Rogers IP Addresses, Circa 2003

The blogging nerdosphere is atremble with anticipation at the thought of an upcoming confrontation between Richard Warman and the CHRC vs. Macleans Magazine, Mark Steyn, and the Nazis, which will take place in an Ottawa courtroom on March 25th. Some of the folks at FreeD are positively giddy at the thought of crashing the proceedings, breaking the camera ban (if one is in place), and blasting images of CHRC investigators all over the Internet:

They should go for the lifting of the camera ban, and if that is refused, video it in secret and post the proceedings everywhere possible all over the world. Let the whole world see what a Fascist State Canada has become.

Meanwhile, online investigator extraordinaire "Buckets" has been quietly chipping away at an answer to the most interesting question that will be raised during the course of this hearing: did Richard Warman post racist remarks using the pseud "90sAREover" to Freedomsite (a Nazi forum) in 2003?

There is more detail in my previous posts on the topic, but in short: the claim that Warman did make such a posting is based entirely on the fact that, later in 2003, he messaged Freedomsite under the name of Lucy from the same Rogers IP address (66.185.84.204) previously assigned to 90sAREover.

And, in short, Bucket's research challenges the reasoning behind this claim (which is, essentially, that once you get a Rogers address assigned to you, you are stuck with it for months or years at a time).

Bucket's rather ingenious method was to, painstakingly and at length, examine wikipedia edits (and other sources) from the time-period in question looking for this particular IP address, and other Rogers IP addresses, and track what happened to them, sometimes on a minute by minute basis. His general conclusion? They're fluid, baby, real fluid! Anyone assigned the IP in question might also have been assigned one of at least 16 other IP addresses, and anyone assigned one of these other IP addresses might also have been assigned, during their very next on-line session, or even during the course of the same on-line session, the IP 66.185.84.204.

Here's the money quote from his summary thread:

These [IP addresses] reflect, of course, only the tiniest fraction of what was really happening. Every time anyone visits a webpage, the visit is logged somewhere, but very few of those logs are ever published; only a tiny fraction of internet users edit wikipedia, and only a fraction of them do so without signing in, thereby allowing us to see their IPs.

Still, the evidence that we do have makes it is fairly clear that having any one of these IPs--indeed, any Roger IP--at one moment doesn't guarantee that you have it at another. The reason, of course, is that Rogers was using these IPs as proxies for all their traffic from a specific region.

Have a good Easter everyone, and happy hunting Buckets! And everyone beware them Nazis!