Blogger meets his Troll

Sykk

say_who_now? wrote: »

Turns out this guy isn't half fond of bigging himself up-

http://www.traynorseye.com/2012/08/men-of-letters.html



knob! :rolleyes:

What a disgusting person...

Reminds me of someone who posts their every experience on Facebook, but only he's talking even more garbage. Didn't know that was possible!

say_who_now?

darraghdoyle wrote: »

Jaysis Boardsies, some of yis are fierce cynical altogether.

If this is made up, then Leo's gone to a hell of a lot of effort... for what? A bit of traffic to his blog?

I don't know the guy - follow him on twitter and Google+ - and have followed this story for a while now. If it is a set up, it's one of the most elaborate for the sake of a few blog hits I've seen in ages.

So if he's lying, he's gone to a lot of effort to make it look authentic...

It's less of a stretch to imagine the trouble he went to Darragh than it is to imagine he was able to LEGALLY obtain the person's home address, much less that the Gardai did not take his claims seriously. As has been posted in the thread already, the Gardai take this kind of thing VERY seriously if it's reported to them. I can only imagine as has been posted on this site before that Dav has a stack of court orders re: disclosure of posters personal details to deal with every day.

In just the blog entry that I posted in this thread earlier, I was left wondering was the point of his "recording the conversation" more to do with the fact that the country was in the crapper, the fact his postman reads the letters section in the Irish Times to see do any of the people on his mail route write in, or that he just wanted to boast about his Doctorate?

I've rarely ever met my postman, let alone had so much as an exchange with him where I'd be able to wedge the fact I have a PhD into the conversation and expect him to give a damn!

Some people will go to extraordinary lengths to garner attention for themselves, and most of the time these people are so full of their own self-importance that they will fabricate extraordinary stories and play them down to make themselves appear to be more interesting, to draw an audience in. Eventually they fabricate even more extraordinary stories to keep their audience interested, until the point where their stories are so far fetched that they are almost laughable because they are so ridiculous. I think that's all that's happened here.

The problem with what he's done is that you can only cry wolf once, so he should probably prepare himself for the comedown off the crest of the attention seeking wave he has created for himself.

dr.bollocko

Gordon wrote: »

If he's emailed (received) his neighbour, yeah.

Legally..... potentially dodgy?

Should I fashion a tinfoil hat now or calmly move on with my life?

I am not saying it is impossible or anything. But his description of how it went down struck me as improbable.

That allied with the sudden popularity in the red tops of catching internet trolls for this and that made me think it was just too ... I dunno sketchy / incomplete to be anything but fiction.

Robbo

This kind of story seemed to work well for Scott Templeton, can't see why it won't for this lad here.

Gordon

dr.bollocko wrote: »

Gordon wrote: »

If he's emailed (received) his neighbour, yeah.

Legally..... potentially dodgy?

Do you never get emails from companies that contain images? All of these are logging your ip address on their servers. It's possible (I'm not an expert on data and legal stuff like this though) that this info must be stored for a certain amount of time due to dpa. No, I can't imagine it's illegal. Happy to have an expert explain though!

say_who_now?

Robbo wrote: »

This kind of story seemed to work well for Scott Templeton, can't see why it won't for this lad here.

Having just read the wiki on Scott Templeton, that is EXACTLY the type of individual I was referring to in my earlier post. I'll eventually get round to watching "The Wire" at some stage, my laundry guy raves about it! :pac: :rolleyes:

Thud

Gordon wrote: »

If he's emailed (received) his neighbour, yeah.

he got 3 addresses not just the home one:

"It transpired that the abuse had emanated from three separate IP addresses in different corners of Ireland. Two of them were public wifi locations but the third...."

Anyone see anyof the abusive tweets?

Hipster glasses wearing PR guy who likes self promotion....smells fishy

28064212

Gordon wrote: »

Do you never get emails from companies that contain images? All of these are logging your ip address on their servers. It's possible (I'm not an expert on data and legal stuff like this though) that this info must be stored for a certain amount of time due to dpa. No, I can't imagine it's illegal. Happy to have an expert explain though!

Getting an IP address is trivial. Tracking that IP address to a real address is most definitely not

buck65

Stay the **** off social network sites...apart from boards

kunst nugget

say_who_now? wrote: »

Having just read the wiki on Scott Templeton, that is EXACTLY the type of individual I was referring to in my earlier post. I'll eventually get round to watching "The Wire" at some stage, my laundry guy raves about it! :pac: :rolleyes:

Is this the laundry guy who read your letter in the Irish Times and made a quip about your doctorate?

say_who_now?

Gordon wrote: »

dr.bollocko wrote: »

Gordon wrote: »

If he's emailed (received) his neighbour, yeah.

Legally..... potentially dodgy?

Do you never get emails from companies that contain images? All of these are logging your ip address on their servers. It's possible (I'm not an expert on data and legal stuff like this though) that this info must be stored for a certain amount of time due to dpa. No, I can't imagine it's illegal. Happy to have an expert explain though!

Nothing illegal about a company storing your IP address when you grant them permission to do so by agreeing to their terms and conditions. What IS illegal though is for an employee of that company to use your IP address for their own personal gain, and even at that, backtracing the route taken by the IP address will still only give you the address of the router, and if you can still manage to get past the router's firewall and get the internal IP address of a specific machine, unless you can correlate this information with the IP address of a personally identifiable twitter or facebook post (neither company will give out this information without a court order, and even then expect resistance!), you cannot say the person in that house was responsible. It's likely, but then you'd have to be able to produce evidence in court to back up that claim.

If the kid brazened it out, as the kids in the Phoebe Prince case did, then it would have been interesting to see how had it gone to court, this guy would be able to say with such confidence that he was able to obtain the kid's home address by "perfectly legal" means!

say_who_now?

kunst nugget wrote: »

Is this the laundry guy who read your letter in the Irish Times and made a quip about your doctorate?

Nah KN, as luck would have it he found my certificate in the àrse pocket of my Louis Copeland tailored chinos! :pac:

scamalert

dr.bollocko wrote: »

I just think the manner in which he indicated he located his troll sounds like BS.

The internet law of proof or GTFO applies here IMO.

Maybe take a read on www.419eater.com/ the $hit people can do these days online with little knowledge.It amazes be that your a mod even here with such little IT knowledge,but maybe pressing ban button doesn't require much knowledge.

28064212

scamalert wrote: »

Maybe take a read on www.419eater.com/ the $hit people can do these days online with little knowledge.It amazes be that your a mod even here with such little IT knowledge,but maybe pressing ban button doesn't require much knowledge.

Go on then so, use your superior IT knowledge to explain to us all exactly how he managed to convert an IP address to a specific house address

say_who_now?

scamalert wrote: »

Maybe take a read on www.419eater.com/ the $hit people can do these days online with little knowledge. It amazes be that your a mod even here with such little IT knowledge,but maybe pressing ban button doesn't require much knowledge.

Absolutely agree with you there scamalert, like setting up multiple twitter and facebook accounts to spam yourself so that you can make yourself look interesting enough to write about it on your blog for attention sake requires no technical knowledge whatsoever.

What DOES require technical knowledge however, is the ability to illegally obtain a person's home address from their online activity.

One doesn't need to be a mechanic to drive a car.

kunst nugget

One other thing that strikes me as odd in this. If I had a friend who was an IT genius and he helped me find a troll using perfectly legal technology, I be shouting his name from the heavens as I gave him profuse thanks, i.e. 'If it wasn't for my friend, Mr. Mark E. Smith, an IT genius, I never would have caught this troll.'

Maybe that's just me though…

Fenian Army

What 17yo Irish kid says "thanks for giving me a break dude"


anyway, what a dick, should have posted his name and went to the garda

dr.bollocko

scamalert wrote: »

Maybe take a read on www.419eater.com/ the $hit people can do these days online with little knowledge.It amazes be that your a mod even here with such little IT knowledge,but maybe pressing ban button doesn't require much knowledge.

Did I ban you on this account? Or was it a previous account I banned you with? Or do you just hate all the mods?

I am not saying I don't believe it because it can't be done.

I have little interest in conversing with somebody who glosses over what I am actually asking just to get a petty dig in.

I am not referring to what can be done. I am familiar with the reality of what people can do with minimal information.

I am asking about this specific situation that the author of this blog describes where this white knight shows up and pulls a house address out of his hat in two sentences.

That's what I want more detail on.

What I am talking about is specifically getting your house address, exact location, from a dynamically assigned IP address with an expiring lease in a legal manner without requests from police to ISPs. That's what I am asking about.

And to be fair, even this would have required a situation where the police were contacted and ignored a death threat.

Zab

say_who_now? wrote: »

Mmhmm, time to get up for breakfast Walter. He ain't no Tom Clancy or Michael Crighton anyway, that's for sure! :rolleyes:

PogMoThoin wrote: »

Nonsense, unless you have access to the ISP database cross referencing the exact time it's not possible. And that only pinpoints the router, not the user

You guys are being naive and seeing things too simply. If my friend uses Outlook to send email then his IP address will probably be in the header of his emails. Many instant messengers such as Skype also make direct connections. And that assumes I don't have access to the records of a website that people log in to (such as boards) or become more active by sending out emails like Gordon mentions (either with images or links).

These methods do only work out whose router it is, not the exact end user. It doesn't seem like too much of a leap for him to decide between his friend and his 17 year old son though, and perhaps he just talked to his friend about it. As I said he wasn't writing a technical description of how the tracking went.

I stand by my statement. If you give me an IP address being used by one of my friends I'll probably be able to work out who. Although there's no easily accessibly IP address-to-real-address database, IP addresses also aren't secrets.

say_who_now?

Fenian Army wrote: »

What 17yo Irish kid says "thanks for giving me a break dude"

Because your stereotypical "opressed emo kid" takes out his frustrated angst on the internet, and talks "americanese", BUT, when shown the error of his ways, becomes all remorseful and repentant...

*fade to black*

A year later the kid is helping old grannies across the road and maintains a cheery disposition and cue a snapshot of the happy family that thanks to the bloggers intervention have been saved from the "evils" of technology!

*THE END*

28064212

Zab wrote: »

You guys are being naive and seeing things too simply. If my friend uses Outlook to send email then his IP address will probably be in the header of his emails. Many instant messengers such as Skype also make direct connections. And that assumes I don't have access to the records of a website that people log in to (such as boards) or become more active by sending out emails like Gordon mentions (either with images or links).

These methods do only work out whose router it is, not the exact end user. It doesn't seem like too much of a leap for him to decide between his friend and his 17 year old son though, and perhaps he just talked to his friend about it. As I said he wasn't writing a technical description of how the tracking went.

I stand by my statement. If you give me an IP address being used by one of my friends I'll probably be able to work out who. Although there's no easily accessibly IP address-to-real-address database, IP addresses also aren't secrets.

For a home user, an IP address is leased by an ISP. You will only get the ISP's details from an IP address. That may be enough to narrow it down, if you only have no more than one friend in a city. In most cases, it will not be.

As I already stated, IP addresses are trivial to find, getting the corresponding real-world address is not

Zab

28064212 wrote: »

For a home user, an IP address is leased by an ISP. You will only get the ISP's details from an IP address. That may be enough to narrow it down, if you only have no more than one friend in a city. In most cases, it will not be.

As I already stated, IP addresses are trivial to find, getting the corresponding real-world address is not

Did you even read the post you quoted?

dr.bollocko

28064212 wrote: »

For a home user, an IP address is leased by an ISP. You will only get the ISP's details from an IP address. That may be enough to narrow it down, if you only have no more than one friend in a city. In most cases, it will not be.

As I already stated, IP addresses are trivial to find, getting the corresponding real-world address is not

I was thinking.. Say if you knew the ISP and it was a cable provider that would lower it down to areas of a city which were cable areas....

In some cases it might be possible to narrow it to a few particular areas. But even then that operates on a one friend per city routine.

28064212

Zab wrote: »

Did you even read the post you quoted?

Yes. An IP address does not "work out whose router it is". The only way to get that information would be by accessing the ISP's database and finding out which customer had the lease on that particular IP at that particular time

say_who_now?

Zab wrote: »

I stand by my statement. If you give me an IP address being used by one of my friends I'll probably be able to work out who. Although there's no easily accessibly IP address-to-real-address database, IP addresses also aren't secrets.

No, you won't.

And there are plenty of easily accessible IP to real address databases, for COMPANY registered addresses, not so much for individuals.

With Outlook and Skype, you already know who the individual is, and it's not too hard to Google their name, but if they have any sense, they won't have put their home address on the internet, so that still leaves you the problem of tying their IP address to their home address, LEGALLY remember?

If I use my dear old nana's internet connection to access my fake twitter and facebook profiles and spam the hell out of yours, then fill your e-mail inbox with spam, good luck to you trying to prove it was me, whether by illegal or legal means.

Now who's being naive?

scamalert

28064212 wrote: »

Go on then so, use your superior IT knowledge to explain to us all exactly how he managed to convert an IP address to a specific house address

well he got a hit on one true ip address,the other two had to be close by,meaning same town,and if you hit locations like mcdonalds guards could easily ask to check cctv cameras at specific time the connection was used,if person suspects that its the same person, as originally his neighbors son was suspected and busted.And that's only one way of doing it.

gctest50

28064212 wrote: »

The only way to get that information would be by accessing the ISP's database and finding out which customer had the lease on that particular IP at that particular time

And ISPs willingly let people poke around their database ?

What if he was behind seven proxies ?

Thud

scamalert wrote: »

well he got a hit on one true ip address,the other two had to be close by,meaning same town,and if you hit locations like mcdonalds guards could easily ask to check cctv cameras at specific time the connection was used,if person suspects that its the same person, as originally his neighbors son was suspected and busted.And that's only one way of doing it.

the guards wouldn't help him....or so he says

28064212

scamalert wrote: »

well he got a hit on one true ip address,the other two had to be close by

What do you mean by a "true ip address"? He got an IP address. He had no way to resolve that to a real address

scamalert wrote: »

meaning same town,and if you hit locations like mcdonalds guards could easily ask to check cctv cameras at specific time the connection was used,if person suspects that its the same person, as originally his neighbors son was suspected and busted.And that's only one way of doing it.

Have you even read the original story? He claims to have traced a real-world address from a single IP address. That is not possible, unless the house has a business account, static IP and specifically registered that address as the owner of that IP. At a conservative estimate, perhaps 0.00001% of residential houses in the country would have that set-up

Again, outline the steps that he used to take an IP address and resolve it directly to a real-world residential address

28064212

gctest50 wrote: »

And ISPs willingly let you poke around their database ?

What? I'm specifically saying the opposite