this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
188 points (99.0% liked)
Privacy
32169 readers
457 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Technically DNS will let you look up a host name from an IP address, but the catch is that it might not work: it's not automatically configured. And even if it is configured you might not get all of the host names pointing at that address.
Very many webserver operators don't bother adding the server's host name to reverse DNS. For example,
lemmy.world
's IP address does not map to any host name in reverse DNS, andgoogle.com
's IP address maps to some completely different name for me, with no mention of Google in the returned name.Also, many websites can be served from the same IP address, especially if they are hosted in the cloud. You are correct that someone snooping on the connection would still see the IP address, but if that points them at something like a webhosting company or a CDN (or some other server hosting many different sites) it still doesn't really tell them which specific site is being accessed.
But yes, if the site you're accessing is the only one hosted on that server then the snoop could potentially guess the host name. But even then: how would they know that's the only site hosted there? If some site they've never even heard of uses the same IP address they would never know.