With some recent incidents of police arresting people who tweeted offensive contents, I wonder how do they actually find out who tweeted.
Did the posters in all those cases use their real name?
If someone uses fictitious username with a disguised IP address, is it still possible to track the user?
PS: Not that I am condoning misuse of Twitter but I'm just interested how the system works.
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I use my real name, and don't use Twitter much anyway. I don't think it can be just an IP address because many people post from a mobile which doesn't have an IP address (?). If it is PAYG it can't be traced to a person or address, or can it?
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>> If someone uses fictitious username with a disguised IP address, is it still possible to
>> track the user?
>>
People who tweet in that way are twits. They probably don't even know what an IP address is.
Last edited by: John H on Wed 1 Aug 12 at 09:20
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>> People who tweets are twits. They probably don't even know what an IP address is.
Bit of a generalisation surely. Why should they be any dumber that those using this forum? Quite like Twitter myself and use it regularly.
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>> >> People who tweets are twits. They probably don't even know what an IP address
>> is.
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>> Bit of a generalisation surely. Why should they be any dumber that those using this
>> forum? Quite like Twitter myself and use it regularly.
>>
You accidentally/deliberately? removed "in that way" from the post that you quoted.
Not cricket, old chap.
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"You accidentally/deliberately? removed "in that way" from the post that you quoted."
I'm sure I didn't - Perhaps the quote is from the pre-edited post?
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They're usually slack jawed imbeciles on their own computers at home so it's really easy to trace them to an ISP then find the account holder and the address.
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It may be possible for a computer literate person to set out to be anonymous on twitter.
But the cases I've dealt with - a couple of racist football fans, a disaffected former partner - were all long term twitter users who could be traced fairly easily from their posting history, if not by other means.
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Yes, the moral of the story is that if you're going to post something racist or abusive on Twitter, don't use your own name and borrow someone else's wifi for the purpose.
And that should be a lesson to the rest of us to make sure our wireless networks are properly secured. Don't see many open hotspots around these days but man many people still using WEP.
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To anonymise your tweet completely you would need to have used a proxy server when you signed up your throw away email address, a proxy server when you created your anonymous twitter account, and a proxy server every time you tweet or log on to the accounts
Most abusive tweeters are not that careful
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>> Yes, the moral of the story is that if you're going to post something racist
>> or abusive on Twitter, don't use your own name and borrow someone else's wifi for
>> the purpose.
>>
>> And that should be a lesson to the rest of us to make sure our
>> wireless networks are properly secured. Don't see many open hotspots around these days but man
>> many people still using WEP.
..........and don't use a decent random alpha/numeric/character password, change the router access codes, disable SSID broadcast, restrict wireless access, (by MAC numbers) to only their own wireless PCs or laptops and change their network name from the ISP's supplied one.
With all this, one is still not absolutely secure, but it will deter a casual drive-by bandit.
Last edited by: Roger on Wed 1 Aug 12 at 16:48
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>>decent random alpha/numeric/character password
If you like, but it'll make it more difficult to remember with consequently more chance of a note being made.
Equally, changing a password "i" to a "1" is close to pointless.
Nothing increases security like length of password. e.g., given the types of attacks used these days "passwordpasswordpassword" is more secure than "5%m^7Qs"
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i use a whole sentence from my favourite poem as my password.
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Twitter arrests - technical aspect - Meldrew
