More often than not, I seem to connect to hosts with IP's beginning with 12, 24, and 68, esp. 24. Sometimes well over half of my hosts have a 24 IP. This is odd, since I am in Germany.

Obviously, I'm not going to look up each and every one of these or memorize IP ranges, but the chances of these hosts duplicating results seem greater to me than if all hosts differed more in IP.

How are these addresses transmitted to individual clients/leaves?

Also, sometimes I notice "old style" UP's who still give the number of connected hosts. I have seen some that stay at one but have an aweful lot of i/o traffic (before I zap them). Who do you suppose these fake UP's are?

24.*.*.* and 68.*.*.* are often US university subnets. They have a high bandwidth and are used by many students for the purpose of copyright infringement.

No, 24.* is a designated block for cable modems and 68.* also contains cable modem users, more so now since the @Home failure. Some universities are grouped in the 100.* to 150.* range.