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Newspaper Tracking
"chris" wrote
| I was under | the impression that a cable connection is actually | part of a party line, with hundreds of other customers | sharing the same IP address. | | Not sure how cable companies do it, but ADSL and fibre connections all have | an IP allocated to them from the pool that their service provider owns. I | imagine cable is not that different. | I wonder. There's been talk for some time of IP4 addresses being short. And as Char noted, in the early days of cable, neighbors used to find each other in their Network Neighborhood. It seems that it would be cheaper and allow for more expansion if cable companies can share IP addresses across a group. So it seems farfetched that everyone online could have their own IP address. But I don't know the details of how it works. I thought maybe someone else might. | Many websites don't even | have their own IP address. | | False. All web domains have an IP address. | Again by definition. They have an IP address by definition, but not necessarily a dedicated IP address, which is what I'm wondering about. If you look at webhosting options you'll see that a dedicated IP is sometimes an option. Probably the cheapo servers like Dreamhost don't even offer it. That limits how many customers they can have. And IP4 addresses have already run out. Shared IP means aaa.com, bbb.com and ccc.com can all have the same IP address, which points to their server. A requested page would then be determined from the GET. So Dreamhost doesn't have to dedicate either a device or an IP to an individual customer. They just put each domain in a separate folder on one machine and figure it out as the GETS come in. Given all that, it made me wonder whether a site can really track visitors, realistically, by IP. In fact, it's not unusual in my own web logs to see commercial GETs coming from numerous, similar IPs, even for one page and it's related images. And it's common (I don't know why) to see things like an IP that resolves to Brazil in terms of geolocation load a webpage, followed by an IP from Europe that downloads a linked file. Yet both show the same company in a hostname resolution. I guess the test would be whether deleting cookies when the browser closes, and blocking local storage "supercookies", allows one to get more articles. And it could also be possible to track people with web bugs, in which case deleting cache would also be necessary. All of those methods seems more realistic than IP blocking, but I just don't know enough about it to be sure. Increasingly I've seen what might be called "passive aggressive" blocking. Pages designed to malfunction if you don't allow them to run code, show ads, etc. Forbes.com, for example, started making their page all javascript. It's effectively a software program. Similarly, someone sent a link to a shopping page at "Google Express" the other day. (First I've heard of that site). With script blocked the page was blank. Looking at the source code I saw that Google had embedded even the page text into javascript. Little or no HTML. They're deliberately showing a blank page if script is disabled. "Yes, we want you to buy stuff here, but not if we can't spy on you!" In a similar vein, npr.org (of all people, a non- profit news organization!) periodically shows me a page with two choices: 1)Enable script and agree to allow us to spy on you or 2) View our homepage as nothing but a list of links. And many sites now do things like putting a big, gray rectangle on top of the content, which gets removed by script. So without script I have to disable CSS in order to read the page. Yet I can always read articles at NYT as long as I allow cookies. Though I've never tried reaching their daily limit and deleting cookies. I'm usually only going there to see one thing that's linked from elsewhere. Interestingly, NYT was one of the first to create a "paywall" and they claim their online subscriptions are very successful, especially among young people. |
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