Wait until you know someone before asking for personal information. It's a big anonymous internet out there and some of us like it that way. The people you will meet playing FA online range in age from early teens to late 60's, so when you eventually make friends don't be surprised if the person who whoops up on you in the virtual skies is not who you thought!
Harassment, threatening messages, or hacking attempts can easily be reported to the provider which owns an IP# range. Any ISP can identify a particular suscriber by the IP number and the time of an incident, and will eventually (or quickly) terminate internet services for failure to abide by their terms of service agreement. Please use the "Ignore" feature to deal with people who annoy you in the HyperLobby. Complaining (except in the extreme cases, of course) about your being offended by another user is just bothersome to any site owners. However, In those rare and extreme cases of abuse, a site owner is able to set their server to reject any connection attempts from a particular IP or subnet range, and effectively ban a user.
In order for any information to be sent to you, your computer uniqely identifies itself on the internet by an IP address number (not the same as an e-mail address.) Individual IP numbers are either a static IP number (remains the same) assigned to a high bandwidth connection, or dynamic IP number (changes within your ISP's limited subrange each time you connect) assigned by your ISP during a dialup modem connection. Every time you connect to a site on the internet your IP number, and other benign information, is recorded by that website. And every time you connect to play FA, all players' computers communicate directly to each others computer via their IP address. The better firewall programs log all of your computers IP connections and attempted connections. From there it is a short job to correlate IP# and callsigns, so logging into HL under a different callsign is NOT a foolproof way to be sneaky.
IP masking utilities will obscure an IP number from casual view, but if data goes into your computer it must go to a specific IP address. To surf the web in relative anonymity, use a proxy service. Proxy servers use their own system as a 'middle man' to transfer information between a site and your computer. I don't know if HL of FA can be used through proxy servers -- Let me know if you are able.
