We used to do this on the EVE online forums until CCP caught on and banned inline images.
this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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"Man, everyone is on planet earth. How boring"
We were using the IPs and post times to identify accounts, then checking IPs that connected to our VOIP servers so we could identify spies and either remove them or feed them false intel.
Basic counter-intel work and all for a video game heh.
Jesus i miss that time , counter intel was so easy back then
This sounds super cool and interesting, is there like a wiki I can read up about that stuff??
theres a whole documentary about it on youtube, check out the "down the rabbit hole" channel
its very long.
Ty :)
spy
rho s quad best quad
Some days, I am tempted to go back to playing eve. Ive got some good memories.
Interesting hypothesis.
Yes, especially because many Lemmy users have some radical views.
For real, totally tubular 🤙
Soo pitted
Yup. Especially with digital watermarking by modifying a pixel here or there - something you'd naturally need a computer to detect.
You don't need digital watermarking got for this. Just host the image at different URLs. evil.lemmy.org/nicole-mbystander.png and evil.lemmy.org/nicole-forrgott.png. (Really you'd use a random string and save in a database.) Then see what IP requests the -mbystander version and which the -forrgottt version, and you have our IP addresses.
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Steganography. Good point.
( This is how a lot of modern information caches have been dropped too: you can put entire documents in a few pixels. Steganography is just the act of hiding something inside another object. It’s an older spy technique than classic cryptography )
Good luck, my IP consistently points to an entirely another city.
Sure, but if you also logged into Facebook from that IP it's a pretty simple match up.
Yeah, I get it (barring the fact that literal Facebook is not even accessible from my IP lol). But whether this is useful, depends on who the attacker is. If we're talking about, say, a data broker - yeah. But would Jake from accounting have such "IP-account" logs?
Good luck doing that in Portugal the ips are all dynamic here
i think so too. And even if they wouldnt be doing this, we should still treat it as if they are and fix the problem of it being even possible to gather information about users using 0-click methods like this.
Way back in the days of somethingawful Lowtax, the admin and owner who was a spiteful shithead, would do a similar trick for sites that criticized him
He would register an account, show up, and chat everyone up. Act in on the joke. Eventually he would post a blank 1x1px image hosted on the somethingawful server in one of his comments. Then, he would view the logs that accessed the image. If any somethingawful members had an IP that matched the log they would be banned
For the young folks who didn’t exist in that era: this was pre Facebook and social media. SA was one of the biggest forums and most importantly it was also $10 to join, plus add ons like search, avatar, etc cost etc. would be like reddit costing money to join and then banning you because you posted here about how much reddit was shit compared to the old days
I've been blocking and reporting these nicole accounts as spam bots lately. I hope this doesn't become as bad as the spam bots in the YT comments.
Might be good to think about fediverse security similar to email security, as they are both federated information sharing systems. Email has spam blocking, allowing for reputation checks and other complex stuff. I wonder if Lemmy instances could collaborate on a SpamHaus type of bad host / bad user list to use and share.
My money says it's Russia trying to find potential political adversaries (people who don't agree with them)
Doed anyone know if Nicole has introduced herself to lemmygrad?
iCloud Private Relay and similar relay services should also protect against IP tracking.
PSA: check your private relay settings if you haven’t in a while
Mine was on but set to “maintain general area” so local content works.
Wait, I'm not the only one who received these strange messages from Nicole? Good thing I ignored them.
Since this is not an issue unique to lemmy, it's also a technique to find the IP address of a user using e-mail, send them an e-mail with a reference to a one-pixel image and look where the download comes from, it behooves those who lack the courage of their convictions and prefer to cower in anonymity to either use a VPN or Tor or both.
That would require cooperation with the servers/dns involved. Though, it would be easy to disprove if people are getting identical image URLs.... we should test that!
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