Comment by josephcsible

1 day ago

> I said top-level domain.

"io" and "com" are top-level domains, and in the example I gave, you can't even distinguish between them.

5 comments

josephcsible

Well, I appreciate the correction: I meant second level (or whatever is most distinguishing for that TLD). However, even if what you say is true, you really cannot disprove my claim with one nitpick, you need to talk majorities. (And, in case it needs to be said: i really don't think the issue here is distinguishing activity to github.io vs github.com)

josephcsible 1 day ago
Okay, how about this then. Here's some of the IP addresses of posts on the HN front page right now:
104.21.3.245 104.21.68.247 104.21.80.31 104.21.95.131 104.21.112.1 104.26.4.133
None of them have reverse DNS records. Can you tell which is which?
- AshamedCaptain 1 day ago
  
  So you take literally the worst possible set of IPs (all of them cloudflare), IPv4 only, and yet Copilot (!) is easily able to reverse 50% of them:
  104.21.3.245 -- trebaol.com 104.21.80.31 -- diwank.space 104.26.4.133 -- daringfireball.net 104.21.112.1 -- simonwillison.net , taras.glek.net
  This was literally the worst example you could possibly do. I hope you kept which one was which, I'd like to know if Copilot was right.
  In the meanwhile, from the current top #30 articles on HN (also via copilot script, but I removed non-cloudflare IPs):
  ycombinator.com -- no CDN letsbend.de -- no CDN grepular.com -- no CDN xania.org -- cloudfront github.io -- no common CDN owlposting.com -- AWS, but IPv4 remained static netfort.gr.jp -- no CDN simonwillison.net -- cloudflare, 104.21.112.1 fixed folklore.org -- azure, 13.107.246.1-255 range danq.me -- no CDN nature.com -- fastly, IPv4 remained static daringfireball.net -- cloudflare, 104.26.4.133 ssp.sh -- no CDN trebaol.com -- cloudflare, 104.21.3.245 glek.net -- cloudflare, 104.21.112.1 gov.uk -- AWS, but IPV4 remained static phys.org -- no CDN diwank.space -- cloudflare, 104.21.80.31 free.fr -- no CDN (my French ISP, btw) ericgardner.info -- AWS, but IPv4 remained static ghuntley.com -- fastly, IPv4 remained static paavo.com -- no CDN railway.com -- cloudflare, 104.18.24.53 alloc.dev -- cloudflare , 188.114.96.2
  Look at how many of them are self-hosted, have zero CDN, or otherwise return me always the same IP (even when I try from 3 different ISPs) which makes them trivial to reverse address. This is already a pretty huge success rate and all my context is that you browsed HN first (which I know, see first result on the list). Now imagine the tools a ISP will have at its disposal:
  - IPv6
  - Its Geo region will actually match yours
  - Routing tables
  - The patience to also include resources fetched from these pages in the analysis (i.e. page X always gets its JS from Y domain which results in a constant Z KB transfer).
  - The rest of your browsing activity
  - The rest of everyone's browsing activity including most popular _current_ hosts for each hostname.
  Do you still claim that it is "impossible" to track your activity because of CDNs? I still bet you your ISP can do it with _100%_ accuracy.
  
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