Internet 301 - Mole catching for fun and profit (EXPANDED)

benburch

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Sun Sep-11-05 04:39 PM
Original message

Internet 301 - Mole catching for fun and profit (EXPANDED)

( People have asked how I sometimes know how many people see my postings and who has seen them. To that end I bring you an >expanded< posting from the past that explained the whole technique. )

It is really very easy to catch moles who post on Right Wing boards and come here to disrupt us, and I'll tell you all how you can do it!

First, you need to have a web server that you control and which you have full access to the logs of. This isn't hard as apache is public domain and easy to configure on most platforms. Most Linux distributions will install a working apache for you at the click of a button, and MacOS X comes with Apache built in.

Second, you need to make a one pixel transparent PNG file, such as this one;

--->

<---

Cant see it, can you?

The link to is is http://www.WhiteRoseSociety.org/images /example.png and you should feel free to copy it. (Remove the space just before the last / !) It contains no virus or trojan horse, just a PNG file header and a single pixel with a clear alpha channel and no color. You can also make one for yourself in The Gimp or in Photoshop easily enough.

Now, these sites could eliminate this problem if they were smart enough to either not allow the inline posting of images, or to force you to upload any images to their own hosted space, but we are talking about Right Wingers here, and almost none of them have much above a room-temperature IQ.

An even better strategy is to create an image that is so offensive or interesting to them that they will inline post it for themselves! Our good friend SwampRat can probably give you some pointers in how to do that!

Next you establish an account on the target board. Create a Yahoo mail account or similar like "NRA_Supporter" or "Condi_For_President" and use that account to log in. Say nothing a RW goon wouldn't say, EVER, no matter how odious they are. Often the best strategy is to ape their own words back to them. Once they accept you, the fun begins.

Post something really controversial here. Nothing you wouldn't be happy posting ordinarily, but make the title into a Fascist Magnet, like "Gun Control Means Killing Fascists", you know what I mean. Drop your PNG into a reply to the original message, not the original message itself.

Wait a half-hour, and then post a message on the RW board, something like "Those damned DUers are threatening to kill us! Lets turn them in!", link in the thread here, and put some nice RW clip art into your posting, something you also host on your server.

Wait.

Then compare the logs. Look for IP addresses that appear on the logs for both files. By looking at the timestamp of postings on each board, and comparing that to the hit times on the image files, you can get a pretty good idea about the IP addresses of those who replied to you message on the RW board and those that replied to your message here.

You will also see people who merely keep an eye on both places, just as you are doing, so do not be quick to accuse.

Best to repeat the exercise a couple of times to gain confidence in your identification of the trolls.

Now, if you are really nice to them, and help them make fun of "Lieberals" enough, they may even make you a moderator. As a moderator, you gain access to ALL of the IP addresses and the exact names and email addresses the come from! Or you can befriend a moderator who is not totally on "their side", and who will then rat out the worst offenders to you.

It helps to have half a dozen or so aliases to work with on each of their sites, too. Now, if you come from a fixed IP address, as many more of us do in the era of DSL, it also helps to use a proxy to mask your location. There are several anonymous proxy services you can use;

http://www.guardster.com

http://www.anonymizer.com

http://www.the-cloak.com

http://www.proxify.com

http://tor.eff.org

Now, with many of these you are only exchanging one fixed IP address, traceable to you with another traceable only to the anonymous proxy service. This can cause confusion if somebody else trolling their site picks the same proxy, and might spoil your plans. The http://tor.eff.org proxy comes from literally all over the planet, anywhere that there is an individual sharing his bandwidth by running the tor server software. In fact, I run a tor site on my home machine so that people can use my bandwidth. This replaces the anonymous SOCKS proxy I used to run here, and which had been abused.

There are literally dozens of places to get disposable email addresses for the "verification" these sites perform. Literally none of them do any effective form of verification, so you should never have to out yourself in order to get an account on one of them. Back when I ran a BBS system, I used to phone-verify all new accounts, and these sites would be wise to establish such a system, but are unlikely to as they don't really trust each other any more than they trust us.

If you use these techniques, I would love to hear how you do with them.

Have fun, and remember, we are smarter than they are!