note: the police appeared to have absolutely zero expectation that there were children in the house; there was an almost panicked reaction from the officer who woke up my kids when they went into their rooms)
Funny thing: I don't like talking about this, but I need to, to keep it fresh as a reminder, but it also makes me angry again. But I'm not someone who wants to live in denial of reality.
P.S. This is in Australia.
I’m not sure about your experience, but I was always allocated a dedicated public IP (not static though) between 2009-2013 when on the mobile networks of two different ISPs. I even remember being able to host public websites off of them, from my phone.
Well then 99.9999% of the people don't really need it. But if one decides to run their own mail server at home (to save those 5-10-20 per month for their mailbox) it's worth the trade-off.
> Not to mention the privacy issues of always using the same address.
For me that's the thing. Privacy AND Security. Especially when you got something 'listening'/waiting.
Which 99.999% of users don't do, ever.
So when was the last time you checked for patched-but-not-auto-applied vulnerabilities in your (almost certainly ISP-provided) router?
ISPs don't want things to randomly break for consumers, so are likely to avoid rolling out updates that could potentially go wrong, but all code has vulnerabilities, and this controls access to your internal network.
The only way ISPs would, would be if their customers routinely turned their router off while they’re not using any electronic devices. But even the older generation I know (80+ years old, no “smart” devices apart from a Samsung tablet or a laptop, depending on the individual) don’t turn their routers off. It’s just not something people do.
In fact if anything, the kind of people who might want to are likely the same kind of people who would get scared to in case it broke something.
The only class of people I think who might, would be ultra tin foil hat paranoid people. And that’s certainly not going to be a large demographic.
Telia actually gives you both an IPv4 address and an IPv6 block which is pretty nice.
The french internet provider free.fr used to do this by default. I'm using another one nowadays which also let me have a static IP https://assistance.free.fr/articles/disposer-dune-adresse-ip...
Most normal households don't get static IPs, but on the other hand they change very infrequently, so they are practically static.
Most people have exactly one device directly connected to the internet (their router), and that router has hours of downtime per year at most. Most of that downtime (if there is any) is due to electricity outages, and so correlated with downtime of other consumers. When there are no outages, very few consumers can be left without an IP address. I'd expect the savings in IP space to be <1%, although I have no hard data here and might be missing something.
This doesn't apply to cellular carriers, there are plenty of subscribers who maintain their plans but disconnect often. This includes people living abroad (who normally use another country's SIM), or even people who turn off their work phones on weekends.
Not every provider, but some do.
We're relatively unique compared to a lot of countries though, where we have an infrastructure provider that serves basically the whole country with very good to tolerable internet (mostly) - Openreach.
Any ISP can sign up to use Openreach's network & a backhaul provider for providing services, and they usually get handover from their backhaul provider in London. Means we have a lot more small/niche ISPs that can still cover the entire country, and provide unique features - like static IPs or even blocks of static IPs.
There are alternative providers too (lots of 'alt-nets', and virgin media) - they're mostly not so open, though.
They won't admit it's static, but it is. I've had the same IP for three years since moving into this house. In that time, I've had power outages lasting for days, IP was still the same. I've replaced my router and the assigned IP didn't change. The only way it can change is if they replace their media converter "fiber jack" or you call or go to their store to ask them to change your IP.