hobo

Your IP address of 172.197.48.213 shows that you are posting from America using the AOL network. If you think Africa is so great than please move there as quickly as possible.

moira de swardt

using the AOL network. If you think Africa is so great than please move
there as quickly as possible.

I've always wanted to know how to read those things.

Moira, the Faerie Godmother

conciliator

Here is an article I saved some time ago, which might give you an idea
how it all works! Hope it enlightens you.

"Let me seize this occasions to post a general outline on sleuthing
online.

As far as I have been able to find out by searching the NGs online, the
original posters under those IDs posted from the USA on the widely used
AOL network. They still do.

We know that the recent, possibly fake messages originate from the
networks in the Asia Pacific region, probably in Australia.

Thus to be more confident that we are reading the original Spinner or
Greesel or Griffith, we need to know that the post originated in the
USA.

How? Bring up the message headers for the article and look for the
header 'NNTP-Posting-Host:' or 'X-Original-NNTP-Posting-Host:'

Your headers for this message are as follows:

NNTP-Posting-Host: 172.137.208.194 and a search for the ownership of IP
address 172.137.208.194 shows that it belongs to the AOL, VA, USA –
which owns addresses in the range 172.128.0.0 to 172.191.255.255.

Thus this message was posted in USA. We would be more confident about
its origin if we had the entry for 'X-Original-NNTP-Posting-Host:'

According to my news server, 'C Spinner' has been posting from the USA
since about October 2002. Thus one will see an entry like the following:

NNTP-Posting-Host: 172.137.208.194
X-Original-NNTP-Posting-Host: 172.137.208.194 where the IP address
172.137.208.194 belongs to 'America Online' in the range 172.128.0.0 to
172.191.255.255.

At times one will read a 'name' for the host IP address entries instead
of the numeric version of the address. Look for 'aol' letters in the
name.

In short, if there is '172' or 'aol' in the entry for the posting host
then it is the fake USA's Spinner or USA's Greesel or USA's Griffith.

Life gets more complicated when more humans are involved. Shouldn't this
disruption in the newsgroups have been dealt with by now? The net is not
immune to political and governmental manipulation. Perhaps the fake is
well placed within the political and administrative system and that is
why the individuals targeted or the readers in the newsgroups cannot do
anything about the impersonation and disruptive behaviour.

Notes:
1) How can one look at the message headers? It depends on the browser or
news reader you have. Find out from a friend or the 'help' database for
the reader. For instance, in the NETSCAPE browser, access the message
you want to investigate, then click on the link 'View This Article
Only'. Then click on the link 'Original Format'.


The procedure will be different for other popular readers such as
Microsoft Outlook Express, Free Forte Agent etc.

2) How can one discover the ownership of the IP address? "The format of
an IP address is a 32-bit numeric address written as four numbers
separated by periods. Each number can be zero to 255. For example,
172.137.208.194 could be an IP address."

The IP address may also be given in the 'name' form that is easier to
identify such as 'www.microsoft.com' or 'post.myuniv.edu' or
'mail.geocidal-imf-mafia.net' which can be resolved to the numerical
form.

Once you have the target IP address that you want to investigate, the
ownership of the IP address can be found using various freely available
tools. Online tools are also available. For instance, in your browser,
access the following site:

http://samspade.org/

Enter (or Copy and paste) the target IP address into the form and 'Do
Stuff'. You will get more information about the target IP address than
you need immediately.

moira de swardt

I have saved the article even though I can't really make head or tail of it.

Moira, the Faerie Godmother

conciliator

I'm not quite sure either, not being THAT clever! However, if you right
click on a message prior to opening it, you get all sorts of technical
info. From that is where apparently you can trace where a message
originates from.

martin.looter.kingfish

Anything of value in Africa was generally created by Caucasians and if not
perpetuated by same, will not be around very long. ;-)

Well, apart from the shrunken head and genital trade, of course.

lol