Saturday, March 08, 2008

Fluidity of Rogers IPs in 2003/4 (Summary thread)

Note.  More complete, more easily accessible version of this data can be seen in this later post.

In a series of earlier posts, we've seen how liquid the IPs of Rogers customers were in the years 2003 and 2004.  Customers who sometimes had IPs 66.185.84.204, which were involved in some controversial edits in the fall of 2003, might find themselves with one of these IPs:
These reflect, of course, only the tiniest fraction of what was really happening.  Every time anyone visits a webpage, the visit is logged somewhere, but very few of those logs are ever published; only a tiny fraction of internet users edit wikipedia, and only a fraction of them do so without signing in, thereby allowing us to see their IPs.

Still, the evidence that we do have makes it is fairly clear that having any one of these IPs--indeed, any Roger IP--at one moment doesn't guarantee that you have it at another.  The reason, of course, is that Rogers was using these IPs as proxies for all their traffic from a specific region. 

That Rogers used some of these IPs as proxies is something that we already knew. What we don't know is how large a number of Rogers subscribers was served by this pool of IPs. Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands?


Updated and expanded; re-edited to make dates clearer
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