[Skyld]

The "IP address is your identity" myth is somewhat hilarious. For most people in the world, you are allocated a new IP address from a DHCP pool every time you connect to the Internet. In this instance, the IP address that you may have had yesterday could have been reused by 6 different people since.

With the WHOIS information behind an IP address, you can probably find out what country/state/province an IP address belongs to, and the ISP who provides your internet connection, but not a lot else. Thinking you can reliably find someone's location with IP addresses is actually quite foolish, though, seeing as my IP address makes me out to be some 200 miles away from where I actually am.

Every time you visit a website on the Internet, your IP address is usually being logged by the webserver. Every time you log into AIM or MSN, your IP address is probably being logged. The fact of the matter is that there's not a lot anyone can do with your IP address.

The only problem this might cause for Graal (which as far as I see it, is the only reason we don't have a publicly accessible player.ip variable) is that it might make it easier to work out whether different accounts are actually the same person; perhaps someone would not like others to know for some reason that they own both or multiple accounts. However, this does not strike me to be a large problem. Even though people might be able to figure out that two accounts are used by the same person, it still does not tell anyone who you actually are.

So, now that we've established that IP addresses are actually quite safe, you can live on knowing that you won't be axe-murdered by Graal players with GPS units and too much free time.