ELi5 please: how can heritage foundation track an IP address to a particular person? and what happens if the editor simply makes edit via VPN? and why does WP show the IP adresses anyway?
I had a guy contact me about buying a Minecraft account a few months ago. It was an account held by a highschool friend of mine with a three-letter username that is a word, making it incredibly unique.
He identified the now-unmonitored email address associated with it, found that email in leaked logs from a forum, then searched for other hits from the same IP in the same time range. That forum access was from my house, so he found my email associated with it elsewhere.
He successfully identified another friend of ours at the same time. All from a single dynamic IP fifteen years ago.
Wikipedia blocks edits from pretty much all public VPNs and is very harsh with IP bans in general. They do allow edits without accounts though, so they show the IP so that an accountless user can be identified when making multiple edits or posting on the talk page. Hashing it would probably make more sense.
Your IP address says far more about you than you think. Your IP address can generally automatically identify what country and continent you are on. Who your ISP is. Possibly narrowing down to even your local region. At which point they simply need to find some marginally plausible reason to petition the ISP to identify who that IP address was leased to during x period of time. And then all of a sudden you’re not very anonymous.
Wikipedia shows IPs instead of usernames for anonymous edits, which the heritage foundation can see. Wikipedia now automatically creates “temporary accounts” for anonymous edits instead of showing the IP
Wikipedia blocks most VPN edits because they cull malicious edits by IP, so while possible, it’s difficult to make an edit from a VPN since the IP is likely shared with bad actors
See above. In an effort to limit malicious or nonhelpful edits, anonymous edits are shown by IP in the edit history, though this now stops that
The Heritage Foundation has threatened to doxx the editors of wikipedia because the greatest threat to authoritarians is information
ELi5 please: how can heritage foundation track an IP address to a particular person? and what happens if the editor simply makes edit via VPN? and why does WP show the IP adresses anyway?
I had a guy contact me about buying a Minecraft account a few months ago. It was an account held by a highschool friend of mine with a three-letter username that is a word, making it incredibly unique.
He identified the now-unmonitored email address associated with it, found that email in leaked logs from a forum, then searched for other hits from the same IP in the same time range. That forum access was from my house, so he found my email associated with it elsewhere.
He successfully identified another friend of ours at the same time. All from a single dynamic IP fifteen years ago.
Wikipedia blocks edits from pretty much all public VPNs and is very harsh with IP bans in general. They do allow edits without accounts though, so they show the IP so that an accountless user can be identified when making multiple edits or posting on the talk page. Hashing it would probably make more sense.
Your IP address says far more about you than you think. Your IP address can generally automatically identify what country and continent you are on. Who your ISP is. Possibly narrowing down to even your local region. At which point they simply need to find some marginally plausible reason to petition the ISP to identify who that IP address was leased to during x period of time. And then all of a sudden you’re not very anonymous.
TIL that anonymous edits show your ip address.
We must all do this anonymously editing in coffee shops and libraries.