I kinda get how it makes sense on a local network, because it’s kinda like a list of the devices that are connected to it and your trying to communicate with other machines connected together in that same list. But this feels like a really surface level understanding and I don’t know what I’m missing.
I understand that they’re a string of 4 digits from 1-255, such as 192.168.1.1 being really common for home networks. But I don’t know what the numbers each mean. I think 192 in this case is a reserved value for home use? Same with 10? And the last number is basically the number of the device on the network I think. But I don’t understand the numbers for x.168.1.x
What I really don’t understand is how public IPs work. You hear online about not leaking or sharing your public IP or it can be used to find (pretty close to) where you live. How? How are they assigned to the billions of connected devices in the world?
I’ve been watching videos about trying to set up a FOSS router because it’s really interesting, but IPs seem like dark magic to me
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You hear online about “protecting” your IP address because they want to sell you a subscription to a service you probably don’t need. There are lots of much better ways to track you online than your source IP address. (In fact, that’s a pretty terrible way to track someone; there’s a lot of much-better mechanisms.)
Your IP address can often be traced to your general metro area, but this isn’t very interesting information.
Public IP addresses are allocated in blocks of various sizes, and then assigned to individual endpoints by those that own those blocks. Your router holds a single public IP, and does some internal wizardry to map that one public IP to however many devices you have behind it.
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