How important is your IP address?

Okay this is both a BS and a truism at the sametime and let me explain a bit.

Think of IPs like telephone numbers, there is only *1* number like that anywhere, (especially as people have cell phones thus can be anywhere) so saying I will find out your telephone number and I can track you down personally to where you are who you are etc. is not normally true (BS). Just like you ABSOLUTELY have to have a telephone number assigned to the phone before you can call another telephone's number, the same with IPs. You need one to make the connection to the target end, to 'call' tomshardware and 'order' the website.

Now here is where the tricky part you see hollywood really make more BS about, when you connect your network (not your computer!) from your home router to a ISP, you are 1 of hundred of thousands of its customers, so your given a 'random' IP from a pool for your state, county, area of town, that gets used by your ISP for that area. So if someone worked INSIDE the ISP, they could 'track' you by that IP to that 'area' and monitor for your connection, or have it recorded already to track back for resolving issues (HEY my internet is slow!). That is the Big Brother Government image coming to hunt you down you see, but it is still a possibility (Court Orders, committing a actual crime, etc.).

Now just as your phone may be AT&T, the person your calling is MCI, how does AT&T connect to MCI? Much less two different phone of different customers in different locations 100% of the time reliably. Well that is the same question about the Internet (replace phone with computer). Basically a spiders web of connections and interconnections were made by Communications companies, they then were forced to play nice by legal / government enforcement, so they share these resources and interconnect them. The 'path' between San Franscisco to Miami isn't straight SE though, it actually could go South then East then North then hop back West before run across to the NE then south again for THAT SINGLE connection. The next time the person tries it could take a different route, based on traffic, outages, etc. So 'tracking' backwards isn't really going to happen as you can see, because you have to be able to access all the connecting points, different ISP providers, etc. to track the connection.