Hanno Böck wrote:
Am Mittwoch 27 Mai 2009 schrieb Nikola Smolenski:
I was thinking about this issue and I believe I have "the best of both worlds" solution, if someone is willing to code it. Take an IP address, concatenate it with a long string (salt), take its MD5 and use that as the anons' username. Two different IPs will have two different anon usernames, but for the readers it will not be possible to find out what is the original IP from the username.
This method only works if the salt is kept secret and changed regularly. I don't know how this could be implemented in a php app. If the salt is kept, the anonymity is not guaranteed - the range of IPs allows just calculating all of them with a given salt.
The salt must be unknown to users, of course. Site administrators may know it, but it is irrelevant since they can gather the same information from logs anyway.