Sonic.net pool of rotating IPs and anonymity

Internet access discussion, including Fusion, IP Broadband, and Gigabit Fiber!
14 posts Page 1 of 2
by bill » Sat Feb 11, 2012 4:06 pm
One thing I like about AT&T is that they have a large pool of rotating IP address from all over the Bay Area.

One day I'm visiting your website from Palo Alto, another from Sacramento -- or so your logs say. Along with uninstalling Flash and clearing cookies regularly, this creates fairly anonymous surfing.

What I'm wondering about with Sonic is how many rotating IP addresses they have overall in the Bay Area, and whether with Fusion (set to rotating) I will be on a small block of them identifiable with my local DSL central office.
by thulsa_doom » Sat Feb 11, 2012 7:18 pm
Generally speaking your DHCP client will request the same IP it had previously. If we haven't assigned it to somebody else since the your old lease expired, we'll give you the same address you had before. It's no uncommon for people to get the same address over and over again for months at a stretch. Dynamic IP addresses aren't a very good means of achieving anonymity. For that you'd want multiple proxies.
John Fitzgerald
Sonic Technical Support
by bill » Sun Feb 12, 2012 1:38 am
I have to strongly disagree. Proxies are not practical for ordinary daily web surfing.

Actually-dynamic IPs are essential to avoid consumer behavior tracking, and also an important defense against brute-force hacking.

Why would you want the negative of long-term identifiability, without the positive of being able to run a server, etc.? What would be the point (for the consumer) of a rotating IP that rarely rotated?

If things are as you describe with Sonic IPs this would be a deal killer for me -- unfortunately as I really like everything else about the Fusion product.

But I'm wondering if, as someone who isn't interested in changing your IP, you might be unaware of how frequently they actually are changing for some Sonic users.

If a thousand users on my DSLAM turn all their computer equipment off at night (please do to save electricity), and then turn their DSL modems back on in random order the next morning -- they should all get random new IPs. Unless your system actively tries to reassign the same IP to users?

And hopefully I'm not the only web user smart enough to set my router to disconnect after 5 or 10 minutes of idle time.
by gp1628 » Sun Feb 12, 2012 5:10 am
Ive been on Internet since its birth, and have run ISPs

Personally, I stand quite the opposite to your opinion. I like recognizable IPs. I think tracking is a good thing. And anonymity should be a choice. The ISP is never going to provide enough of it anyway for the extremely paranoid so it is better for them to do it themselves thru proxies and such rather than have the ISP force it onto them.
by bill » Sun Feb 12, 2012 5:03 pm
I agree that we should turn America into an Orwellian techno-dictatorship in which every action of ever citizen is monitored and recorded from birth till death... in order to make things easier for ISP admins :|

I'm not the one who came up with this concept of not being tracked across the Internet. Your browser lets you clear cookies for a reason. But clearing cookies is pointless if you're being ID'd by your IP number anyway.
by toast0 » Sun Feb 12, 2012 9:43 pm
I doubt a whole lot of sites use IP for general user tracking; it's too tedious. Many users change IPs frequently, some IPs are shared between users, etc; mostly IPs are useful for abuse tracking. Having a static IP is good in that case, you won't get treated as an abuser (unless you are an abuser/your machine is in a botnet that is abusing); with a dynamic IP, your IP may have been recently used by an abuser and when you get it, you're on the wrong end of abuse prevention. OTOH, I have and prefer the option for static ip(s), as I do hosting, and firmly believe an internet connection without the ability to host is not an internet connection. I don't think a dynamic IP is really going to impact brute force attacks against you; I don't think attacks specifically target static vs dynamic ips, and if your computer is online, it's going to be attacked.

I think the Sonic VPN may have a more actively reassigned pool of IPs than the DSL/Fusion pool. It's probably more convenient than using random proxies. Also, even with my static IP, and reverse dns pointing to a domain with public registration, all the IP location tools tell me I'm in Sonoma, not San Jose, which may or may not be comforting.
by dane » Mon Feb 13, 2012 11:27 am
toast0 wrote:I think the Sonic VPN may have a more actively reassigned pool of IPs than the DSL/Fusion pool. It's probably more convenient than using random proxies. Also, even with my static IP, and reverse dns pointing to a domain with public registration, all the IP location tools tell me I'm in Sonoma, not San Jose, which may or may not be comforting.
This is correct. Connecting to our VPN service will get you a unique IP each time, one which is not associated with geography beyond perhaps our Santa Rosa office.

DHCP will generally get you the same IP as you had before, as it tries to maintain that consistency. It doesn't assure it, and in particular if you leave your equipment off for a while and there is need for an IP it may be assigned to someone else. Or, it may not.
Dane Jasper
Sonic
by bill » Mon Feb 13, 2012 5:36 pm
Thanks Dane. Like proxies, VPN is too involved to bother with for normal daily Web use.

I just do a few reasonable things like clearing browser cookies, blocking Flash cookies (or Flash), and not having a static IP -- in the course of my normal non-"paranoid" Internet use -- that largely eliminate for me the gigantic consumer web behavior file being compliled on less careful people.

I'm hardly alone in being interested in this. Microsoft has undertaken a major new "Tracking Protection" feature in IE9, and a "Do Not Track" list is being discussed in Washington.

At AT&T with PPoE DSL I get a new IP every time my router disconnects and reconnects (it is set to disconnect after 5 minutes of idle time). Whether this is intentional, or just because many people are connecting all the time I'm not sure. The IPs cycle up through blocks rather than being random.

You're aware now that this is a fundamental issue for me in selecting an ISP :)

So I'll just close with the product suggestion that Sonic make its rotating IPs as actively, intentionally rotating as possible, with as large a pool as possible.

There should be two distinct products you can chose -- the actually static one or the actually rotating one. Quasi-rotating is pointless and the worst of both worlds.

Thanks
by dane » Mon Feb 13, 2012 9:31 pm
bill wrote:There should be two distinct products you can chose -- the actually static one or the actually rotating one. Quasi-rotating is pointless and the worst of both worlds.
We concur. As a general principal, making dynamic IPs more dynamic is a goal. Today the DHCP is managed in the POP, by the Cisco equipment there. It has no knobs to turn, and simply does DHCP in the standard way, which results in little churn.

We are working on a new redundant and distributed DHCP server deployment. This will give us the possibility of doing custom development in order to create a more "dynamic" dynamic behavior.
Dane Jasper
Sonic
by Guest » Wed Feb 15, 2012 12:38 pm
bill wrote:Thanks Dane. Like proxies, VPN is too involved to bother with for normal daily Web use.
If you're invested in privacy, you might want to give it another look. I was super easy to set up on Mac OS X. Added benefit, it also works from wireless cafes, so I have a secure connection all the time.
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