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Comment by JohnnyFlash | Hacker News Reader

Really scary.

I wanted to see if i could find someone. Went onto twitch.tv. Picked a random stream. Got email. Looked up Skype id from email. Searched for skype id which gave me the IP and the small town where they currently reside.

Its worrying how easy this makes it to find someone.

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Honest question, why is it scary?

My IP resolves to a location ~20 miles away. I don't see why having a Skype contact and knowing a 20 mile radius where they live is anything to worry about?

Most residential internet connections don't have any sort of DDOS protection, so privacy issues aside, at the very least you are open to a simple denial-of-service attack. This was a huge problem for the popular progamer "Destiny" in the Starcraft 2 community.

So is it also really scary that the mods/admins on the Starcraft 2 forum could also see his IP address?

The risk of being DDOSed when you share a contact on Skype and they find out your IP address is hyperbole.

There is a pretty substantial difference between a few Blizzard employees knowing your IP address and the entire public knowing your IP address.

You obviously don't live in China...

But is no different than just send them a link where you save their IP when they open it (and with little social engineering you can trick anyone into clicking a link)

Actually, it's very different because one can passively acquire contact info this way, as opposed to actively contacting each one. Not only is it faster than social-engineering each contact, it's more palatable to those who don't want to attempt such.

Yes, but why does it actually matter if someone has your IP address?

It can be directly linked to your address in most cases.

In most cases? And with what accuracy?

Sometimes you can get to the correct city in the US. Rarely can you get any further than that from an IP. In other countries you can only really be sure about the country.

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