- Joined
- Dec 28, 2014
If I already have a list of candidates for a nick being someone and the IP gives me their rough geographic location, they're doxed at that point. And that's assuming I'm not, say, a tranny with $100K who is interested in spending it to get someone via legal process, rather than just to buy a bunch of cheesecake and eat it all.Even then unless you have a static IP address all it's going to point to is your ISP. And without a court order or warrant they're not giving that information out.
There's a reason to use VPNs and why an IP address is something you really don't want people knowing. On the ancient Internet, IPs were everywhere. Every Usenet article had an NNTP-Posting-Host: header, similarly they routinely showed up in email headers. There were ways then of avoiding these actually being accurate or useful, but irc is one of those old Internet protocols that by default just exposes IPs.
There's a reason this is no longer the case and most apps don't just go spewing out IP addresses at random. (Most of these like Discord rape your privacy in altogether more insidious ways.)
Most modern irc servers, especially those used by the more paranoid types who currently use them, use something (vhost is one such thing) that allows users to return a fictional domain rather than their actual IP, but irc really doesn't have security built in. You have to roll your own.