Posted by Michaelmiranda on January 01, 2004 at 02:35 [66.92.46.172]
In Reply to: I need a computer whiz to straighten this out!! posted by davep on December 23, 2003 at 17:27
It is _most_certainly_ possible for two or more people to appear as though they are coming from the same IP address. Many ISPs, especially large ones, use something called a proxy. I know AOL does this, and I would assume MSN and other such providers do, as well. By using a proxy, web-page requests get sent from someone's computer at home and arrive at an ISP's caching proxy --- from that point, the request gets forwarded to the targetted web site, and the web server ONLY SEES THE IP ADDRESS OF THE PROXY, not the IP address of the home user. Thus, on a given day, a popular website (such as, say, CNN.com) could see hundreds of thousands of web requests from the same IP address, even though different people are initiating the actual request. A more accurate way to uniquely identify a user is through the use of enforced logins and encrypted cookies; however, this part of the wetset.net site is, unfortunately, not set up for that.
I hope that clears things up.