I use windows media recorder to download off of youtube and such. A dialog box that sets up ports. One says to change ip address click one the ip address. Does that mean every time i download my ip address is displayed to the website where i am downloading from? What if i am going through a proxy?
every time you connect to anything on the net, be it website, p2p, or anything else, what you are connecting to knows your IP address as that is necessarily for data transmission. some people trust proxies, but i don't. that's just adding a third party to transmit your data through. anything of value can easily held against you, as data logging is common on any proxy.
