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Reddit beats film industry again, won't have to reveal pirates' IP addresses

arstechnica.com

41–50 of 99 posts

Re: Reddit beats film industry again, won't have to reveal pirates' IP addresses

#41
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And most IPV4 addresses are vague and only give a coarse location of where you are That's not true, you can request/compel Frontier to tell you what specific customer that IP was assigned to at a given time. > and they're typically shared among many others so an IP is not a guaranteed signal that it was 'you' who pirated stuff. Most residential ISPs in the states have 1 ipv4 (and possibly ipv6) assigned per custome…

The FBI contacted me over a shitpost on Reddit using this exact process. Hilarious, but also very concerning.

Was there plausibly a threat in it?

If it took the visit to realize that you're not very anonymous on the internet, you owe them for the lesson.

Re: Reddit beats film industry again, won't have to reveal pirates' IP addresses

#43
post #42
post #8

> Firms wanted seven years' worth of IP address logs on users who discussed piracy. Does that mean reddit stores ip addresses for 7 years? That seems excessive.

I wonder how many years HN stores IP information?

e-mail dang and let us know how it goes.

Re: Reddit beats film industry again, won't have to reveal pirates' IP addresses

#45
post #8

> Firms wanted seven years' worth of IP address logs on users who discussed piracy. Does that mean reddit stores ip addresses for 7 years? That seems excessive.

I suppose it's possible the poster's IP is stored in the post metadata itself, along with the date, username, and so forth. Don't know if that's how Reddit works but in that case it'll be retained forever. As for the reason for 7 years worth of data, I think that's because the firm wants to go back and search for infringing acitivity on all those IP addresses due to dynamic IP updates and so forth. If the user is sti…

Yeah that's why it's good to start a new reddit account every year and delete the old one. As well as VPN, regularly changing mac address on your router etc.

Re: Reddit beats film industry again, won't have to reveal pirates' IP addresses

#46

I wonder if they'll still do this once Reddit IPOs

Only if the film industry can figure out how to tank Reddit's stock price when it doesn't. It's a misalignment of incentives. Unless Reddit is exclusively associated with piracy and bad actors, most advertisers will probably ignore the bad press* and keep giving them money. * I'm not even sure it'd be bad press. Internet users aren't overly fond of film companies and we're talking about a meme factory against the peo…

What are they gonna do, put out ads "Reddit has pirates on it!", that will only make it more popular.

Re: Reddit beats film industry again, won't have to reveal pirates' IP addresses

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this the first major public forum to go public?

Maybe if you define "forum" in a way which excludes social media sites like Facebook, but that feels like an artificial distinction.

It really does, there are facebook groups that have 80% of the functionality of reddit on specific topics, much like reddit, with discussions like reddit, and sharing media, just like reddit.

Re: Reddit beats film industry again, won't have to reveal pirates' IP addresses

#48

Btw doesn't increasing adoption of CGNAT [1] render useless these types of attempts to identify people based on IP address? A CGNAT IP address identifies multiple households. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT

Wouldn't ISPs keep logs of which IP:Port maps to which internal IP:Port at any given time?

If not for law enforcement, at least so they can track you better and sell the data.

Re: Reddit beats film industry again, won't have to reveal pirates' IP addresses

#49
This past week I've gotten two people banned from reddit (full site ban). I was curious if it was possible so I picked some comments that I didn't think deserved a ban. The comments were more jokes than anything. Nothing serious.

Maybe Frontier should hire me.

Re: Reddit beats film industry again, won't have to reveal pirates' IP addresses

#50
A recurring revenue opportunity for Reddit would be to forget about the old defender of online freedom image, and sell data. :)

"How much is it worth to your case, to know who the commenters on this thread are?"

"What would you pay to filter hiring candidates for ideology, troublemaker tendencies, or bedroom kinks that bother your conservative Chairman?"

"Your own actuaries can tell you how much money this individual vice data will save your insurance company, so let's split it."

"Making your astroturfing more effective, and getting full credit in your org for shifting perceptions, would be easier if you could crunch individual voting behavior."

"There's only so much censoring that bribed mods can do on the sub that keeps dumping on your brand. Seems like the private messages of your most influential critics would be useful to you. Oh, ha, I just pulled up the alts for one of them on my screen, and looks like they're secretly also an OnlyFans model."

"Would your government or department like to subscribe to the Access Plan or the Fusion Plan?"

Obvious idea: https://thenextweb.com/news/reddit-knows-your-dark-secrets

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