Monday, March 31, 2008

66.185.84.204 and the promiscuity of Rogers' IPs (Summary thread)

Rogers IPs
Update. When I first posted this, I didn't realize that these were all Rogers' web-caching proxy servers. The shifting that I've documented is presumably a result of the practice of load-balancing (on which see here).

Over the last several weeks and in dozens of posts, we've seen how liquid some of Rogers' IPs were in the years 2003-2005. IPs in 66.185.84.xxx range seem to have changed without warming; in extreme cases a surfer might have several IPs in several minutes. (See, for example, here from 2004 where there are five IPs in half-a-day; or here from 2003, where there are three in 8 minutes; or some of the other listed under the label "quick change").

The shifts between these IPs are trackable, but the details are widely dispersed and the overall picture difficult to make out. Hence the graphic above. Each line connects two of the Rogers' IPs in our pool; I colour-coded them by year (see the key at the top right). The evidence for some of the equivalencies are more certain than for others, which can be checked via this index:
This list reflects, of course, only the tiniest fraction of the internet traffic. Every visit to any web-page is logged somewhere, but very few of those logs are ever published online and therefore become available to us, and only a tiny fraction of internet users edit wikipedia anonymously.

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