this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2023
68 points (95.9% liked)

Asklemmy

43392 readers
1576 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago (2 children)

One does not simply "block fingerprinting". Fingerprinting is incredibly complicated and very hard to avoid. You need VPN, Browser with no extentions and fixed windowsize (tor or mullvad), frequent cookie deletion, even the installed fonts/language packs can give them identifiers...

EFF has a good test which tests your browser

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

If you have JavaScript enabled all this is useless. So add "disable JS" onto the list.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

I just checked their tool. With a brand-new private browsing window open, connected through a VPN, and a fair amount of blocking shit layered into my browser, it's showing that I'm blocking ads and trackers, but that I still have a unique fingerprint. Even tools like canvas blocker aren't preventing it. Running it through Tor, I have a non-unique fingerprint, but Reddit doesn't play nicely with the Tor browser. Attempting to use different clean installs of browsers (Vivaldi, Brave, Edge, Chrome (incognito mode), etc.) all have me as unique. Fonts could def. do it; I have to have a ton installed on my workstation.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Its not machine specific, they can see very little about your machine. It's most likely your browser. The cookies can give you away.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I tried using different browsers and cleared my cache multiple times.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

My alts work just fine with a VPN after being banned.