How do you avoid the Avatar Online trackers??

I am aware of how the tech works.

However some instances of same address usage:

* Couples and friends who share the same house and on SL together.
* Places like dorms and offices have a single internet facing IP address due to NAT addressing, each room or cubical gets a CAT5 network connection.
* Apartments often have people agreeing to share a single internet connection with others to reduce costs. People who do this install a router, a DSL modem and route the networking cables to all places that are sharing. This could be professionally wired in for some places or a hack job depending on the place and people.

Sure some ISPs can restrict usage by contractual means but they cannot police the usage from behind a firewall, it all looks like the same traffic.

Um, yes, obviously I'm familiar with these cases because I mentioned some of them. In each of these cases the people involved can tell if they've got a public IP address and probably have a fair idea of how likely it is that their SL account will be sufficiently diluted by other SL accounts that they are unlikely to attract suspicion of a stalker.

For couples and roommates, for example, it doesn't really matter whether the stalker starts stalking the other account because it's an alt or because it's a roommate or a relative, now does it?

Stay offline, problem solved!

Argent's answer was correct. Another way of looking at it is using the same IP address for different households takes more processing and more configuration to manage in the service provider's aggregation routers. (I'm a development engineer for these routers.) That means, they'd need more routers and more technicians.

For most service providers, it would cost them more than using a single IP address per customer site (letting the customer site's equipment worry about the overhead involved in NAT, which stands for Network Address Translation, which is what you need whenever multiple computers share the same IP address to the outside network.)

I wouldn't be surprised to find IP sharing in remote villages or somesuch, but I'd be surprised to find that there are many such sites with enough bandwidth for people to run SL effectively. But, I have no experience in 3rd-world installations, so I'm extrapolating.

If you took two arbitrary avatars with the same IP and asked, "Are these alts?" I couldn't say. But if you suspect two avatars are alts and they have the same IP address, well, it's not conclusive, but it's pretty indicative.

The people who are concerned about being stalked, however, DO know how often that they are likely to be a "false positive", or can find out. And as far as my advice goes, they're the only ones who need to know. Statistical estimates don't matter when you know the actual results.

The best way to avoid an Online Tracker is to...

...is to not tell people you exist.

LOL!
(oooh, the two of you are clever! First, noticing that someone had the reverse name of your av, then making yourselves look similar, and finally coordinating these two posts. I'm in awe.)

My reply was not to you in this instance Argent, read more closely.

Argent yuor part about stalking is only one use case about IP address tracking. Where in my original post here did I say anything about the usage? However my sttement about IP address is correct.

OK, replace "stalkers" with "the people who the original poster (and people who have similar problems to the ones being discussed in this conversation) are trying to avoid by using alts".

You attempting adding weight to Argent's *opinion* by adding your own does not in fact make any difference.

And no it take no more processing. If I have a 4-8Mbit ADSL connection and I choose to share it around my house, apartment building then there is no extra processing needed at the ISP at all.
Offices *can* be a different but only the big ones which will likely have a dedicated line and single static IP address to the outside world for *all* people inside it.
Small offices might well use the same trick as households for internet sharing.
Dorms can be but not always are going to be on the campus backbone which will have a single static IP address to the internet also for everyone.
Basicallyalmost everyone is using NAT to face the outside world these days.

It is not limited to just small villages in remote countries either, dorms and offices use a single IP address in some circumstances.
My point is you *don't* *know* what makeup of the population are using the same addresses, which you actual seem to agree with that despite the first part ofyour post.

The bottom line is that the odds don't matter, because the people to whom this issue does matter have the information they need to determine whether it matters or not, so long as they are aware that it *might* matter, and that's the only thing that really matters.

My solution is much easier, had it before. "I know you're online" and that dude telling me how he knew. Told him was nice to know ya and muted him.

Anyone, anyone that does not respect my privacy, by ignoring offline/online status, by using spyscripts of any kind, with only less than a hand full exceptions get muted on the spot.

End of problem.

Total BS, My original post is to Pie's post about stalking a DJ.
You get banned for stalking a DJ, then possibly sometime in the future someone else from your dorm, office, village shows up at the same spot as that DJ quite by chance and might not even know your stalker. The DJ sees the same IP address and then unfairly bans the avatar as being the first person.
The DJ thinks he knows he banned a stalker, he does not know for certain.

No they don't, they have an AV and an IP address. Unless that av is doing something to them right then and has the same IP, they know nothing.
An av just stood dancing in the same place with the same IP cannot be determined to be an alt of anyone.

I think the dispute here is really dealing with different use cases (or, perhaps "abuse cases" for IP address stalking to determine alts. Gabriele is quite correct that an IP address match does not *determine* alt-itude. But Argent and Lear are also correct in that it would add some amount of evidence from which a stalker might confirm a suspicion that was formed from other independent data. So it would be a fool's errand to go sieving through stream server hits looking for IP addresses to identify alts at random, but not so bootless to watch the IP addresses for two suspected alts who have no a priori reason to be sharing IP addresses.

But that's not why I'm posting. Earlier in the thread there was mention of hiding online status from all but scripted objects being just a tick-mark on the Friends list. I just wanted to point out that, if the friends share any groups, that's another way that online status can be learned despite the status being hidden on the friends list, without anybody using any "sneaky scripts." So, just because somebody discovers that you're online when you've tried to hide that, you can't conclude that they're going out of their way to find it out. A side-effect is that they know you're online *and* they know that you've tried to hide your status from them in your friends list. (So I never do that, myself.)

It is quite possible that they are talking about different use cases but the strange thing is that Argent responded first to my original post which was:

/327/74/302858/2.html#post2291326
In which I responded to Pie's post about the same specific use case I have been talking about all along.

Lear responded to me about Argent's tangent though and so we end up here. Moral is, perhaps more careful reading is needed.

The tick mark on your friends list really is a totally useless feature. LL need to decide there is going to privacy and implement it better or discard the whole idea of privacy.

I would prefer better privacy but I am not adverse to telling people to quit bugging me if need be.

My original posts were in response to several messages, yours was only one of them. The only reason I responded to yours was because I don't believe that your calculation of the odds is accurate. But it doesn't matter, because in the original poster's situation the odds are known.
True. The fact is, though, that there ARE people who ARE using this technique to try and cross-reference IPs and accounts to build up "IP-based" ban lists. It's actually happening. The fact that these people are getting false positives is obviously not something that matters to them, or else they wouldn't be complaining about how changes in media streams make their job harder.

I have only responded to your replies that quote me except in one case where I thought you were still replying to me - my bad on that one.

Just for the record and to make it clear I have never said anything on this thread that contradicts what you have said about cross-referencing IPs and in fact agree with that part. In fact if you read back I even stated that people who don't care about false positives won't care that they get it wrong - sheesh this is getting hard work.

OK. Your messages seemed to imply that cross-referencing was rarely going to provide useful information to the person trying to use the technique... which would lead many to the conclusion that nobody should be concerned about this problem. I agree that there will be many situations where there are false positives, but I doubt that there would be *enough* to discourage the kind of person likely to be doing it.

Are you just trying to pick a fight? There's no rule against him replying to one of your notes even though that note happened to be in response to one of mine.

No one is claiming that your examples aren't possible, just that they don't apply to the typical case where a single household has their own modem to connect to the cable or phone company. The context of the issue was informing SL users that it's possible for other people to find out your av's IP address with good but not perfect reliability. Sure, there are specific situations in which that IP address is often shared with others, but so what?

A more relevant point is that merely knowing an av's IP address isn't terribly good for much, with rare exceptions. Not because the IP address could be shared, but because not many people have the ability to do much with it.

No it is called a discussion to which I am merely taking part, you are the only one who seems to bringing this to a personal level.
Where did I say he is not allow to respond to me?

Nothing you have written about the tech is any news to me, including your first post to me. You are not educating me here, chances are I know just as much about the technology as you and what is possible so I would appreciate you not talking down to me.

Go back and read my *first* post, it was inresponse to the statement by Pie not to alt-stalk a DJ because they can find you out, to which I responded that the IP address will not guarantee you are getting it right. The rest stemmed from there.

If y'all agreed with that in the first place then why did any of you respond at all?

Context.

The fact that the IP address doesn't *guarantee* you get it right is true, but it only matters if there is a high enough false positive rate to make it worthless to the person trying to use (or abuse) the IP address. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case.

I had context, it was in response to Pie's post about alt-stalking a DJ. DJ's get alt-stalked all the time and have only marginal amounts more clue about it than anyone.