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It's not exactly a knockdown argument by itself, but it just adds a little more to the pool of thought saying an IP address doesn't correspond to an individual.
by Jach 15y ago
It's not exactly a knockdown argument by itself, but it just adds a little more to the pool of thought saying an IP address doesn't correspond to an individual. That viewpoint seems to be gaining more and more momentum, e.g. somewhat recently: http://torrentfreak.com/ip-address-not-a-person-bittorrent-case-judge-says-110503/ http://torrentfreak.com/ip-address-not-a-person-bittorrent-c...
- MichaelGG 15y agoI thought that BitTorrent used TCP? If so, spoofing a connection requires being in a position where you can intercept the return packet in order to be able to complete the TCP handshake. Possible, but requires a spoofer to be very well connected.
- Jach 15y agoI don't think they mean spoof in such a technical way. I think they just mean it as "the You Have Downloaded website could be just generating files to go with IPs", and similarly "any torrent logs may have been spoofed/made up." Obviously the next step for the You Have Downloaded site is to track in real-time and say "This IP is currently downloading x,y,z."
- skymt 15y agoYou don't need to spoof a TCP connection to register a spoofed IP address on a tracker. The tracker GET request has an optional `ip` field, the contents of which is registered as the client's address, regardless of the source address of the actual request. So it's trivial to write a Bittorrent client that reports a false address to the tracker. http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0003.html http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0003.html
- ay 15y agoSo does this optional parameter fully override the peer's address in the reporting ?
- skymt 15y agoProbably. When the tracker responds with a list of peers, each peer only has an id, an ip & a port; there's no real_ip or reported_ip parameters. Of course there could be tracker software in the wild that ignores the ip parameter entirely; it's just a spec, not a contract.
- ay 15y agoThanks for the clarification. This makes it entirely possible to spoof someone's address then by a third party.
- MichaelGG 15y agoWow, that's very interesting. Thanks!
- ay 15y agoIf you do layer 4 network address translation (NAT) - then a single IPv4 address can theoretically be used by circa 64000 people at the same time; depending on how multiplexing is done, by maybe even more. The large-scale translators on the headends are the reality for quite a few service providers already. So, the "IP address does not correspond to an individual" is not just a mere viewpoint gaining momentum, but an emerging hard technical fact. ;-)
- Jach 15y agoTinfoil hat Just wait, once the US government at large finally understands IPv4 networking, someone with too much power will look at IPv6 and the phrase "Look we don't have to do NAT anymore!" Then the government will assign a unique IPv6 address or two to every citizen to use as ID (they'll need a replacement anyway once they get rid of social security). Then they mandate the ISPs to track IPs, and they make it illegal to share or mask IP/IDs since that's something only pirates and thieves and other bad people do anyway. And we'll look back and say "Remember The Right to Read? rms was right again!"
- kiloaper 15y agoUnique internet IDs are far from a conspiracy theory. They're being actively developed in China and South Korea to name a few. While the South Korean one has faced setbacks it's only a matter of time before they become common place in other countries in my opinion.
- ay 15y agoIf governments were to do that, they would also be forced to solve the problem of the routing table explosion. Which is a hard problem. As for unique ID - it's already doable and being done without any IPv6. Read up on evercookie. There was an article on HN a while ago about a bunch of advertisers doing just that. This is worse than the government having it - not only it gets abused, but someone gets rich on this.
- tedunangst 15y agoThere are 16 million IPs in 10.x.x.x.