There's so much ignorance in this thread I can hardly decide where to begin... The main thing I want to say is that while tracing your IP may be easier than you think, it's also much harder than you think.
If you are using a GOOD proxy and someone elses WIFI connection then, for the most part, you are a ghost. MAC addresses are virtually useless unless you put yourself in stupid situations.
Here's a scenario for you, if you're using what I described above:
1) You do wrong on the internet.
2) The feds/authorities decide to pursue you.
3) They get your IP and they contact the owner of the IP (an ISP or whoever).
4) They're told that the IP belongs to someone (the proxy).
5) They go to a judge, get a warrant.
6) They seize the proxy machine (home pc, server, whatever)
7) They discover that it was not the bad guy, but a proxy. They pull the logs to find where it was redirecting to.
8) They find it was redirecting to a starbucks in New York (this could be 2000 miles or more from the proxy).
9) They go to that wifi location, pull the router logs and find SEVERAL DOZEN people connected to that router at the time of the crime.
10) Now, the last step... they hope that the WIFI router keeps decent logs and is able to tell them specifically which mac address was doing the crime. Otherwise they may have several dozen mac addresses to search thru. At this point they have to begin scouring all of NYC's ISP's for ALL these mac addresses and getting warrants for all of them, or at least interviewing all of them, to find out who the criminal is....
Sound easy? Not hardly. The biggest obstacle in this story:
Many proxy services clear their logs every 7 days. This means that unless they get a warrant and get to the proxy service within 7 days, the records are GONE.  |