I post an online journal and within that journal I am given the ip address of the people who post a response. I was wondering if I can ever be able to match the ip address with an owner legally.
Sometimes you can... most residential users don't have static ip addresses meaning it changes from time to time. Even if they do have a static IP I'm not sure how to ID them though.
You can if the ip is static as FrancisFan said. Anyone with cable or dsl service will be assigned an IP by their provider, so you wouldn't be able to trace it back to them unless you had access to the company and their private information, which you better hope you don't if you want to stay out of jail.
You can find out where they are coming from but not who they are (name, age, sex etc.) unless you contact the actual isp and request that info and they won't give it to you unless its some kind of court decision, subpeona etc. (ie. RIAA)
But with the tracert command you can find where they live (most of the time and not street level or nothing...just local provider). All you do is go in Command Prompt type "tracert ip_address". Take me for example my ip is currently 66.139.107.171. Use tracert and you can find where I live live and my provider.
Steve, you can do a "whois" on the ip (and a bunch of other cool stuff) here: http://www.dnsstuff.com/ A whois will tell you who owns that ip or block of ips. Based upon that information, you can contact the owner, and (with a warrant or court-order), you can find out who had that IP at the time you're wanting to find out about. I haven't gone through the process, but I know people who have. If a traceroute resolves names, and you don't hit a firewall that blocks pinging, a lot of times you can get more specific information than a whois will give you (i.e., it might hit a hop called something like "houston-sbc-tx1" or something like that. Well, now you know it's a houston location owned by sbc.
While generally true, this part isn't always true - especially with ISP's like AOL due to the use of proxy servers. But at least you know it's AOL, I suppose.
Exactly, it's not really an exact thing, it will only work if the server you hit has a name that helps identify where it is.
