(Nov 24, 2013, 00:41 am)Feru Wrote: Thank you great info, I heard that like if you get a persons ip you can access files remove programs and do all kinds of things
No, the IP gives you the exact same access to a computer as you would get after resolving the host name. Something like "www.google.com" is called a host name (technically the "www" is the host and the "google.com" is the domain). But in all cases these internet names get converted to an IP address and that's when your computer can connect to the actual computer.
So the IP address gives you access to the computer (it's the 'real' address) but you won't get anymore access than you normally would. It's just an address. It doesn't give you any keys.
However it allows you to bypass the "looking up domain" step. Sometimes sites are blocked but they are not really taken offline, they're just removed from the white pages. So you don't know how to find them. That's when the IP can come in handy. It gives you the direct address.
Also when you are doing network maintenance and you messed up your DNS configuration, you can no longer look up domain names in the tables, but that's a different story altogether. As a regular user you should always have unproblematic access to the name servers of your internet service provider.
This system of giving names to computers (hosts) that would otherwise only have a number, is called the Domain Name System.