Aol

[Kevin]

Can their be 7 people logging in with identical IP's
from all over the world with AOL?

Would they match identical ?
or would there be some difference?

[Unregistered]

no no yes

[Unregistered]

AOL use web caching proxies and divert all their users through them, although most AOL users are probably not aware of the fact. The destination web site then only sees the IP of the proxy - so it could appear that all have identical IP's.

Same as if you were using the same proxy as me, we would both appear on this ***rd with identical IP's.

For AOL users this provides a bit of privacy by the backdoor - and for AOL it speeds up the service because they only need get a page when it changes and serve it up to thousands of users directly from the cache.

Dynamic pages and BBS that change frequently could be requested by several users and then appear in the BBS log as from one IP.