World of Warcraft®

All I am saying is I see absolutely no way in which it can be enforced.
All it will do is cost money to the companies involved.

It shouldn't do really. IP addresses are nearly always logged anyway. Existing admin staff/volunteers could provide the occasional request (the legal requirement to qualify will mean it's not invoked THAT often). I don't see it costing any more in real terms. Not enough to deter people from operating from the UK at any rate.

A minor change trumpeted as some big move. This is PR, not politics.

This I'd agree with. I'd be surprised if we needed even both hands to count the times it'll be used successfully in a year.

12/06/2012 12:09Posted by Andrai

IP addresses are nearly always logged anyway.

IP addresses are meaningless. They can be spoofed (e.g. I can pretend to be on an IP owned by someone else). Networks can be hijacked (I could log onto one of by neighbours networks). Open wireless networks exist (McDonalds etc). Or I could use an anonymising service.

If I was going to seriously abuse someone on the internet, I would hide my identity very well, there would be no trace to the real me. This is very easy to do.

IP addresses are meaningless. They can be spoofed (e.g. I can pretend to be on an IP owned by someone else). Networks can be hijacked (I could log onto one of by neighbours networks). Open wireless networks exist (McDonalds etc). Or I could use an anonymising service.

If I was going to seriously abuse someone on the internet, I would hide my identity very well, there would be no trace to the real me. This is very easy to do.

Thank you, The point I was trying to make.

TROLLERS BEWARE

Websites will be legally obliged to provide victims with the identity of people who post abusive and defamatory online messages about them under plans by the Government.

Major reforms of the libel laws will also see internet service providers (ISPs) given greater protection from being sued if they help to identify so-called trolls.
Would-be claimants will have to show they have suffered serious harm to their reputations, or are likely to do so, before they can take a defamation case forward.
It comes after a mother who was targeted by online trolls won backing from the High Court to have her tormentors' identities disclosed.

And they will be able to do that how? I know that i never give my correct details (except to game companies like bliz) when i sign up for forum accounts and the IP i use is a proxy running on a dynamic IP, so how exactly are they going to do this? :p

12/06/2012 12:24Posted by Dðra

IP addresses are nearly always logged anyway.

IP addresses are meaningless. They can be spoofed (e.g. I can pretend to be on an IP owned by someone else). Networks can be hijacked (I could log onto one of by neighbours networks). Open wireless networks exist (McDonalds etc). Or I could use an anonymising service.

If I was going to seriously abuse someone on the internet, I would hide my identity very well, there would be no trace to the real me. This is very easy to do.

The rest of this post is a good point. But "spoofing" IPs. I don't really want to go down that road again. But in short, for a full session you can't just "spoof" an IP. You'd be unable to ever receive the responses requires to even setup a TCP session. A long way back it was kinda pulled off, but the way sequence numbers are generated in modern stacks puts a stop to that method.

Spoofing single UDP/ICMP packets, or flooding SYN's from a spoofed IP are possible. But in none of those cases are you able to make coherent forum posts, from a spoofed IP.

While I bet most don't. ISP's should be blocking any IP from a subscriber that is not within their assigned range anyway. I was setting this up on my work network 10+ years ago. It's hardly new tech, nor hard to implement.

But that wasn't the point. Getting an IP is a step in the right direction. It enables you to start asking questions and in some cases would result in getting a useful address.

Also, I suspect that sites like facebook have a pretty good IP history. For sure, I suspect they have IP's for both my home connections, places I've been, wifi networks like you suggest. With this whole portfolio, I'm sure the right people could get something useful.

• Depends on the country.
• One could easily use Tor or similar VPN/tunneling service to avoid revealing one's identity.

Who cares, really?