Reddit Was Fun

[–] tackleberry 14 points 6 months ago (1 child)

If they can track you to this extent, imagine what they do with data you do not know they have. Reddit is an AI bot cesspool now. A good portion of content there are not real

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[–] lastlybutfirstly@lemmy.world 4 points 6 months ago (1 child)

They must be using a phone. From what I understand, those have like a digital fingerprint of some sort so it's insanely easy for sites to track you. On a computer, you should be able to just re-start the modem and get a new IP address and wait a day.

The way they catch people, via a computer at least, is that someone living in a suburb will keep trying to immediately re-register and start posting and subscribing to the exact same subs. Since there won't be a lot of people registering from that IP address, they can be pretty sure it's a ban evasion. If you're registering from Manhattan, I can't think of a way they can be sure a new register is a ban evasion.

Except maybe if you're using the same browser which will store cookies from the site. But if you use a new browser or clean out those cookies, you should be fine. Actually, cookies are probably the main way they catch ban evasions. There's probably a cookie that gets placed in the browser when you're banned and when you register the site will check for it.

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[–] plyth@feddit.org 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

Do other sites offer identity verification as a service? If they can ask Google and Meta if an IP is linked to a known account, ban evasion would become very difficult.

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[–] lastlybutfirstly@lemmy.world 2 points 6 months ago

An IP address can't be linked to a single user. The IP address can just be tracked to an area of roughly five square miles.

When I was a web developer in the 2000s and 2010s the hit counters I used would give me, for each visitor, the browser they used, the operating system, the screen resolution, the IP address, and the internet provider company they were using like Xfinity and, most importantly for this discussion, if they were a return visitor.

So if I was running a forum and I banned someone who was from an IP address in Luckenbach, TX using Bubba’s Fish and Tackle and HiSpeed Internet Service, using Internet Explorer 7 on Windows XP, with a screen resolution of 800x600. And then, an hour later someone from Luckenbach, TX using Bubba’s Fish and Tackle and HiSpeed Internet Service, using Internet Explorer 7 on Windows XP, with a screen resolution of 800x600 marked as a return visitor tried to register a new account, I could safely assume this is the same guy I just banned.

The return visitor thing narrows it down to a single person or at least the same computer and the same browser. Theoretically, I could have written some PHP code that automatically checked this type of thing and automatically handled ban evasions.

I’m pretty sure this is how Reddit does it too. Mainly that cookie that tells them this is the same computer and browser that the banned person used. I think phones have this type of cookie built into their hardware. The Trusted Platform Module (TPM) in modern computers can be used for this as well but I don't think they're using it for that yet because Windows fucked up and decided to try and force everyone to buy a new computer with TPM during an AI bubble.

Plus, they might have Discord type somewhat-secret partnerships where if you’re logged in to gmail, and then visit Discord, gmail automatically sends Discord your email address so you can automatically log in there. I’ve never given Reddit my email so I don’t know if they have this kind of thing. But if you didn’t know and tried to re-register and your banned account had the same email that gmail is sending to Reddit to automatically log you in, gmail is accidentally snitching on you.