11–20 of 66 posts
This article is copied in its entirety from: http://www.resistradio.com/news/questioning-the-trollocaust-... as admitted in the intro. Why link to a copy instead of the original?
If one of the mods could change the URL to point to the original I'd be grateful.
The author of this article is almost certainly trolling. It's perfectly logical that the victim would change his Twitter behavior even after discovering the identity of the harasser. If your car were stolen but then recovered and the thief arrested, would you stop locking it? After all, the threat has been eliminated... Just because you cannot traceroute an IP to a physical address doesn't mean you can't determine wh…
The only strong case here is in the IP address geo-identification. Traynor could identify them if he were to cross validate the IP address location with a list of known friends and family - people of whom would have Traynor's personal address. But Traynor should have suspected his friend - not his friend's teenage son. That's the part of the story that doesn't add up.
This article is copied in its entirety from: http://www.resistradio.com/news/questioning-the-trollocaust-... as admitted in the intro. Why link to a copy instead of the original?
Drive up the rageviews?
Seems like 'graunwatch' is all about bashing the Guardian and this is an anti-Guardian story kinda?
A more interesting question is does the author know and consent to the wholesale copying? Does that change the story?
The author of this article is almost certainly trolling. It's perfectly logical that the victim would change his Twitter behavior even after discovering the identity of the harasser. If your car were stolen but then recovered and the thief arrested, would you stop locking it? After all, the threat has been eliminated... Just because you cannot traceroute an IP to a physical address doesn't mean you can't determine wh…
0. He didn't change his behavior during the abuse, when he could have trivially stopped it by unfollowing. If your car was stolen, would you keep the loaner unlocked before your car was even recovered? 1. Only if they use non webmail 2. To sell a story. The default assumption should always be that tales like this are false or at least extremely embellished.
"Almost certainly" seems like a stretch. - The arguments regarding Traynor's behavior on Twitter carry absolutely no water with me and sound like totally average behavior. It's not very intuitive that only people you follow can message you. - Police in America frequently decline to investigate things like harassment and petty theft in favor of spending their time elsewhere. I don't know about Ireland, but it seems ve…
But after you've received some hate messages, it also sounds like the kind of thing that you'd learn pretty quickly.
In other words if you're making up a story, it is the kind of detail that you'd not noticed you'd gotten wrong. But if you're actually harassed, it is the kind of thing that wouldn't keep happening to you for years.
Seems like a good reason to conclude that the story is made up.
As for home address discovery, that bothered me far less. If I had tracked someone down to 3 IPs, one of which was close, I'd go looking for evidence that there was a personal connection. One of the standard things that I would think of is to look through all received emails, and look for the IP address there.
That would indeed track it down reasonably reliably to a specific household without any need for a court order. And if the person that I did this for didn't understand what I did, confused explanations about how it was done are only to be expected.
If I somehow had three IP addresses to general locations, I would wonder who I had followed in those general locations.
If in one of those locations a friend of mine lived, I might wonder and then check my email to see what IP addresses had been captured there.
The only strong case here is in the IP address geo-identification. Traynor could identify them if he were to cross validate the IP address location with a list of known friends and family - people of whom would have Traynor's personal address. But Traynor should have suspected his friend - not his friend's teenage son. That's the part of the story that doesn't add up.
For example, IP addresses (even internal unroutable ones) are frequently passed along in email headers. If he was able to find an IP and an email sent by his friend in the same timeframe, that would be a good correlation. I've done this on occasion when someone's external IP has dynamically changed but they sent email, in order to fix VPN connections.
Pinning it on the son is the stretch here.
"Almost certainly" seems like a stretch. - The arguments regarding Traynor's behavior on Twitter carry absolutely no water with me and sound like totally average behavior. It's not very intuitive that only people you follow can message you. - Police in America frequently decline to investigate things like harassment and petty theft in favor of spending their time elsewhere. I don't know about Ireland, but it seems ve…
Often the IP will clearly identify a regionally-specific ISP and even a particular community. And once recognized as someone local, there were probably just a few suspects from vague hunches about who seems a little angry/fidgety/pranky.
Maybe the neighbor leaves their wifi open: borrow access one day, see what the public IP is.
Maybe the neighbor corresponds via email with Traynor or the 'genius': check email 'received-from' headers; include an HTML email image bug; tempt the target to click a unique link.
The author of this article is almost certainly trolling. It's perfectly logical that the victim would change his Twitter behavior even after discovering the identity of the harasser. If your car were stolen but then recovered and the thief arrested, would you stop locking it? After all, the threat has been eliminated... Just because you cannot traceroute an IP to a physical address doesn't mean you can't determine wh…
0. He didn't change his behavior during the abuse, when he could have trivially stopped it by unfollowing. If your car was stolen, would you keep the loaner unlocked before your car was even recovered? 1. Only if they use non webmail 2. To sell a story. The default assumption should always be that tales like this are false or at least extremely embellished.