Just because your paranoid. Doesn't mean they are not out to get you.

Whoa, tkozy, that's really creepy. Can Jason somehow trace back how it was done? 

I am sure he can.There is no way to hide on the internet.

The troll sent me a message that he/she could hack into my profile whenever he/she wanted.  I don't know who it was or how they planned it but it looks like they/he/she managed with yours.

Well, tkozy, I hope he finds out and I hope you press charges. I wish you luck with that. You and I may not agree on much, but I would never wish you (or any other regular on here, for that matter) ill. 

Wow, Nancy, really? I missed all the troll "fun" last night, I guess.

I haven't seen Pax on today. I wonder if the same thing happened to him.

Wow.  So if CatherineBaker ever says anything that is factually incorrect or just plain wrong, please notify Jason immediately because my account's been hacked!  ; )

Jason!  What the heck?!?!?  How did this happen?

I'm scared now.  Hold me.

BTW--Where's Wayfarer been lately?  I haven't seen him around in a long time.

The server is the point where an IP address can be blocked. I'm not up on it like I used to be, but that's where it takes place. Server logs record the iP address of every single connection, every time and to block someone, you usually have to manually enter their IP address into a special field in the server software. However, some forum software will allow you to do the same thing. It's set up as a tool for the Jasons of the world to use to weed out ner-do-wells.  Okay, there's probably a few more avenues to blocking an IP address, but in most cases it something that can only be done by the server administrator. There are often several people have security access to the server and, frankly, sometimes it gets a little lax when you are working with people who know and have many reason to trust.  A hacker could possible find a hole and gain access to the server but in TKozy's case, this seems kinda deliberate that he - specifically - got blocked and not for a disciplinary reason.

This stuff creeps me out.

It was really weird.  The troll left two messages on my guestbook and on my sidebar messages.  Methinks he no like me.  I'm crushed....

Nancy,

what did he look like?

--virgil

What a nasty, petty thing to do. Hey, Troll, if you're reading this...GO AWAY!!!!!

There...that oughta do it. ;P

Sigh...  There's no conspiracy here.  We block IP addresses when the actions of suspended users (say, international commercial spammers, or permanently suspended users who won't take no for an answer) warrants it.  Some of those permanently suspended users create new sockpuppets and get around IP blocks by using proxy servers or resetting their IP address and getting a new one from their ISP, often by simply manually resetting their modems.  Now, even though we know this, we often block these IPs anyway, just in case.  If a local user with the same ISP gets assigned one of these blocked IPs randomly and contacts us, we will unblock it.  That was the case here--TKozy was using an IP he'd never used before that had been blocked when used by a permanently suspended user's sockpuppet account, on the same ISP.  The reason the blocked IP in question did not show up as associated with TKozy's account in our backend system is simple (though it had to be supplied to me by our development specialists).  "

It's all Greek to me.  I just hang on for the ride. 

virgil..come to think of it, he looked a lot like you.

Thanks Jason. Grip restored.

http://www.youtube.com/watc...

Virgil and Nancy : I think this is what happened..LOL

Jason,

Are you saying that SBC changed my IP address. Because I am still using the same computers and dsl modem. I was under the impression that SBC has static IP address associated with the Cards in the panels out in the street. Not the modems.

I haven't heard anything back from KNZR. But that is a strange situation also.

Yeah, it's all Greek to me too, Nancy, but Jason seems to understand what he just wrote, so I guess I'm pacified.

Until next time!!  Dun dun dun!  ; )

Jenny,

Tell that little troll he left his tool box in my front yard.

And he's not getting it back!!!!

Tkozy, I don't know how it actually works, I'm just repeating one explanation I've been told by others who know more about this stuff than me.  But as to your understanding of SBC's IP addresses undermining my possible explanation, let me remind you, as I did in my emails to you, that 8 different IP addresses show up as associated with your account, so you explain that to me. 

THERE WAS NO HACKING. THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE TROLL FROM LAST NIGHT.

I can't remember who, but at least one other user has written to me, also with SBCGlobal, about problems with hitting blocked IPs--sometimes, but not always.  And he didn't assume it was a hacker conspiracy.

Ms. Jenny,

I suppose,  that's possible ....  :   )

--virgil

Glad it is all cleared up. :-)

Not to reloosen people's grips, but this can serve as a security lesson for the less technologically minded out there....

The blog login page transmits in plaintext. To make an analogy, a plaintext password is like streaking the neighborhood. That means whatever password you're using here flies around the Internet as naked as a jay-bird. If you're using the same password here that you use elsewhere, you've just opened yourself up to a whole lot of problems. Anyone who is on the same LAN as you or the same LAN as the login server for TBC can sniff traffic and see the password (unless the LAN has been designed with anti-sniffing technology such as switches resilent to flooding attacks). If you've logged in over wireless, that's especially prone to sniffing unless you are using WPA with AES encryption. WEP and TKIP WPA wireless access points have many issues that would allow someone to crack the encryption in just a few minutes. Once they do that, again they can gather your TBC password as it flies past in plaintext.

Also, I've seen a lot of people around here who like to visit joke websites and view videos online. You have to be a bit cautious when you do that, particularly if you use IE. There are methods less than friendly websites can use to compromise your machine when you visit them. Having a virus scanner will not always protect you because the virus scanner is not always up-to-date on these exploits (and not all of them scan webpages although they really should). Firefox is a little more secure in this respects because you can install add-ons like FlashBlock, NoScript and AdBlock to prevent the most common methods the unsavory folks use to compromise sites. Again, to use a real-world analogy, if you don't take precautions online, it's like not taking precautions in your personal life.... you never know what you might end up "catching".

Moral of this security lesson: make sure your TBC password is unique and not used elsewhere and ask your friendly neighborhood computer geek about how to check the security of your machine and wireless router if you don't know how to do that yourself.

As an aside to tkozy, unless you're paying for a static DSL plan (which cost $50-75 a month), then you're getting a dynamic IP address ($20-35 a month). The standard lease is something like 2-4 days, so every few days your IP address could change. That doesn't mean it will change, but it can change, depending upon how they've configured it. BrightHouse on the other hand has never changed my IP unless I've forced it, like when I moved to my new machine the other day.

Observer nailed it and it does cause some problems on social networking sites where bad boys and girls have to get their chains yanked. If Jason has to block someone (an unfortunate but inevitable occurance) there is always the possibility that an innocent person may be connecting from the "suspect" IP address that was blocked as well. TKozy did the right thing by simply contacting Jason to resolve the issue.  

Observer,

I have a router:

Routers are devices that allow multiple computers to "share" a single IP address. The device that's connected to the Internet is the router, and it has a unique IP address. The router can then act as the DHCP server to the local network handing out local IP addresses to the computers connected to it. As traffic flows across the router, it does the job of translating the IP addresses from the local addresses it has assigned, to the external IP address it was assigned, and routing the right bits of data to the right computer ... hence the name.

One of the many side effects of using a router is that it can be assigned a static address on the Internet, and hand out dynamic IP addresses locally, vice versa, or any combination.

TK continues.

My explanation for the multiple IP's showing on my account would be the multiple locations I have accessed TBC.  Anywhere between here and North Dakota.

If my account was dynamic. I couldn't be blocked. I would be assigned a new IP when I  logged on to the Internet each time. Making blocking a IP useless. In fact more than useless. Very troublesome. 

No two sites are allowed to use the same IP. And a new dynamic IP is assigned each time you log on. But some how between late yesterday evening and  early this morning someone accessed TBC with an IP address associated with my home.  (it is possible I supose that I had my IP changed over night) 

To change  my  IP requires at least a tier two tech..  Even resetting my modem does not change the IP address. I have done this on occasion. I have even had my outside street panel card locaton changed. Not because of hacking. But beause the panel card had gone bad. That did change my IP.

I am concerned that someone maybe hacking through my wireless.

Schwaine,

My account was not blocked. My IP was blocked. I could access the account from my Cell phone. 

What really concerns me is that yesterday I set up a wireless computer in my Garage. I did use WPA though.. So put yourself in my position. 

Supposedly dynamic IP that would change each time I logged in.  Yet my IP was blocked.

Intruder on the site last night.

And. The first night I had a wireless computer set up in my garage.  

I have a lot of kids in and out of the house. Playing games on the computers.  I have 8.

I would like to find out what is happening.

If it is a neighbor kid. I may have to ring their neck!

It was the evil blue bloods trying to derail tkozy by logging on to his sockpuppet with their top secret flux capacitor...

Check google.maps.  There is a black helicopter right over your house, right now....

Okay, I'm confused as to exactly what you think happened, Tkozy.  All but one of the 8 IPs associated with your account had IPs that ended with

so that means they're local not all the way to North Dakota.  I don't pretend to understand how any of this works, but what Observer describes has been my experience on this end regarding sbcglobal and pacbell IPs rotating (either randomly or forced by the user) and thus users of that ISP sometimes finding themselves on an IP previously blocked because of the activity of a user other than themselves.  The user being referred to as last night's troll was, to the best of my knowledge, not a recurring sockpuppet version of a previously known B.com user--when this user was suspended, the user created a new account with a name different by one syllable. I suspended that new account and blocked the single IP that was logged as being shared by both accounts.  That single IP address was not the IP address in question that had previously been blocked because of a serial sockpuppeteer and which was the IP via which tkozy was unable to access the site last night.

I want to change my moniker to RonSockpuppet....or perhaps CerealSockpuppeteer... I can't believe sockpuppet is an actual term in IT jargon..

 I still think it is the blue bloods, of the international variety that have infiltrated this board and are carrying out their neffarious plan to silence those who threats to their cabal.......

Jason,

The sntc IP is the North Dakota IP I believe.. I am surprised you only have 7 IP's listed. I assume that is the capacity of your software. I should have many more.  I also access TBC from My Mothers and brothers Computers at their homes. And wireless SBC accounts using my cell phone When I am at a doctors appointment or traveling etc... I am sure my cell is a new IP each time I access the Internet. That is what I was referring to..

As I said, because of the different things that happened at one time. Especially setting up my wireless computer in the garage. I am concerned.

I am by no means an expert. But shutting your eyes and ignoring things is not computer safety.

Tell your computer dude. Anytime he says never. He is wrong every time. :>)

Oops the same can be said about every time. :>)

tkozy, networking and network security are part of my job, so excuse me for saying this but you are misinformed of how home networking works.

There are two ways AT&T (and SBC before them) configure home networks: dynamic IP plan with a router and static IP plan with a router. Both methods can have a router. The only difference is how the router is configured and how much AT&T charges you for the plan each month.

With a dynamic IP plan, the router acts as a Network Address Translation (NAT) box. What this means is there are two sets of IP addresses used in your network: the WAN IP and the LAN IPs. The WAN IP is the one the outside world sees. There is no human interaction required to change the WAN IP once the router has been set up with a dynamic IP plan configuration. It can be updated from time to time by the software in the router. The ISP doesn't necessarily have to update the WAN IP, but it has the option to do so if it so desires when the router is set up this way. So you could still have a dynamic plan even if your IP remains unchanged when rebooting the router. That could just mean the ISP is kind enough to hand out your old WAN IP when the router reboots.

Also, when in this mode, turning your computer on and off wouldn't affect the WAN IP because your computer is using a LAN IP. The LAN IP is used to number the machines behind the router so the NAT protocol knows where to send data. The NAT protocol translates your LAN IP into the WAN IP before sending the data out onto the Internet (and does a reverse translation when data returns from the Internet). NATing is a way of sharing one IP address among multiple machines. In this mode, all machines in your house appear to have the same IP address (the WAN IP) when they go out on the Internet.

With a static IP plan, usually the router acts just like a router. It hands out one of the five static IPs you've paid for to the machines in your house. You can't have more than five machines online at the same time without having a seperate NAT box (or using the command line to configure the router to do both routing and NATing, which is an advanced setup that AT&T doesn't usually do for people, but something tech geeks can do for themselves). With a static IP plan, the IP address on your machine is the one the outside world sees. So then each of the five machines on your network has a different outside IP address, although it should be noted that the five addresses are right next to each other numerically.

If Jason has seen 8 wildly different IP addresses (not numerically next to each other), then it's likely you have a dynamic IP plan and every machine in your house appears to have the same IP address to the outside world. Not only does this mean your WAN IP could change from time to time (and you may run into this problem again), but it also means anyone behind your router would have the same WAN IP as you since the WAN IP is shared for a dynamic plan. The only way to know what plan you have, assuming you're not tech-savy enough to log into the router to check, is to look at your bill.

If you have a dynamic IP plan and your wireless router was not secured properly and someone in the neighborhood decided to have a blast, this would explain both things you observed. Your IP got blocked because the router translates all the LAN IPs into the one WAN IP. Either the router updated last night to a WAN IP that was previously blocked or your neighbor did something via the wireless router to cause the WAN IP to be blocked. And your password got recovered because it was sent in plaintext and the encryption was not sufficient. WPA alone is not enough anymore. It has to be WPA with AES. Anything less than that and they could crack the encryption in less than 5 minutes.

Schwaine.

I have 8 computers and a cell. Only one computer is wireless. That is the one I set up yesterday. All 8 computers and the cell can be signed onto TBC at the same time.

Jason has 6 similar IP numbers for me. One I assume is North Dakota. The 6 are not consecutive. But are similar in that 2 or 3 numbers match.

I use computers at both my mom and siblings house. I am surprised Jason only has the 7 IP’s

Tier 1 techs can not reset a IP. Heck SBC has inside and outside maintenance guys. They actually fought over who was supposed to change out my card in the street side panel. Seems as though. Even though it was out side. It really wasn’t. :>)

Changing out that card gave me a new IP.

Neither resetting my modem or the Router will change my IP.

I have thought I had a dynamic IP myself. But after my problems with the SBC street side panel It seemed as if my IP was set by that card. It was that card that assigned my IP. And that it must be manually changed by SBC.

That made sense to me. Because in reality. My modem only gets shut down when power goes out.

After your post I went back and checked my settings.

I am using WPA PSK for the one wireless computer.

What is strange now is that it said my wireless was disabled. When I tried to change it. It acted like everything froze up.

I had to reboot both the router and my computer.

Checked the settings. And !

Wireless was enabled!

I had a wireless connection both before and after rebooting my router and inside computer.

It is a linksys router and I am using 3 separate switch’s.

I am not a expert computer guy. But I have been around them for years.

I am not a conspiracy theorists.

But when 2 and 2 start getting me confused. I get out the calculator.

And sometimes the old calculator starts a wondering and wandering. :>) 

Shwaine, this is a sincere compliment and I hope you take it as such. By the third paragraph of your 4:43 comment, my eyes started to glaze over, mostly because I have little interest in the workings of such things; however, I plowed on as I was intrigued by your style of writing.

I would imagine that you were deliberately writing for the audience of laymen, as I have seen you do in the past. Your suggestions to me regarding my Brighthouse issue were easily understood, even by a tech-idiot like myself, and you were extremely helpful in making me a more informed consumer. In this case, I again learned something new, so thank you.

I am pretty sure that reading your peer communications would look like Greek to me! You're a smart cookie  : )

It is clear I did not distill my technology knowledge enough for you to understand it in either post. And my translation circuits are not working well enough to let me translate your descriptions into their technological analogs. Your descriptions are giving me a murky picture and I cannot guess what is going on at your house without physically being there and poking through the routers.

So let me try to make this as simple as possible: Look at your bill. If it says something like "Elite-S", "Pro-S" or "Express-S" and costs more than $50 a month, then you have a static plan. If it just says "Elite", "Pro", "Express" or "Basic" and costs $50 or less, you have a dynamic IP plan. That's is a whole lot easier than playing guessing games over the Internet.

LOL, how's that for timing!

Oh yeah, and you might want to hire someone to look at that wireless router. PSK has several modes which are vulnerable, particularly TKIP mode. It needs to be WPA PSK with AES to be secure against current attacks and not all routers or wireless cards support that. If you don't see AES in the options list, it probably doesn't support it.

shwaine,

Don’t worry so much about your inability to communicate. :>)

It is pro, don’t need to look up anything. That does not change the fact that resetting either my router or modem does not change my IP. Sorry but I have spent many a times with techs We have reset and reset.

No change in IP.

So your not the first to not understand.

To change my IP required a Tier 2 tech to force. Now in saying that, I am not also saying that it does not change on a random basis.

schwaine,

It's AES

Thanks

Wow Shwaine! That was impressive!

Schwaine,

I like to make things simple.

How many trillions of random IP’s are there?

Don’t you find it strange that a TBC user could get banned. And another TBC user would randomly be assigned that same IP?

It would be like two meteors coming from two different directions, hitting two guys standing next to each other.

Indeed possible. But not very likely.

If you don't have "Pro S" or "Pro-S" on your bill, then you are on the dynamic IP plan. That doesn't mean that your IP address will change all the time though, just that there's the potential for it to change if AT&T so desires. It's all a matter of how they set things up. They could let you keep one IP or they could make you change IPs a couple times a week or anything else in between. With a dynamic DSL plan, it's all up to what AT&T decides to do.

As for how many random IPs there are out there, that's a bit hard to answer because each ISP can chunk up their address space as they see fit. The dsl.bkfd14.sbcglobal.net domain name is associated with many different chunks of addresses, with each chunk containing either 254 or a tad over 16k addresses.So they've got plenty of random IPs for Bakersfield, but that still doesn't mean you'll get a unique address.

And it is actually likely that two TBC users could end up with the same IP due to a statistical phenomena called the Birthday Paradox. That paradox says in short that it's very unlikely that two random people will share a birthday, but in a group of people it is likely to find at least two people that share a birthday and that probability increases as the group size increases. Think of it like socks in the laundry... if you have a bunch of random sock and just closed your eyes and picked two, they probably wouldn't match. But if you looked for matching socks, you could find them. So put this back in IP terms, there's a low probability two randomly selected TBC bloggers ever shared the same IP address, but there's a much higher probability that you have an IP address that some other TBC blogger had used in the past.

Schwaine,

I don’t see how the birthday paradox fits.

In IP’s we are talking about one distinct number that can only be possessed by one individual.

There can never be two people with the same IP in one single bunch of IP’s. Or in fact the totality of all the IP’s that exist.

With birthdays. The whole packet of people could have the same birthday. Or none of them could be the same. So in this case it makes it more probable that two people of the same birthday exists in a packet of people. And of course the larger the size of the packet, the more likely to have multiple matches.

The Birthday Paradox applies to any finite resource that can be shared. All the Birthday Paradox really says is that as the population size increases and the resources remain finite, the probability increases that two people will share a resource. It uses birthdays as an approachable example because it's a well-known example of a finite resource.

Your problem is you aren't viewing this as a timeline so you don't see how IP addresses can be shared. You're thinking in the present, not the present and the past. In the present, it's true that only one person can have an IP without things failing. But think about IPs like the revolving doors. Only one person can fit in a slot in the door at any given time, but over the course of time multiple people can use the slot. At some point in the past, this former blogger was using the IP address (he had the slot in the door). Then he gave up the IP address (left the door). Last night you came along and got the IP address (entered the door after he left the door).

The probability of someone on TBC happening to get an IP address that someone else on TBC had in the past (but no longer has) can be described by the mathematics of the Birthday Paradox. The mathematics tell us that as the number of bloggers increases or the number of IP addresses decreases, this probability of a blogger getting an IP that another blogger had in the past increases quite rapidly. It is anything but low. So that answers your question about the odds of this happening. It's actually much, much higher than "two meteors coming from two different directions, hitting two guys standing next to each other".

And as an aside to Jason, if you don't have a policy of reviewing IP bans from dynamic IP blocks after x months, you might want to implement one. I've found that if I haven't had any attempts on an IP after a few months on my servers, it's pretty safe to assume the troublesome user has either gotten bored or has obtained a new IP. There's then no longer any point to keeping the IP ban in place. Blacklisting an IP out of a dynamic IP block for eternity seems to cause more problems such as these than it solves.

Schwaine,

Birthdays are finite. They are limited to 365 times the maximum life expediency in years. A relatively small number.

Birthdays with hours, minutes and seconds may be approaching the limits of IP's.

But in that case the possibilities of a match within a packet are growing infinitesimally small.

One would be, the number of living people, out of a choice of apx 36500. Definitely finite. No if’s and’s or but’s.

The other would be, the number of living people, out of a choice of a gazillion. Finite, but approaching infinite.

Not much of a comparison in my opinion.

You're always welcome to your opinion, but this is mathematics, not a political debate. The exact same statistical formula applies to this problem. The result will of course be different because the input is different, but the method is the same. This is not two random, unconnected events like your meteor strike example. This is the probability of reusing a finite pool of reusable resources as time marches on. It's a totally different ball of wax mathematically speaking.

In fact, reusing finite resources is one of those statistical problems where the probability tends to be higher than human intuition would think. Humans are very bad at estimating these probabilities without crunching the numbers. What you perceive to be a very low chance is actually a rather common occurance. We see it all the time in the sys admin world.

Schwaine,

Just can't admit that you're wrong can you tkozy?

Here's your first mistake: thinking IP addresses are infinite. They are not. IP addresses are finite. All addresses in computers are a finite set. There are only n bits allocated to an address, which limits its range from 0 to 2ⁿ-1. In the case of IPv4 addresses, there is actually fewer usable addresses that this because many blocks of addresses in the range have been reserved. Each ISP is given a small sliver of the total IP address space that is theirs to "own". The ISP then takes that sliver and breaks it down further into each of its service areas. For a service area the size of Bakersfield, there is not a gazillion addresses. More like a couple hundred thousand for a large provider like AT&T or tens of thousands for a smaller provider.

Your second problem is still not understanding the time involved in the process. There are no expiration dates on IP bans, but there can be expiration dates on IP addresses. Let's say the troublemaker had the IP address "blah" back around Christmas. At that time, you had IP address "foo". He got in trouble at TBC and Jason added "blah" to the banned IP list. Our troublemaker then used techno-trickery to change his IP address from "blah" to "bar". At this point, AT&T puts "blah" back into the pool of unused IP addresses because the troublemaker is no longer using it. Now fast forward 9 months to Wednesday night. TBC is still banning the address "blah" because bans don't expire. Your router goes up to AT&T and says "hey, I'm currently foo address but my lease expired. What's my address now?" and AT&T replies back "sorry, I need foo back, but here, use blah address instead because no one is using it currently". You no longer are "foo" address at this point. AT&T has taken "foo" back. Your router then switches to using "blah" address and you run across the IP ban at TBC because there's no expiration date on bans.

Your third mistake is your coin flip analogy. It shows you have not understood what I have been trying to tell you at all. I have not said anything about a 50-50 probability, just that the probability is a whole lot higher than the one in a gazillion odds you seem to think it is. A more appropriate example using coins would be this: toss coins one at a time into an aquarium filled with water. Eventually, a coin will land on top of another coin because there is a finite amount of space at the bottom of the aquarium. As you keep tossing coins, the probability of landing on another coin gets higher and higher because there's less free space in the aquarium. Getting an IP address that another has used in the past is like landing on any coin in the tank. Getting an IP address that TBC has banned is like landing on specific coins in the tank. As time goes on, both these probabilities increase.

Here's another analogy for you. Think of this like a road where the pavement surface area is the IP address space, you driving your car is getting a dynamic IP address and pot holes are IP bans. When the road is first paved, everything is pristine and there are no pot holes (IP bans). On this freshly paved road, you have no probability of driving over a pot hole (getting stuck with an IP that had been previously banned). Over time, pot holes start popping up. If no one repairs the pot holes (removes the IP ban manually or by having it expire), the road will become more and more ladden with pot holes and you have a higher and higher probability of hitting a pot hole.

Getting back to the probability, this is a variation of the pigeonhole problem taken over time. The Birthday Paradox is just one example of the pigeonhole problem without a time component. Apparently the time component is confusing you, so here's how it goes. Just as the coins in the aquarium will eventually overlap because there's only so much space for them to fill, eventually users will get IP addresses that someone else has used in the past because there's only so many available addresses. This probability increases when more users are added to the system but more IP addresses are not added to the system. The whole purpose of dynamic IP addresses is to share x IP addresses among y users even when x < y by taking back an IP address once a user is done with it and handing it out to another user. It works on the theory that not all y users will be online at the same time. It's the same principle as time-sharing a vacation home.

And if you still don't understand it after these analogies, I don't know what to say other than there's nothing wrong in admitting you're in over your head on a topic and you don't understand it.

Schwaine, 

It is not about right or wrong. I like the sport of debate.

I had hoped you would not go the ad homonym way.

Your coin comparison does agree with my meteorite example. .The larger the area of the tank. The less likely the chance of the landing event happening.

You need to read my post above. I didn't say IP's were infinite.  I said they approach infinite. That is because they are number based, not object based. The numbers are only  confined by the way the ip system is defined. It could be defined as a infinite number of groups of .d00's. Because numbers and time are infinite. Time is infinite only because it is numbers based. It hasn't anything to do with religion..

Stars or meteors in the universe are not infinite. They can be defined as time minus one or even less So the number of stars are a set less than time.. You will eventually count all the stars in the universe. If you count long enough. And because time is infinite. You will have plenty of time to count all the stars.

The star itself is not numbers based. It is a object that can be touched. If you only give yourself enough time to get there. And time is numbers based and infinite.

So the banned IP is finite. It is only one. The rest of the IP's are a set approaching infinity.

What is the chance of a coin event in the case of 10 coins inside a tank whose area is approaching infinity? 

.

Numbers are NOT infinite in computers. If they were, we wouldn't have had the Y2K problem, nor would we have the approach Unix epoch issue. Integers, whole numbers such as addresses and dates, ALWAYS have a finite range when stored in a computer. They are fixed width, only so many places allowed. Real numbers, such as fractions, can only be approximated by shoehorning them into a fixed width representation called floating point numbers. You think you have infinity, but it's only an illusion. There's still a fixed range and some real numbers can't be accurately represented, just approximated. That's why computers can suffer from math errors when dealing with fractions. They're manipulating approximates, not the actual fraction.

You would be the guy in a programming class constantly trying to store a gazillion into a 32 bit integer and wondering why the computer kept putting some other "random" number on the screen and not the one you typed, even after being told you can't go beyond 2 billion with a signed 32 bit integer. Or the one wondering why 6.0 stored in a floating point number is printing to the screen as 5.999999 even after being told that float are approximates.

You can't just willy-nilly add another .xx to an IP address because there are only xx.xx.xx.xx allowed. That's 32 bits (each .xx is 8 bits). No more and no less is allowed. It must be exactly 32 bits for IPv4 or the routers would discard it as gibberish. IPv6 allows 64 bits, but not all systems support that, and again it would be exactly 64 bits, no more, no less. It's a fixed width.