A magistrate in Louisiana has ordered Homestead, a web hosting company, to reveal the identity of an anonymous poster on Homestead's site who has been accused of posting defamatory remarks about University of Louisiana at Monroe and its staff. http://listserv.educause.edu/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A2=ind0110&L=edupage&D=1&H=1&O=D&F=&S=&P=1039 I will also add that the identity of "factwatcher" who posted many defamatory remarks about Dr. Bear and George Brown could be revealed if a court order is obtained.
Well, actually, it's not quite so simple. In the case of Homestead, the guy posting the derogatory information was a fool. He didn't take sufficient steps to separate himself from the website in question. It's quite possible to post information completely anonymously and untraceably through a number of ISPs, he just didn't happen to choose one that provided anonymous services. With regard to people sending emails through anonymizers, things are equally complicated. It's not as simple as serving a court order, because even if the anonymous remailer has log files (most don't), all they will have, at best, is an IP address. Then, one would have to get a 2nd court order for the ISP and hope that it's not another anonymizer and/or that they have logs that will be able to resolve an IP address back to an individual poster. Is it possible? Yes. Is it easy? In most cases, no.
Factwatcher is a worthless scum-bag that doesn't even deserve the attention of being tracked down, at least IMHO. If we ever did found out who he was then perhaps we could suggest that the FBI start up a 10 most unwanted list.
Gee whiz, it is easy to be anon. There are ways to be 100% foolproof and you don't have to be a computer geek to know how.
There are actually very few ways to be 100% foolproof, in spite of what the anonymizer services will tell you. You might be surprised what happens when a search warrant gets served on an anonymizer ISP. And, of course, we don't knowingly permit the use of anonymizers at degreeinfo... we have many of them blocked, and we do keep an eye on our user traffic to prevent spamming. For this reason, we can know things like the fact that you're posting from your home computer near Sarasota, FL using Cox@home
True, but there are ways (and you know it as well as I do). Uhmmm, I have asked judges to sign my search warrants and I have served search warrants and, yes, I know the power of a subpoena! Oh, that’s kids stuff. Trailing an ISP number is easy. Additionally, I’m not trying to be anonymous from you, the administrator (just to the millions of worldwide viewers). It would be easy to make a posting on this forum and you (nor anyone else) could trace it back to the user. Do you deny this?
True, and some ISPs make it more difficult to track than others... I'm not saying it's *impossible* to post anonymously at degreeinfo (*never* issue a tech-related challenge unless you wish to provide an open invitation to the hardcore uberhacker), but it is a violation of our TOS, and we block most of the major anonymizers and some of the smaller ones as well.
