A Wikipedia cite???
:eek::dubious:
There’s nothing wrong with the wikipedia cite. It’s the topic itself that we don’t want to focus on.
Until he got an answer.
Until you get an answer.
He waited for a while, but not until he got an answer, which is what was meant by “waited for a reply”. Wait until you get a reply.
Common sense. If you are not getting a response from someone, and there is someone else you can contact, contact that other person.
The same person, who was out of pocket.
No one said Charlie should have known a mod was on vacation.
Actually, that isn’t what IP spoofing means. You are trying to say a proxy can be a way of concealing your true IP address from the server you visit, which is true, but IP spoofing as the term is defined and used involves generating your own forged TCP packets with incorrect header information.
A person using a spoofed IP address can’t get an answer back to their packets because the receiver has only the fake IP address to respond to. So it is used mostly for denial of service attacks and the like, where a response from the server isn’t needed. It is a one-way communication that can be accurately compared to sending a snail mail with the wrong return address written on the envelope. It has nothing to do with VPN or proxy connections.
No sense in complicating an already complicated issue here by throwing around incorrect terminology.
Eh, yes and no.
IP spoofing does have a specific meaning in the context of network packets and does indeed refer specifically to forged packet headers.
However, IP spoofing can be used in a more general sense to refer to anything that fakes out the sender’s IP, which can be forged packets, going through a proxy, or other methods. This latter usage is admittedly only common in less technical discussions, at least in my experience.
If you’re in a room full of people who understand what you mean when you talk about ACK and FIN bits, then you probably do want to restrict your usage of the term to the former, or else some folks might look at you funny.
Yeah yeah, that’s what they all say 
I’m going to be frank: your posts throughout this thread have convinced me that you also do not understand what a VPN is. A VPN does obscure your real IP address by routing your traffic through a whole different network. I don’t know why you’d claim it doesn’t. If for whatever reason you don’t want someone to recognize you by your IP address, using a VPN is a perfectly good way to achieve that. I’m not vouching for Charlie’s motives here, but the fact is that he isn’t wrong when he says it’s possible to use a VPN to keep people from associating you with your real IP address.
Except going through an HTTP proxy is not “faking out the sender’s IP.” Neither is going through TOR, or a VPN. None of these involve fake sender IP addresses and are not IP Spoofing. The packets have return addresses and the responses to right back where the requests came from. Sure, you can say “well, people who don’t know any better use the term this way”, but you’re basically talking like a fake hacker on TV saying “I just have to IP backroute the packet to hack the TCP trace” or some nonsense. These terms have actual meanings.
This is simply incorrect. Technically, a VPN may obscure your IP address, but practically, VPN providers keep logs that can reveal your IP address, and will cheerfully give up those logs when a subpoena is served.
You’re arguing semantics here. It’s correct that using an anonymous proxy or TOR does not employ IP spoofing in the strict TCP sense, but they do effectively hide the sender’s IP address (and thus prevent identification). Of course the same vulnerabilities exist as with a VPN… it’s difficult to be sure whether you’re using an ethical provider or a honeypot operator.
No, it’s not incorrect. I’m not claiming that it obscures your IP address from law enforcement officers with a subpoena, I’m claiming it obscures it from random evildoers and website operators. Which it does.
I’m arguing factual definitions. IP Spoofing is a type of technical forgery, and those other things are not. But let’s try a different tack. For the sake of argument, let’s pretend that we’ve lost our minds and we’re going to call using a proxy “IP Spoofing.” Why wouldn’t this bogus definition apply to a VPN too?
Frankly, this is just disrespectful to the members here. The attitude of “I can ignore you as much as I want and you have to just sit there and take it” would be more suited to some power tripping minor government official than to a simple moderator on a small message board. They are hall monitors, not the gestapo.
If a moderator specifically said not to post anything until further notice thats one thing, thats an explicit instruction. But to just ignore the request for days on end and expect that the poster should just accept that indefinitely says worrying things about the moderation here, is it really “them and us” to that extent?
In this day and age 5/6 days is an eternity when it comes to electronic communication, if I emailed somebody about some minor issue and didn’t get a reply after 5 days I would judge that I wasn’t going to get a reply, and if a second follow up email also goes without acknowledgement I would be certain. My request has either been forgotten or is being ignored and I would have to act accordingly. If it was at work or somewhere important I might make a phone call, but on a simple internet message board where nothing is important I’d just post the damn thing anyway, because if anybody had a problem with that then perhaps they should have given me the courtesy of saying so. Especially when the thread in question does not even break any board rules.
To just sit there and wait indefinitely until somebody may or may not deign to respond? No, thats not what adults do.
This wasn’t a case of us power tripping or acting like the gestapo. We goofed. Sorry. As I said already, we’ll try to do better.
But again, simply posting it anyway without permission isn’t the best way to proceed. A much better way of handling it would be to contact another mod and ask for guidance.
We don’t expect people to just wait indefinitely.
Yeah, suuure.:dubious: Keep PMing Mods and then they decide you’re a nuisance and then they topic ban you or something. Great idea there. :rolleyes:
Only in the same way that accidentally washing a pair of pants with a paycheck in the pocket is “Money Laundering.”
The term carries an implication of wrongdoing. IP Spoofing can really only benefit someone who has nefarious intentions, other than maybe research or bug testing or something. “VPN Service” carries no such implication.
People on public wifi, in countries with content bans, etc. all have legitimate reasons to use VPN services. Hell, I’m in a remote part of Mexico and I trust a big name well-vetted VPN service a lot more than my own ISP. Contrary to the insinuations in this thread and the GQ thread it spawned, these services aren’t only offered by “some a-hole” you can’t trust. They are offered by some of the biggest names in anti-virus and internet security companies.
They do conceal your IP address from the hosts you visit as one of many uses, which I understand may be an inconvenient truth for message board operators playing whack-a-mole with spammers all day, but that doesn’t lessen their usefulness or legitimacy for the many other users who can benefit from them.
As PC Magazine said:
Golly, Crazyhorse, this almost makes it sound like a VPN can be a legitimate security option. PC Magazine recommends? Kind of like what Charlie was trying to say, or something.
That point about VPNs being useful on wifi connections and such was brought up in the GQ thread that is linked upthread.
Two things are important here.
- That is NOT the situation that Charlie was using it for.
- Charlie sent me the name of the service he is using. Their web page makes it very clear that they are in the business of hiding your IP for uses like illegal file sharing. They specifically mention that they don’t log traffic (so when they get a subpoena you can’t get caught). They also specifically mention torrents. Their service is clearly geared towards things that cannot be discussed here on the SDMB.
Indeed. Without a VPN I cannot access a significant and growing number of links posted on this message board (the day Indonesia banned imgur I was really bummed).
You should try looking at this from a civil liberties perspective, rather than insisting on viewing it from a “only bad people have something to hide” perspective. In the security community, vowing to keep no logs is generally considered a desirable attribute in a VPN provider.
You seriously expect me to believe that a company whose main web page is clearly geared towards folks who engage in illegal file sharing is advertising their lack of logging for civil liberty reasons?
By the way, I did some poking around and the guy who owns the web site in question also owns at least one illegal online gambling type of web site as well. I seriously doubt that this guy has anyone’s civil liberties in mind with his companies.
Riiiiiight. :rolleyes:
There have only been like 6 people topic banned, ever. There was Handy, who was forbidden from discussing medical stuff (because his medical knowledge was “Whatever the first hit on google is”), there was a poster who’s still around so I won’t mention his name who was forbidden from injecting his misogynistic sexual kinks in every thread he was in, Lissner was banned from discussing that incompetent director who did Show Girls. Reeder was topic-limited (one “I hate Bush” thread in the pit at a time) and Jack Dean Tyler might have been topic-banned on circumcision.
I may have missed one or two, but topic bans almost never happen, and only to people who are stupidly, obnoxiously obsessive on a given topic.
I strongly doubt they’d topic-ban someone for a couple of mod-emails. It takes extreme behavior to get that.
And frankly, I’d like to see more topic-banned posters, not less.
Considering I don’t even know what site you’re talking about, I don’t make any claims about what you should believe. But you seem to expect us to take “they even talk about not having logs as if it’s a * feature *” as evidence of wrongdoing.