KAPTAIN KREMIN said....
Never for a minute did I doubt that there are those who have the intellectual or technological ability to identify persons on this forum and are doing so on a minute by minute basis. My concern is use or disclosure and how that applies to Privacy Law and the resulting hurt to individuals who assume anonymity. I am not one of those "intelectually" blessed and haven't got a clue about IP's and clearly hadn't even noticed or considered the interesting bottom corner of replies!!!!!! But , believe me, I do write in fear of retribution.
I shall explain briefly for you.
All internet IP's are registered, meaning that you have to apply to get one assigned to you or your company, just as you have to apply to your isp to connect. To connect to this website each end must know where to send stuff to, this is the IP address, each side must know the others (generally). If someone gets your ip address, all they can do is find out who it is registered to (ie telstra). If in this case they found out it was with telstra, telstra has to receive a court order to provide details as to who was using that ip at that time (privacy act) or have your permission to do so.
If you connect from a large company that has 1 or more registered IP addresses, than anyone can find out that you are online through their network. It may also be able to know, in a genral area where you are connecting from(ie telstra sydney, or telstra perth). All that can be done is to associate your forum handle with the ip address it was posted from. Earlier in this thread, snarek stated that the ip address was from AsA. To actually get the ip address, he must either have access to that information from the forum admins, or can "sniff" the information if he doesn't.
For example the ip address of 210.84.189.251 (The ip address I am posting from) can be found by going to
http://www.apnic.net/search/index.html
and searching on 210.84.189.251
As you can see, not much data can be gathered legally on just an ip address, as to why snarek has access to ip's on this forum, I suppose you may request that info from the forum moderators, admins etc.
If you have good security and virus protection then it makes it a lot harder for anyone using non legal means to get this or any other private information.
Cheers