WARNING - you are broadcasting your IP

<rant>
Just so we have this all cleared up, when you come across the pop-up/flashing GIF

"Your computer is not safe, it is broadcasting it's IP address to the world, click here to download <company name> firewall software now!!"

Believe it or not, you MUST share your IP address, that is your internet address, similar to your physical address, and when i mail you a letter i need to know your address, and when my computer wants to send your computer a TCP/IP packet (that's how 99% of the internet goes) i need to know it's IP. (This includes if you go to a webserver just to look, they need to know where to send the html back to)

So before another person asks me how they can protect themselves from this problem realize its not a problem, that's the way the net works. If you want to be totally safe from the outside world unplug all phone/data/lwireless devices from your computer, remove the hard drive from the case, install high-security medco locks on the door (i can give you a discount on the install, i worked for a locksmith for years), rig the room to blow if anyone enters it without the password, place guards with autoatic weapons at all the doors, and then rest easy - your are pretty safe, at least you will keep the honest people out.

</end rant>

You don't have to share your ip by connecting through an anon http/ftp proxy. Yes those ad's are worthless but its just a marketying ploy to get paranoid users to give them money for garbage.

dont even start me on those things... those are an excuse to track every single site you visit in order/time and then sell the whole thing at once - instead of getting how many hits ebay.com gets, ebay can but the exact history of all their customers instead (not ebay was an example. this is in no wan intended to reflect on ebay)

some of us broadcast our IP address all the time.... we do

file transfers on AIM
use IRC (/dns user)
go on website which keep monitoring logs (a counter)

and so on.....

You don't really broadcast your ip address. You send it in the packet so the server knows where to respond too. Only time you actually broadcast your ip is on a lan when your box is acting as a router for arp request.

It's not like you can broadcast your IP address on the entire internet anyway. If that were possible, the DOS freaks would have a way to bring down the whole net.
So like genlee in effect says, it's just stupid to say that you're "broadcasting" you IP address. You're really just sending it to the nodes you want to connect to.
(Just for public interest for those who don't know, I know that many already know that in here)

sorry i worded my post a bit differently to what i intended,

what i am basically saying is that most of us make our ip addresses available to anyone we wants it and most people don't know that they are doing it, if you see what i mean ?

Well, the thing is that, in contradiction to what many for some reason seem to believe, if you keep your system properly configured, you can give out your IP address to the entire world without ever having to worry.