Private Networks: The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) demonstrated their amazing foresight by setting aside several "chunks" of the 32-bit Internet Protocol (IP) address space. They understood that there would be situations where organizations might want to create an "off the Internet" private network without needing to get official allocations of "public" IP space. Since these addresses would be disjoint and disconnected from the rest of the Internet, they could be freely used and reused without concern of "collision". In other words, two different machines located in different companies might have identical IP addresses. This would cause no problem because neither machine could be reachable from the Internet nor to each other. Four regions of IP addresses were defined, creating four "sub-networks" of differing sizes and routing complexity: 10 . 0 . 0 . 0   –   10 . 255 . 255 . 255 169 . 254 . 0 . 0   –   169 . 254 . 255 . 255 172 . 16 . 0 . 0   –   172 . 31 . 255 . 255 192 . 168 . 0 . 0   –   192 . 168 . 255 . 255 This yields networks containing in excess of sixteen million, sixty-five thousand, one million, and sixty-five thousand uniquely identified machines respectively. Plenty for just about any purpose. All this is significant to you and the security of your machine having the IP address shown above because all such addresses are, by design, "unreachable" from the external "public" internet. IP Agent has notified the server that it's residing in a machine with this address, but there is no way for the server — or anyone outside of your own network — to reach you. Those addresses are simply "undefined" within the Internet's routing tables. In other words: Your computer is very secure against typical threats and discovery from passing Internet scanners.