Happy April 1st (little late)
–
http://hangouts.asia

Or use the neighbor’s wireless connection which he forgot to secure it…

Or, some advanced users uses services like youhide.com …

Steps to set up anonymous proxy server:
In your browser settings, configure the proxy to one of the IP addresses found on this page:
http://www.publicproxyservers.com

Best,
John Smith

WRT Proxies - most people know that IP addresses are not always unique to individuals. I for one would like to know when all employees from a company talk up or down a particular view point.

WRT people who will post from office, then go to the library to post and then go to their home to post - its still possible to post multiple times - but you have to work harder.

WRT spammers / hackers picking up live ip addresses for attacks use an image oriented mechanism to show the IP address or some other stronger obfuscation mechanism.

Actually, this may not be happening. Many companies (like mine, 500 employees plus) have a single external-facing IP addr, and so while multiple people may be reading (and posting to) TC, they’ll all look like they’re from the same IP.

Have these people lost their civil rights of protection of their identity because of the incident? Or is one to expect to be put in the public pillory with identifiable pictures on Techcrunch for committing a geek crime?

I got accused of trolling recently, after chatting to the owner of the site we determined it was a college of mine (My company uses one IP).

Just something to keep in mind…

Those CEOs won’t know any better until such advanced topics are taught in business school.

But passing personal information associated with the IP address behind the curtains between two services simply to identify the trollers would be a major privacy violation and would destroy the reputation of both Facebook and any other company that is involved in this type of personal information sharing.

This means most anonymous forums would have no way of getting the person’s real identity unless they resorted to some type of privacy violation. In case of criminal investigation, the law is on your side. There are no laws against trolling however, so if you are a forum admin and you are willing to support anonymous posting, be prepared to deal with anonymous posts that you don’t like.

Its probably true for most of the big company startups with CEO in a different office location than employee. But for a smaller startup with a cheaper T1 line with only one unique static IP, employee and CEO probably leave comments from the same office but from different computers, but the logs will show the same IP address obviously.

what i want to know is, what was the exact investigative process used to get this information? did craigslist and the local ISP just give up these folks information voluntarily? was the Patriot Act used? something else?

One CEO first denied it, but then threatened to sue us for ‘breach of privacy’ when we explained how we knew it was him.

“Jackson County sheriff’s deputies arrested a Medford couple Monday and said the two stole horse saddles and other items from Robert Salisbury’s home.

Then, deputies said, the couple tried to cover up their theft by posting a notice on the Web site Craigslist that said Salisbury had to leave the state and his belongings were free for the taking.”

Which is a slightly smarter plan than showing up with the mob (and dozens of witnesses). Of course, they’re still enormous @$$holes.