Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Confessions of a spy

I’d been hoping to leave the werewolves in the dark about this, but the Town Meeting forces me to bring out my own methods in self defense.

The e-mail I sent out after the first zhandwolf e-mail was a ploy to get everyone involved to send me a message so that I’d get the IP address of their local mail server.  Unfortunately, gmail forwards its messages along its own private network, so results there are limited.

However, Yahoo! mail doesn’t even attempt to hide the IP address of the sender.  A quick inspection of the e-mail headers shows that the zhandwolf e-mail originated in New York while my own mass e-mail in response originated in Texas.  Anyone who got both e-mails should be able to confirm this.  And while it’s apparently possible to fake the sender’s IP address, Yahoo! mail uses software that alerts you when this happens.

posted by Bucky at 24 Oct 2007 16:36:00 UTC Comments (4)

Comments

Chivalrybean:

24-10-2007 17:10:46 UTC

So, who lives in New York?

Clucky: he/him

24-10-2007 17:24:18 UTC

Wait what? I remember getting a PM here from some random guy who had made an second account trying to get in touch with the werewolves in a sneaky manner, and being tempted to run an IP check as IPs are stored within EE—but thinking that would be against the spirit of the game. But I never got an email from you, so this defense sounds rather… sketchy?

Brendan: he/him

24-10-2007 17:34:08 UTC

Very sketchy, both in spirit and in fact.  “Possible to fake the sender’s IP address?”  POSSIBLE?  Hi, welcome to the internet.  We have a thing here called “spam.”

Your lack of back hair was leading me toward not suspecting you, but this is too much.  The fact that you’ve clearly been saving this up to use as a lynching defense speaks very strongly against you.

Bucky:

24-10-2007 21:15:04 UTC

I’m bringing this up only because the main reason for my lynching was the “email strangeness”.  This post was an attempt to clear that up