If it blocks your IP, wouldn’t everyone who came to your house get banned as long as they’re using your Wi-Fi?

  • Ziggurat@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    In general, ISP would sell a fixed IP adress as a fancy option, just unplug/replug your modem a couple of time and you’ll get a new IP. As very few ISP don’t offer IP6 yet another fancy option they have to pool their IP adresses among their customer

    This make IP ban pretty unreliable, and there is way better way to identify a single user even in private browsing

  • HelixDab2@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    It’s complicated.

    Reddit doesn’t seem to ban an IP specifically, but they have ways of figuring out if accounts are associated. For instance, I was permanently banned for suggesting arson as a way of dealing with nazis moving in down the street. (I guess Reddit thinks that this is “encouraging violence”, as if Nazis were human?). I always use a VPN. When I changed my location and logged in to an alternate account, that account got banned also. I made an account from a different computer a few days later, also with a VPN, and that account was banned as well; I had previously logged into my 1st account from that computer.

    So I think that there’s some kind of digital fingerprinting going on. I should have fingerprinting blocked on my computer, but it’s still happening, somehow; there must be some kind of hardware configuration information that it’s able to scrape that gives it a high enough degree of certainty that I’m me… The only solution that I was able to come up with–I have not actually tried this–was replacing my computer entirely, and then creating a new account.

    EDIT: I’m curious to see what would happen if I tried to log into my banned account from my wife’s laptop. She has a reddit account; would they see me using her laptop as proof that her real account is one of my alternate accounts? IDK.

    • Rocky60@lemm.eeOP
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      1 year ago

      Now that I recall, I started an account using cellular and it was banned hours later, still on cellular.

  • alokir@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Not sure if they IP ban you because it’s not reliable. Most internet providers don’t give you a static IP, you get a new one every time you connect to the internet.

    I’ve been IP banned before from some Counter Strike (1.6) servers back in the day because they though I was cheating (I just learned the AK’s recoil pattern), all I had to do was restart the router to play again.

    I recently visited a forum for the first time and I wanted to comment but I couldn’t because I was IP banned. Probably because someone trolled there with the IP that I ended up receiving.

    Me and my friends got banned from an online game because we logged in from school computers and sent each other resources. They thought they were one person’s alt accounts, which was forbidden. This was before wifi became commonplace so I guess they assumed everyone used their own internet.

    I suspect that your IP is just one data point that they use to try to identify you if they do this sort of thing. Your browser (or their app) provides tons of information like screen resolution, device id, extension list, plugged in device list etc. These can identify you quite accurately.