Incommunicado

All that he is saying is that if you turn off the cable modem, you are not guaranteed to get an IP address when you turn it back on. He said that because their servers were hacked and all the usable IP addresses were "taken" (my understanding based upon what I gathered from your post).

So, go ahead and leave the cable modem on all the time. You can still turn your computer off if you want (I never do).

Jason

 

At the risk of insulting everyone's intelligence, a short lesson on IP addressing:

Computers need a way of identifying each other so they don't get confused about who they're talking to. So each computer on the internet is assigned an Internet Protocol (IP) address.

A web site has at "static" IP address; in other words, an IP address that never changes. For instance, a WhoIs lookup on Baptist Board says that Baptist Board's IP address is 202.178.1.2

Now, static IP addresses cost big bucks. An internet service provider (ISP) may have hundreds, or even thousands of clients; it isn't cost effective for them to assign a static IP address for each of their clients. So they use "dynamic" (or temporary) IP addresses.

In the number for Baptist Board above, the first three groups of numbers (202.178.1) identify the location of the computer that hosts Baptist Board; the final group identifies specifically which computer, or where on the computer, the Baptist Board files are located.

Whenever you log onto your ISP to get to the internet, your ISP assigns your computer an IP address. The first three groups will always be the same, but the last group will change each time you log on. When you log off, that number will be "released" and available for use by the next client of the ISP that logs on.

What SheEagle's ISP guy is saying is, whenever you leave your cable modem turned on, you've been assigned a dynamic IP address and you keep that IP address until you turn your cable modem off. He advised her to not turn it off, because the hacker in this situation was using all the available IP addresses. Once you log off, because the hacker was "stealing" all the unused IP addresses, there was the very distinct possibility that when you tried to log back on, there were no IP addresses available for you to connect with.

In some terminology, this might be referred to as a "denial of service" attack--meaning, the hacker was denying service to all the clients of this particular ISP.

Hope I didn't muddy that too much....