In article ,
says...
Apparently on date Tue, 16 Mar 2004 12:30:29 -0000, Pete Smith
said:

In article ,
says...
In article , News
writes

Do you know my neighbour?

No, but I know who you are. You're the trolling ****wit who posts as
"IMM" in uk.d-i-y. Apart from having an identical posting style,
displaying a complete lack of clue, showing a breathtaking level of
arrogance, etc., you're both posting from the same computer:


How did you manage to track this down?

I didn't think google was too hot on searching headers of news postings.

Google isn't important.

If you are using standard mail readers, the information is just in the headers
for all to see. If you use something like Outlook Express, it doesn't cover
this stuff so you can't see it.

I'm on Agent, and you can download that for free from www.forteinc.com if you
want to see how it all works. In Agent, to track down the information, you just
press the "h" key to turn the headers on and off. It's probably similar in many
other news readers.

The (common) headers in the CrapaClean poster's posts, look like this:


Slight bit of confusion here I think.

What I was wanting to do, was do a google search across all groups for the
NNTP posting host that Crapaclean was using, eg NNTP-Posting-Host:
217.134.67.161.

I'd then to a time comparison on all these articles for any group where
Cataclean isn't being used, so I could actually find out more about the
person.

Basically, I think Mike managed to do this, simply because he subscribes to
two groups where Crapaclean posts to, recognised the styles, and did a
manual check, and it showed that the same host posted messages within
minutes of each other.

FWIW, I'm using Gravity, and I can show the headers purely by pressing H.

IMO, it would be really handy if Google allowed you to do a complete search
of the headers. We could then do checks like this, eg

Search all articles for: NNTP-Posting-Host: 217.134.67.161 sorted by date.
We could then see what other groups he posts to. Given he/she/it uses about
4 aliases, I'm pretty sure there will be more.

_Or_ if net.loons used a fixed IP, so that rather than having a dynamic IP
which resolves to an "anonymous" Freeserve/PlanetOnline dialup address, so
we could actually track them down. This is why I could never convincingly
troll, because my IP is fixed, and resolves to a meaningful address, which
you could use to track me, almost down to a postal address. If I wanted to
troll, I'd have to use dialup networking, and a range of newsreaders, to
throw the trackers off the scent.

Pete.

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