re: #80 Fat Bastard Vegetarian

How does an internet address change. Do you have to move? Seriously. People will do it if that’s what they have to do.

Symps? Heh.

It depends on how you connect to the Internet, and exactly how your hosting service does things. With cable services, you typically “lease” an IP address that remains assigned to you indefinitely; it is “renewed” every time you connect, and stays assigned to you until you haven’t connected for longer than the “lease period,” which varies a lot but is typically on the order of a couple of weeks. For most, who leave their cable modems connected continuously or who log on every day, this makes your IP address effectively constant.

Dial-up accounts get new IP address assigned each time they log on.

It is also possible, even in the case of cable leases, to reset your assigned IP address by twiddling with your router and having it display a “spoofed” MAC address. This forces the cable provider to issue a new IP address.

The IP addresses assigned, whether leased or not, are drawn from the limited subset a given provider has available to it. The provider can always be immediately identified from a portion of the IP address; the leading part of the address remains the same, and only the low-order portions change with each user.

As a practical matter: anyone who is spending their entire life hovering over a site, waiting for those fleeting opportunities to register a hostile account, will almost certainly be using a cable connection, and will be the kind whose entire life consists of trolling the web, so they’re connected all the time. These types will ALWAYS have the same IP address, no matter what, and will be extremely easy to identify. Certainly, if you’re attempting to register multiple sock puppets during a single registration period, you aren’t going to have time for modem twiddling, resetting and reassignment; you’re going to stupidly assume that no one is watching, and get stomped on when a simple script attached to the registration form finds your IP address already listed in the site database. And frankly, getting sophisticated just isn’t in the nature of either trolls or sockpuppets; their neural capacity is already saturated with hatred and revenge.