Tech Tip for Writers #75: What’s My IP Address
Tech Tips for Writers is an occasional post on overcoming Tech Dread. I’ll cover issues that friends, both real-time and virtual, have shared. Feel free to post a comment about a question you have. I’ll cover it in a future Tip.
We discussed phishing earlier this week. This Tech Tip is a follow-on:
Q:I need my computer’s IP address, but I don’t know where to find it. Help!
A: Let’s start with why you might need your IP address. Here are a few reasons:
your Web hosting company asked you for the IP address to troubleshoot your internet connection or an email problem.
you fear your computer’s internet access has been hacked so want to know where it last occurred. How’s that work? My IP address is different at home than at the local free WiFi–even if I use the same computer in both places. An IP address isn’t assigned to my computer; it’s assigned to how/where I access the internet with my computer. That means, if I’m hacked, I can (in theory) track back to the hacker by the IP address they used. I did this recently when my Gmail was hacked. Gmail has a nice security function that tells you the last several locations from which you logged into your account. One was–as expected–my home IP in California. Another–the same morning–was from Turkey. Gee, I wasn’t visiting Turkey that morning or… ever.
link your printer (or other digital device) to your computer. Sure, it’s supposed to do this automatically, but it doesn’t always work. When you have problems, you can plug the printer IP address in (found through your printer’s menus) and manually make the connection.
to verify legitimacy–I constantly get alerts from MailChimp (my email newsletter tool) about activity on a particular IP address. They want me to verify it is legitimate. Since I know my IP address, I can.
There are lots of places online that provide your IP address for free, in nanoseconds. Here’s one: My IP Address.com .
More about security:
Questions you want answered? Email me at askatechteacher@structuredlearning.net and I’ll answer it within the next thirty days.
Jacqui Murray is the author of the popular Building a Midshipman
, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy. She is the author/editor of over a hundred books on integrating tech into education, adjunct professor of technology in education, webmaster for four blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, a columnist for TeachHUB, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, monthly contributor to Today’s Author and a freelance journalist on tech ed topics. You can find her book at her publisher’s website, Structured Learning.
Filed under: tech tips for writers, writers tips Tagged: security
