Why hide your IP address?

[wimiadmin]

OK. I've got to ask.

Why hide your IP address?

I can understand if you're a gamer and some little 15 year old punk who gets their milk money taken from them daily now has admin power and bans almost anyone that asks them a question or beats them at their own game. You hide your IP to get back into the game you were playing prior to being banned. Understood.

Otherwise, unless your intents are malicious, I don't understand why it's so important to people.

We were "congratulated" this morning in a very pleasant e-mail (sarcasm) for banning the entire TOR network. If you're not familiar with TOR, just Google it. It's a plug-in for FireFox to hide your IP address. Pretty cool app when I tested it, but my connection was just slightly faster than dial-up when surfing with TOR enabled.

I'm not asking for specifics, just a little insight. I'm not a gamer...well, I play Xeno Tactic every now and then, but I wouldn't need to hide my IP for that.

Thanks,
Brian

[AboveTheLogic]

I think some people are just a bit too paranoid.

[fotonique]

lol not at all paranoid it;s quite necessary if you surf the internet from your workplace or if you are in china trying to bypass domain blocks on sites like yahoo or google..and many more.

[AboveTheLogic]

If from the workplace, is the goal for your IT dept not to see what you are doing, or just to not have your work IP show up in the website's logs?

I can understand if its domain blocks

I prefer to just run a VPN server at home and connect to that, then surf the web. I then have a nice encrypted tunneled connection to home, then am open to the world as if I'm home.

[aziernest]

One reason that may sound legit to you is access some banned sites due to country policies. Taking particular example of the whole domain *.blogspot.com was banned in Pakistan which can be accessed by changing ip address

[andyroo]

It can be usefull to hide your IP address to avoid spam im led to belive
and also websites recive a fake ip when your on the internet normaly called proxys proxys are also used to get around baned websites like myspace at school

[JoshuaXiong]

Oh yeah I use Tor. Tor is a slow proxy configure FireFox >.<

[Professional Dude]

Simply, I dont want anyone to be able to trace where I am visiting the site from..Other than that, its kinda useless for me.

[Chevex]

The only time I ever hide my IP is for application testing in my web development. I have to make sure all features function with my internet connection in many different states (i.e. javascript turned off, IP hidden, etc...)

[DeadEye]

Originally Posted by wimiadmin

you're a gamer and some little 15 year old punk who gets their milk money taken from them daily now has admin power and bans almost anyone that asks them a question or beats them at their own game. You hide your IP to get back into the game you were playing prior to being banned.

^^this.