Bebo, IP Addresses, and Infinite Workarounds

by on March 27, 2008 · 13 comments

Listening to another panel at the 2008 Tech Policy Summit I heard an interesting point brought up by Rachel O?’Connell the Chief Security Officer of Bebo. When signing up for a Bebo account, users are now shown their IP address and told that they are not anonymous when using Bebo. Presumably the user’s location information could also be displayed along with anything else that can be found doing a reverse DNS lookup.

I thought this was a novel thing to do and may be a real deterrent to cyber-bullies or potential online stalkers. So, I thought I’d post on it. Before I did, I ran a quick search on “Bebo IP address” using Google. Such a query will bring up a host of tools to mask your IP address while using Bebo. Presumably these are TOR type services or other proxies that route your traffic around and therefore obscure your originating IP.

So, is Bebo discouraging online baddies, or reminding them to anonymize their IP?

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Cord Blomquist / Cord Blomquist spends most of his time pining for the singularity. To pass the time while waiting for this convergence, he serves as the New Media Manager at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Before landing this sweet gig, Cord hocked policy writing for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, toiled in the halls of Congress, and even worked in a crouton factory. In college, Cord spent his hours studying political philosophy and artificial intelligence, resulting in an unhealthy obsession with Lt. Commander Data. All of these activities will, of course, be viewed as laughable when he is ported from this crude meatspace into the nanobot cloud.

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