IP/Proxy Help Needed

How can someone obtain proxy info...

[Unknowledgeable]

Forgive me if I have put this question in the wrong forum. I'm new here and followed a link from another site looking for information on proxy and IP use.

I am a member of a new message board and upon my first couple of posts I received a private message from a user that contained the proxy information for my connection. I am not very knowledeable on this subject but I know a couple of things for sure:

There is no way anyone not on staff could obtain my IP without someone from the staff informing said person.

The only possible way, and it's a stretch, would be if I were to follow a link posted by a person that specifically logged IPs and cookie information. There would be no way to correlate IPs to screen names though. This person says they only have my proxy and not IP so I am at a loss as to how they obtained that information.

Can anyone enlighten me? I know proxy is different than IP but I still don't know enough.

Thanks in advance.

[py9jmas]

Most proxies add a couple of extra headers on to the request that your browser sends to the website.

Here's an example of a request sent via a proxy:

GET / HTTP/1.0
Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, application/vnd.ms-excel, application/vnd.ms-powerpoint, application/msword, */*
Referer: http://www.example.com/
Accept-Language: en-gb
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Host: www.example.org
Via: 1.0 wwwcache.example.net:3128 (squid/2.5.STABLE7)
X-Forwarded-For: 192.168.0.1
Cache-Control: max-age=259200
Connection: keep-alive

(Hosts and IPs changed to protect the innocent).
As you can see, the Squid proxy server has added information about itself (the Via: header) and about the user's IP (the X-Forwarded-For: header).

Search Google for 'browser header check' to find sites that will show you exactly what websites see when you request a page.

[Automan Empire]

Was it one of those danasoft-type signatures you saw? A "sign" reading along the lines of "You are at ip XX.XX/ You are running IE6 etc."

The first time I saw one of these was on a tinhat conspiracy site... I practically pulled the DSL cable out of the wall it scared me so! Now that I've seen 'em around, they don't bug. A great way to freak people out, that's for sure!