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What prevents someone from setting their static IP to that of another server such as Google's servers? How is that prevented?

Justin Hou
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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it does not demonstrate a basic understanding of the technologies involved. – fukawi2 Mar 10 '15 at 03:27
  • Nothing prevents you from assigning any ip address you like to your computer, but no traffic destined for that ip address is going to be routed to your computer. David Schwartz summed it up very nicely with his analogy. – joeqwerty Mar 10 '15 at 03:38

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You can put a sign on your house that says "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue" but that won't cause the President's mail to go to your house because the post office doesn't care what sign you put up. That's not what they go by.

So nothing prevents it, but it doesn't matter.

David Schwartz
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  • I see, I guess I don't understand then how a packet finds its way to a certain IP address. Could you let me know which protocols for that are? – Justin Hou Mar 10 '15 at 03:29
  • [BGP](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol) is probably the most important one to understand. Note that pretty much nothing a typical user can do will have any effect on their ISP's BGP activity. It is very, *very* important to understand that routing on the Internet is policy driven -- it doesn't take the shortest path but the one that's paying for the service. – David Schwartz Mar 10 '15 at 03:32