2015-04-05 17:31 GMT+02:00 Brian Wolff bawolff@gmail.com:
Things that come to my mind: *range blocks become impossible, and its impossible to tell if vandals are using near by ips *cant do a whois on the ip to see if its a library or something
Oh, I didn't think about this!
What about: * creating a new permission group (say "IP watchers") that can see the IP in non-hashed form? * compile some sort of list and automatically tagging edits from schools and libraries? (this could be useful regardless of hashing IPs)
Suppose those first two come down to the drawback of not knowing the ip is you dont know the ip
I think that restricting the view of IPs to users that may need them (admins, checkusers, ...)
More importantly, as details of the mapping become public, its hard to hide them again. IPv4 addresses are usually dynamic, eventually some people will publish what their hash is and ip, and then everyone knows the hash (and if you follow a specific user you may be able to link one hash to another hash as belonging to the same isp, and slowly puzzle things together.
(This was also the idea of the main drawback of this algorithm as I imagined it)
I imagine data mining algorithms could be effective here, especially if you have edit history from before and after the switch) this could result in a false sense of security. Often in privacy situations less security is better than false security
Yeah, as I said on Wikimedia-l[1] there are already studies that can mine data from Wikipedia and locate the user within a area (a fairly large area, but still) and this would continue to be possible.
In this light probably even obfuscating IP only for unregistered users and keep them visible for registered users may be an idea.
Also, I don't think that hashing would provide greater security, probably would simply raise a little the bar for people wanting to locate users, but this would be a small bump in the road for an organization (say, the NSA) or individual with enough commitment and resources.
If people are looking into it, they probably know better than i do
Thanks for your answer!
2015-04-05 22:04 GMT+02:00 Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com:
This has been discussed countless times. Some links for starters: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T20981
Well, it doesn't look like the discussion was much more developed than what bawolff said here.
C [1] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2015-April/077404.html