On Friday 24 June 2005 17:53, David Gerard wrote:
Jake Waskett (jake@waskett.org) [050625 00:46]:
An admin called RickK has blocked 62.252.192.8 (for what seems to me to be a really poor reason: Autoblocked because your IP address has been recently used by "Abortion". The reason given for Abortion's block is: "troll, offensive user name".) As can be readily seen from a reverse DNS query, this IP address is a transparent proxy server, use of which is forced upon NTL users (a large UK telco). manc-cache-5.server.ntli.net
Trouble is that admins can't actually see what IP a username is coming from. So there's no indication until someone calls it to their attention.
Hmm. There seems to be a clash between anonymity and usability here, as is so often the case with security systems.
Perhaps we could allow admins to see part of the reverse DNS, but not all of it. If we strip off the last two parts of the name (in this example, leaving just "manc-cache-5.server"), we'd get something that nine times out of ten would identify a proxy or not, but would not be personally identifiable.
Reasonable?