5 ms·

Does everyone in the States have a static IP address? Here where I live, every time you reconnect to the internet you get a new IP.

pdonis 13y ago
It depends on your ISP and what kind of service you have. Most providers of high speed internet (meaning cable or fiber optic) these days don't change your IP very often, so although it's technically not "static" (meaning, there is no guarantee that it will stay the same), it ends up being more or less the same thing in practical terms.
- graycat 13y ago
  Not really: For whatever reason, my electric company commonly drops power for a second or so about once a week. How do I know? Because then the clock on my microwave oven just blinks not knowing what time it is. Well, that one second power drop also causes my cable modem to forget the IP address it was assigned via DHCP by my ISP. So, the guy with the C&D letter can tell the Web site that traffic on the banned IP address was no good evidence that the traffic was from him and, instead, could have been from any customer of the relevant ISP. Moreover, the ISP could assign the IP address the Web site banned to just any customer not involved in the C&D letter, etc. Then the Web site would ban that person; I hope that person would not get charged with a crime.
  - pdonis 13y ago
    that one second power drop also causes my cable modem to forget the IP address it was assigned via DHCP by my ISP. Does the IP address actually change when this happens? Some ISPs have their DHCP server assign IPs according to the MAC address of the cable modem, which of course won't change if power is shut off and then turned on again. the guy with the C&D letter can tell the Web site that traffic on the banned IP address was no good evidence that the traffic was from him and, instead, could have been from any customer of the relevant ISP. If he was a private individual getting internet access from an ISP that did that, sure. But in the particular case referred to in the OP, the "guy with the C&D letter" was a company, not an individual, and as I understand it, the IP addresses that were banned were the ones mapped to that company's domain name based on DNS records. That's a different situation. the ISP could assign the IP address the Web site banned to just any customer not involved in the C&D letter, etc. Then the Web site would ban that person; I hope that person would not get charged with a crime. It's not clear how Craigslist found out that 3Taps had changed the IP addresses it was using and resumed scraping the site. However, whatever means it used to find that out was apparently accurate, since 3Taps admitted that it had changed IP addresses and was still scraping the site. The court case was based entirely on Craigslist saying that 3Taps was no longer authorized to access their site; there was no dispute about whether they had actually done so.
    - graycat 13y ago
      This case is stupidity piled higher and deeper! > Does the IP address actually change when this happens? Some ISPs have their DHCP server assign IPs according to the MAC address of the cable modem, which of course won't change if power is shut off and then turned on again. My ISP does this. I get a new IP address whenever I cycle power on my cable modem. And sometimes my ISP gives me a new IP address for whatever reason. Maybe their reason is that they want to charge a little more for a fixed IP address. Or maybe they have more paying customers than IP addresses so must dynamically assign IP addresses to users actually connected. Yes, if 3taps was accessing Craigslist from a fixed IP address, then that can be fair, although not really good, evidence that 3taps was continuing to access Craigslist after the C&D letter. If 3taps just admitted continuing to use Craigslist, then they were, just how do I say it, s.t.u.p.i.d, or some such? Or, all a 3taps person had to do was just go home and get the Craigslist data from a home computer with a different IP address. I'm not up on mobile devices, but I have to believe that they also use frequently changing, dynamically assigned IP addresses. Also I don't like the idea that there is screen scraping as something different from ordinary usage; it's not. The Web site sends the data, and the data is nearly always stored on disk by the Web browser. Also the Web browser can write the data to an HTM file and a directory with the JS, CSS, JPG, PNG, GIF, etc. files. Then the user has essentially all the data in simple, plain unencrypted form. Nearly all the data is sent just as simple text. E.g., likely the Craigslist data is sent this way. Then if someone wants to make some new use of that Craigslist data, they can easily remove the HTTP, HTML, CSS, JS, etc. stuff, leave the simple text, analyze it, reformat it, combine it with other data, format it with Word, TeX, PostScript, PDF, etc., wrap it in some new HTML, CSS, and JS, and publish it again. Then it need not be the least bit clear just where the data came from. In this case, with little good evidence that the data came from Craigslist, it would not be fair to search the facilities of 3taps for evidence. Broadly, the Web site offers the data to all anonymous users, as mostly just simple text. In that case, the Web site should basically just shut up about what happens to the data they sent.
      - pdonis 13y ago
        I'm not up on mobile devices, but I have to believe that they also use frequently changing, dynamically assigned IP addresses. I believe that's correct, yes. If they are using wifi, they will appear to be connecting using the wifi router's public IP address, which will certainly be different for each wifi router. If they are using the cell phone network to connect, I'm pretty sure they get assigned a public IP address based on which cell tower they are using to connect, so that will change as well. I don't like the idea that there is screen scraping as something different from ordinary usage; it's not. In terms of the data itself, you're right, screen scraping is just pulling the data, the same as a web browser does. However, since screen scraping can be automated, it can potentially use a lot more bandwidth, since it can request multiple pages from a site much faster than a human driving a browser can. That's why sites are allowed to restrict what automated search bots can do on their sites, for example with a robots.txt file. A service like 3Taps would be expected to respect these types of restrictions just like Google does. That said, I don't think the issue in this case was the screen scraping per se; I think the issue was that Craigslist asserted copyright over their data, so that they had the right to say that 3Taps could not use the data the way they were using it.
mpyne 13y ago
Most have dynamic addresses, but business/corporate networks do tend to have static blocks from what I understand. Remember static IP used to be required to use SSL/TLS at all, and still is required if you want to support XP clients.

pdonis 13y ago

It depends on your ISP and what kind of service you have. Most providers of high speed internet (meaning cable or fiber optic) these days don't change your IP very often, so although it's technically not "static" (meaning, there is no guarantee that it will stay the same), it ends up being more or less the same thing in practical terms.

graycat 13y ago
Not really: For whatever reason, my electric company commonly drops power for a second or so about once a week. How do I know? Because then the clock on my microwave oven just blinks not knowing what time it is. Well, that one second power drop also causes my cable modem to forget the IP address it was assigned via DHCP by my ISP. So, the guy with the C&D letter can tell the Web site that traffic on the banned IP address was no good evidence that the traffic was from him and, instead, could have been from any customer of the relevant ISP. Moreover, the ISP could assign the IP address the Web site banned to just any customer not involved in the C&D letter, etc. Then the Web site would ban that person; I hope that person would not get charged with a crime.
- pdonis 13y ago
  that one second power drop also causes my cable modem to forget the IP address it was assigned via DHCP by my ISP. Does the IP address actually change when this happens? Some ISPs have their DHCP server assign IPs according to the MAC address of the cable modem, which of course won't change if power is shut off and then turned on again. the guy with the C&D letter can tell the Web site that traffic on the banned IP address was no good evidence that the traffic was from him and, instead, could have been from any customer of the relevant ISP. If he was a private individual getting internet access from an ISP that did that, sure. But in the particular case referred to in the OP, the "guy with the C&D letter" was a company, not an individual, and as I understand it, the IP addresses that were banned were the ones mapped to that company's domain name based on DNS records. That's a different situation. the ISP could assign the IP address the Web site banned to just any customer not involved in the C&D letter, etc. Then the Web site would ban that person; I hope that person would not get charged with a crime. It's not clear how Craigslist found out that 3Taps had changed the IP addresses it was using and resumed scraping the site. However, whatever means it used to find that out was apparently accurate, since 3Taps admitted that it had changed IP addresses and was still scraping the site. The court case was based entirely on Craigslist saying that 3Taps was no longer authorized to access their site; there was no dispute about whether they had actually done so.
  - graycat 13y ago
    This case is stupidity piled higher and deeper! > Does the IP address actually change when this happens? Some ISPs have their DHCP server assign IPs according to the MAC address of the cable modem, which of course won't change if power is shut off and then turned on again. My ISP does this. I get a new IP address whenever I cycle power on my cable modem. And sometimes my ISP gives me a new IP address for whatever reason. Maybe their reason is that they want to charge a little more for a fixed IP address. Or maybe they have more paying customers than IP addresses so must dynamically assign IP addresses to users actually connected. Yes, if 3taps was accessing Craigslist from a fixed IP address, then that can be fair, although not really good, evidence that 3taps was continuing to access Craigslist after the C&D letter. If 3taps just admitted continuing to use Craigslist, then they were, just how do I say it, s.t.u.p.i.d, or some such? Or, all a 3taps person had to do was just go home and get the Craigslist data from a home computer with a different IP address. I'm not up on mobile devices, but I have to believe that they also use frequently changing, dynamically assigned IP addresses. Also I don't like the idea that there is screen scraping as something different from ordinary usage; it's not. The Web site sends the data, and the data is nearly always stored on disk by the Web browser. Also the Web browser can write the data to an HTM file and a directory with the JS, CSS, JPG, PNG, GIF, etc. files. Then the user has essentially all the data in simple, plain unencrypted form. Nearly all the data is sent just as simple text. E.g., likely the Craigslist data is sent this way. Then if someone wants to make some new use of that Craigslist data, they can easily remove the HTTP, HTML, CSS, JS, etc. stuff, leave the simple text, analyze it, reformat it, combine it with other data, format it with Word, TeX, PostScript, PDF, etc., wrap it in some new HTML, CSS, and JS, and publish it again. Then it need not be the least bit clear just where the data came from. In this case, with little good evidence that the data came from Craigslist, it would not be fair to search the facilities of 3taps for evidence. Broadly, the Web site offers the data to all anonymous users, as mostly just simple text. In that case, the Web site should basically just shut up about what happens to the data they sent.
    - pdonis 13y ago
      I'm not up on mobile devices, but I have to believe that they also use frequently changing, dynamically assigned IP addresses. I believe that's correct, yes. If they are using wifi, they will appear to be connecting using the wifi router's public IP address, which will certainly be different for each wifi router. If they are using the cell phone network to connect, I'm pretty sure they get assigned a public IP address based on which cell tower they are using to connect, so that will change as well. I don't like the idea that there is screen scraping as something different from ordinary usage; it's not. In terms of the data itself, you're right, screen scraping is just pulling the data, the same as a web browser does. However, since screen scraping can be automated, it can potentially use a lot more bandwidth, since it can request multiple pages from a site much faster than a human driving a browser can. That's why sites are allowed to restrict what automated search bots can do on their sites, for example with a robots.txt file. A service like 3Taps would be expected to respect these types of restrictions just like Google does. That said, I don't think the issue in this case was the screen scraping per se; I think the issue was that Craigslist asserted copyright over their data, so that they had the right to say that 3Taps could not use the data the way they were using it.

mpyne 13y ago

Most have dynamic addresses, but business/corporate networks do tend to have static blocks from what I understand. Remember static IP used to be required to use SSL/TLS at all, and still is required if you want to support XP clients.