[Techtalk] Getting names and addresses of forum users

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Thu, Sep 19, 2002 at 05:27:07PM +0000 or thereabouts, Arashi wrote:
> At one linux forum I often visit, someone recently said he(she?) 
> was planning to publish (though not at this particular forum) the 
> real names and addresses of trolls who had been regularly flaming 
> him/her.
> 
> The impression I got from that thread was that grabbing people's 
> names and addresses thru a forum they're members of is quite easy.  
> Is this true, or is it just script kiddie bravado?  How is this 
> possible?  I'm not asking because I want to do it myself - I just 
> don't want it to happen to me.

Depends. 

I once came across an hilarious but alarming thread on a 
bulletin board where someone caused a lot of trouble. 
Someone else said "Stop hiding behind what you think is 
your anonymity or I'll show you how thin that veil is" or 
something to that effect. They didn't stop and in fact
said "You're just showing off, you don't know who I am"
or similar. 

And in sequence, the guy started posting his IP address,
his account name, his probable physical location, his
school, the last few digits of his phone number..
...and for his final trick, rang up his house and got 
his parents. "Oh, hey. Tell him I rang, will you?" 

As the thread started, a lot of people were saying "serves
you right" to the victim of this: I gather he basically
spent his time being as obnoxious as he could. Towards the 
end I got the impression that people were thinking, "hey, 
enough is enough". 

The guy doing all this maintained that in the process he broke 
no laws whatsoever. It's entirely possible that it this was 
indeed the case. 

Somewhere on the (massive) Junkbusters website is a list of
resources to demonstrate how non-anonymous you can be:
it includes links to a variety of sites which will perform
searches for you. Right now, of course, I can't find the
thing.

Telsa