Originally posted by: flipfl0p
Not an expert on this (just superficial knowledge). You might have seen some websites which says how many visitors from which country etc (if you have your own blog also, you can know). How does one know it? The IP address of the machine can be tracked. May be a casual blogger may not know how to decode. But an expert running a website can know.
Most of our IP addresses can be traced except for hackers. They can hack some other machine and create an illusion that they are operating from that machine. Once we had an incident (Long ago. Our system admin was quite bad at firewall). A person has hacked in to our system. Sitting at a computer in a country A, hacking into another computer in country B. From that, hacking into another computer in Country C. From there, ours. He was just a harmless hacker. Anyway since we are not that smarties, we have to realise our IP addresses can be traced.
That's why sometimes we ask in India Forum, don't just ban the ids. Ban the IP address. (With this, they can ban any id created from that IP address). That implies the owners have our IP address (for that matter, any website). But usually they won't misuse (we trust 😆).
In twitter, one's IP address is protected. Only way one can get your id is, making you click a website. They might DM you. Or they might have a website link in their profile. If you curiously click on it, your ip can be noted.