Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Too much paranoid, or not enough?

One of my regular website reads is SurvivalBlog.com, I try to visit the site at least a couple times a week because there is a lot of good info to be had and I find Mr. Rawles' site (on the most part) entertaining and informative. On my last visit I noticed that he is now posting his actual IP address on the site, and he's not the only one that started doing this. Apparently he (and many others) are concerned that hackers or unnamed government entities will take control of his site. Frankly I am not sure if he and the others doing this are too paranoid or not enough. In general I am in favor of paranoia, it tends to help keep you alive, but I'm wondering if this isn't going too far. Am I just being naive? What do you say readers, do I need to do this too? Is wilsonblog in danger of being taken over by some nebulous "Gubment" agency or some pimply-faced teen hacker?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

For a survival blog, it sounds reasonable, even without trying to make a paranoid case.

The DNS system, which gives the human friendly URL to computer address, has a couple of known issues. In the simple cases, like of a persons ISP DNS going down, or a higher level DNS, or ..., the reader can still get to the website vi the IP address so long as the site is still up and at least one of the paths between the reader and blog are configured correctly.

In the cases of a determined attack, posting the IP address is not effective other than keeping the attacker from poisoning the DNS system and keeping most readers away. It might be argued that even posting the IP will not save most of their readers while the sufficiently paranoid would have already stored the IP address regardless. As a thought puzzle, have you ever written a website IP address down for "just in case"?

Wilson said...

Right now I can’t even tell you my own IP address…