by Flack » Mon Jan 21, 2019 1:26 pm
Jiz nailed it. When you visit a website, your machine has to tell the site your IP address so it knows where to return the web request. Your cable modem isn't broadcasting anything out like a beacon or anything, per se. In PHP, you can display a visitor's IP address pretty easily:
Code: Select all
<?
echo $_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"];
?>
So in regular terms, visiting a website is like walking up to someone, handing them a note, and then having them return a different note back to you. And a VPN is like handing your note to a third party, having the third party deliver the note for you, accepting the other person's note on your behalf, and then returning the note to you. And a really good VPN is the same thing except they hire people from other countries or guys with selective amnesia to do all the note passing. And then there's onion routing, which is writing each word of the note on a different slip of paper and asking a dozen people to each deliver one word to the person, and doing the same in reverse. Oh, and then there's SSL, which is sealing the envelope so that the guy passing the notes back and forth can't read what's inside them. :)
And also, Jiz was right about internal vs. external IP addresses. My cable modem's IP address is 68.12.152.10 (or something). But that plugs into my router and internally, all my addresses are in the 192.168.1.x range. So the router keeps track of who requested what. Publicly, they're all going to look like they came from that 68.12.152.10 address.
Jiz nailed it. When you visit a website, your machine has to tell the site your IP address so it knows where to return the web request. Your cable modem isn't broadcasting anything out like a beacon or anything, per se. In PHP, you can display a visitor's IP address pretty easily:
[code]
<?
echo $_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"];
?>
[/code]
So in regular terms, visiting a website is like walking up to someone, handing them a note, and then having them return a different note back to you. And a VPN is like handing your note to a third party, having the third party deliver the note for you, accepting the other person's note on your behalf, and then returning the note to you. And a really good VPN is the same thing except they hire people from other countries or guys with selective amnesia to do all the note passing. And then there's onion routing, which is writing each word of the note on a different slip of paper and asking a dozen people to each deliver one word to the person, and doing the same in reverse. Oh, and then there's SSL, which is sealing the envelope so that the guy passing the notes back and forth can't read what's inside them. :)
And also, Jiz was right about internal vs. external IP addresses. My cable modem's IP address is 68.12.152.10 (or something). But that plugs into my router and internally, all my addresses are in the 192.168.1.x range. So the router keeps track of who requested what. Publicly, they're all going to look like they came from that 68.12.152.10 address.