I understand that perfectly. But when IP addresses are only used by a single account in over 9 years then it is a fairly good indicator that they are being used by the same person, particularly when they have used that IP for several years as a named account. A VPN might be used by millions of people, but we are only interested in the ones who access this site. Most hashes are unique. Where they have been used by more than one identity it is clearly obvious to us.
But for the reasons that you state we DO NOT rely solely on IP addresses. There are other correlations that can be made that assist with identifying the user. For example, I can tie 5 different comments into the hashes that are associated with 5 separate comments made over a period of 16 minutes this morning. The chances of those comments coming from completely different users but all commenting in a short time period and all looking remarkably similar to those easily associated with a specific account are astronomically huge.
There are also additional clues such as :
Give it up. I am aristarchus.
In essence, your security sucks.
-- I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Saturday October 21 2023, @09:20AM (1 child)
I understand that perfectly. But when IP addresses are only used by a single account in over 9 years then it is a fairly good indicator that they are being used by the same person, particularly when they have used that IP for several years as a named account. A VPN might be used by millions of people, but we are only interested in the ones who access this site. Most hashes are unique. Where they have been used by more than one identity it is clearly obvious to us.
But for the reasons that you state we DO NOT rely solely on IP addresses. There are other correlations that can be made that assist with identifying the user. For example, I can tie 5 different comments into the hashes that are associated with 5 separate comments made over a period of 16 minutes this morning. The chances of those comments coming from completely different users but all commenting in a short time period and all looking remarkably similar to those easily associated with a specific account are astronomically huge.
There are also additional clues such as :
In essence, your security sucks.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 21 2023, @09:53AM
Random IP assignments by VPNs are no basis for a system of government! Constant references to Monty Python's Holy Grail might be, however.