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  #1  
Old August 9th 18, 06:30 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Dave C[_2_]
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Posts: 67
Default Newspaper Tracking

There are three people in my house. All of us read newspaper posts
from our prior home town paper; using the same Internet access
provider.

Each month, all of us quickly learn that we have exceeded the monthly
"article" limit. Is there any way I can reset. whatever page view
"counter" - so that each can have have their own individual usage
limit (not collective/ ala sum of our three users)?
  #2  
Old August 9th 18, 06:38 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Andy Burns[_6_]
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Posts: 1,318
Default Newspaper Tracking

Dave C wrote:

There are three people in my house. All of us read newspaper posts
from our prior home town paper; using the same Internet access
provider.

Each month, all of us quickly learn that we have exceeded the monthly
"article" limit. Is there any way I can reset. whatever page view
"counter" - so that each can have have their own individual usage
limit (not collective/ ala sum of our three users)?


I you don't have to login to the newspaper, usually it'll be clearing
cookies from the website.

  #3  
Old August 9th 18, 06:49 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
NY
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 586
Default Newspaper Tracking

"Andy Burns" wrote in message
...
Dave C wrote:

There are three people in my house. All of us read newspaper posts
from our prior home town paper; using the same Internet access
provider.

Each month, all of us quickly learn that we have exceeded the monthly
"article" limit. Is there any way I can reset. whatever page view
"counter" - so that each can have have their own individual usage
limit (not collective/ ala sum of our three users)?


I you don't have to login to the newspaper, usually it'll be clearing
cookies from the website.


Might the site also be logging the number of page hits from an IP address?
And all the accesses from the various PCs in a household will appear as
coming from the same public WAN address. If your ISP allocates IP addresses
dynamically, you might find that rebooting the router results in a different
address so for a while you appear to be a new "person" - until that address
uses up its quota.

I've found the clearing cookies from a given PC doesn't solve the quota
problem with local papers. One paper is particularly stingy, only allowing
two stories to be read per month unless you have a subscription account.

  #4  
Old August 9th 18, 07:46 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Chris
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 832
Default Newspaper Tracking

Dave C wrote:
There are three people in my house. All of us read newspaper posts
from our prior home town paper; using the same Internet access
provider.

Each month, all of us quickly learn that we have exceeded the monthly
"article" limit. Is there any way I can reset. whatever page view
"counter" - so that each can have have their own individual usage
limit (not collective/ ala sum of our three users)?


It'll based on the IP address assigned to your router by ISP. Powering off
and on the router might force it get a new IP, but probably not.

Best bet is for each of you to get your own VPN. There are plenty available
for free.

  #5  
Old August 9th 18, 08:28 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Char Jackson
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Posts: 10,449
Default Newspaper Tracking

On Thu, 9 Aug 2018 18:46:43 -0000 (UTC), Chris
wrote:

Dave C wrote:
There are three people in my house. All of us read newspaper posts
from our prior home town paper; using the same Internet access
provider.

Each month, all of us quickly learn that we have exceeded the monthly
"article" limit. Is there any way I can reset. whatever page view
"counter" - so that each can have have their own individual usage
limit (not collective/ ala sum of our three users)?


It'll based on the IP address assigned to your router by ISP. Powering off
and on the router might force it get a new IP, but probably not.


He can probably get a new IP by changing the MAC address of the device
that connects to the cable/dsl modem, then rebooting that device.

Best bet is for each of you to get your own VPN. There are plenty available
for free.


+1 on the VPN.

  #6  
Old August 10th 18, 03:21 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Mayayana
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Posts: 6,438
Default Newspaper Tracking

"Chris" wrote

| It'll based on the IP address assigned to your router by ISP. Powering off
| and on the router might force it get a new IP, but probably not.
|

Do people have unique IP addresses? 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. Many websites don't even
have their own IP address.


  #7  
Old August 10th 18, 03:25 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
nospam
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 4,718
Default Newspaper Tracking

In article , Mayayana
wrote:

Do people have unique IP addresses?


yes.

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.


no.

Many websites don't even
have their own IP address.


yes they do.
  #8  
Old August 10th 18, 04:16 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Paul[_32_]
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Posts: 11,873
Default Newspaper Tracking

Mayayana wrote:
"Chris" wrote

| It'll based on the IP address assigned to your router by ISP. Powering off
| and on the router might force it get a new IP, but probably not.
|

Do people have unique IP addresses? 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. Many websites don't even
have their own IP address.


I'm on ADSL, and my previous ISP had a pool of around
3 million DHCP IP addresses. Powering off the modem and
powering on again, would give a different IP address.

Cable modems are different. They're not likely to be
as stealthy as my ADSL situation. The MAC address may
affect whether the cable modem even comes up.

With ADSL, the phone company has some idea what copper pair is
connected to your house, so you can't exactly plug
the modem in some place you're not supposed to, and
have it work. Your userID/password would be associated
with a single physical location and copper demarc.
If I walk into my neighbors house and use their
copper pair, the authentication process at the
telco will deny the connection. My networking
equipment could have any old MAC address I want,
without affecting authentication or operation.
I can switch modems, if they're both loaded
with the same userid/password pair in the
auto-login.

The ADSL can be set to log on and re-establish a
session, as soon as the power comes back. Mine is
set that way right now, but wasn't always that way.
Now that I'm on VOIP, it makes a bit more sense to
autolog it (so the phone can ring when I'm asleep).
There's nothing really amazing about this. Underneath,
it's using the same ole PPP that dialup modems used.
Just a different version (PPPOE or PPPOA or a ton
of other variants I didn't know existed).

*******

Deleting cookies is harder than it looks, because
of the variety of techniques used. Nobody really
sticks to just the "cookie file" when money is
involved. They'll use evercookie techniques. I
don't even think I could safely clean Chrome,
without breaking something. Other browsers are
a bit easier to clean. I have one browser where
clicking "remove private data" or whatever,
does nothing. And the cache is still fully
loaded. Nothing a hammer cannot fix :-)
So if I "want to read the newspaper", I use
the browser where cleaning is possible, and
remove whatever passes for evercookie.

I suppose you could try an incognito session
using the browser, but they must be able to
detect that. If any browser causes a $$$ site
to lose "control", there's got to be a back
door so they can regain control. Browsers
should always "bend" to support commercial
interest, not vice versa.

If a person wants to make a profession out
of this, there's always GreaseMonkey or
TamperMonkey. Maybe a file for one of those
already exists, to defeat the newspaper company
tracking attempts. You could try "NameOfNewspaper
GreaseMonkey TamperMonkey" and see what pops up.
All I managed to make work with those, is the
barest of "Hello World" programs, just to prove
what triggers it and how it works. It's outside
my pay scale to write actual useful scripts in .js.

Paul
  #9  
Old August 10th 18, 06:20 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Char Jackson
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 10,449
Default Newspaper Tracking

On Thu, 09 Aug 2018 23:16:47 -0400, Paul wrote:

Mayayana wrote:
"Chris" wrote

| It'll based on the IP address assigned to your router by ISP. Powering off
| and on the router might force it get a new IP, but probably not.
|

Do people have unique IP addresses?


Generally yes. Each household gets a unique public (routable) IP
address, but of course multiple people can share that address if they
use a router to translate from that address to another address (NAT).
Next door to me there are 3 unrelated adults renting a house. To the
outside world, they share a single IP address, but on their side of
their router they each have a unique (non-routable) LAN address.

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.


Huh? Crazy talk, but that might refer to HFC networks from the late
1990's, before Baseline Privacy (BPI) existed, where everyone on a given
node was essentially on the same network, (people could see each other's
shared folders and print to strange printers), but that didn't mean that
two or more people used the same IP address. Each household still got
one or more unique IP addresses assigned.

Many websites don't even
have their own IP address.


Every website has an IP address, but what I think he means is that
multiple websites can share an IP address. In that case, instead of
using the address to figure out which site the client is requesting, the
web server examines the Host header. Alternatively, multiple websites
can share an IP address if each site listens on a unique port. 80 and
443 are the HTTP and HTTPS defaults, but nearly any port can be used.

I'm on ADSL, and my previous ISP had a pool of around
3 million DHCP IP addresses. Powering off the modem and
powering on again, would give a different IP address.

Cable modems are different. They're not likely to be
as stealthy as my ADSL situation. The MAC address may
affect whether the cable modem even comes up.


The MAC address of the cable modem needs to be registered with the ISP,
but it's the MAC address of the first connected device, the device
that's connected to the LAN side of the modem, that determines which IP
address will be assigned to the WAN side of that device. Many times that
device is a router, but it's frequently a PC. Either way, change the MAC
and you get a different IP. Change it back and you get the old IP,
assuming it's still available. As long as the lease is valid, they'll
hold it for you.

With ADSL, the phone company has some idea what copper pair is
connected to your house, so you can't exactly plug
the modem in some place you're not supposed to, and
have it work.


With cable modems, once the modem is registered it should work anywhere
on that node. Then again, people don't usually grab their modem and head
to the neighbor's house.

  #10  
Old August 10th 18, 07:58 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Chris
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 832
Default Newspaper Tracking

Mayayana wrote:
"Chris" wrote

| It'll based on the IP address assigned to your router by ISP. Powering off
| and on the router might force it get a new IP, but probably not.
|

Do people have unique IP addresses?


Not people,devices. Devices directly connected to the internet have to have
an IP address, by definition.

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.

Many websites don't even
have their own IP address.


False. All web domains have an IP address. Again by definition. Bigger
domains will exist on multiple IPs for resilience.

  #11  
Old August 10th 18, 01:47 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Mayayana
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 6,438
Default 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.


  #12  
Old August 10th 18, 01:55 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
nospam
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 4,718
Default Newspaper Tracking

In article , Mayayana
wrote:


... it made me wonder whether a site
can really track visitors, realistically, by IP.


absolutely, along with a lot of other things.
  #13  
Old August 10th 18, 03:27 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
sxgvegovujvdhdfortughjk
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Posts: 3
Default Newspaper Tracking

On 8/10/2018 5:47 AM, Mayayana wrote:

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.


Daily limit? The current NYT limit is 5 articles per MONTH.

they claim their online subscriptions are very successful


Digital subscriber numbers have recently shot up in the newspaper
industry in general, a phenomenon some refer to as the “Trump bump"...
  #14  
Old August 12th 18, 06:50 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
chris[_5_]
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Posts: 2
Default Newspaper Tracking

On Fri, 10 Aug 2018 08:47:46 -0400, "Mayayana"
wrote:

"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.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion


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.


It's easier to give everyone a unique IP address. Large scale NAT is
called "Carrier Grade NAT" (CGNAT), but most ISPs don't want to deal
with its complexities, nor do they have the hardware or the capabilities
to do so. NAT in a SoHo router is one thing; NAT for an entire ISP is a
whole different world.


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.


It's not farfetched at all, and lots of people know how it works. What
questions do you have?


| 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.


It's called virtual hosting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_hosting

IIS, Internet Information Services, is included with every version of
Windows. IIS supports virtual hosting, so you can test it there. Just
create multiple sites in IIS, all using the same IP but different root
folders. IIS will check the Host header on each request to see which
site is being requested.


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.


Not really. Putting it another way, virtual hosting limits the number of
IP address that are required.


And IP4 addresses have already run out.


No, they haven't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion


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.


You're talking about the Host header, which is mandatory in HTTP/1.1
requests (what you call GETs). You can see it with any HTTP-aware tool.
The easiest is probably curl.exe with the -v option.


Given all that, it made me wonder whether a site
can really track visitors, realistically, by IP.


Generally, sites track visitors by cookie, but if cookies are disabled
at the client, they'll fall back to IP address. IP tracking is not
optimal, especially since an IP address could be used by different
people at different times, or different people at the same time.


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.


No idea what you're trying to say there.


-chris
  #15  
Old August 10th 18, 09:04 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Sam E[_2_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 248
Default Newspaper Tracking

On 08/10/2018 01:58 AM, chris wrote:

[snip]

Many websites don't even
have their own IP address.


False. All web domains have an IP address. Again by definition. Bigger
domains will exist on multiple IPs for resilience.


That one was true. Read the "THEIR OWN" part. Nothing was said about not
having an IP address.
 




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