this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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Correct me if I'm wrong but ISPs dynamically assign WAN IPs to the vast majority of their non-enterprise consumer base, right? If that's the case, how would historical posts on 4chan have any relevant data to dox someone with? Wouldn't the window of opportunity have passed for pretty much everything older than a few weeks?
Every ISP I've dealt with thus far has kept me on the same dynamic IP for years on end.
Only once did it actually change for me, and it was seemingly random so I assume they must have updated the lease block range.
It kind of makes sense because if some 3 letter agency asks for a historical lookup, they have less data they need to store compared to constantly rotating IPs to everyone.
This is highly dependent on where you are, and your ISP. I get new IPs basically daily. Even my ipv6 prefix changes daily for no reason other than to be annoying I guess. It's infuriating, but somewhat convenient for privacy reasons (only).
Were I live, it updates at least once a month and i think its on purpose. If you want a static IP, you gotta buy the business plan. I do host stuff so instead of spending the extra $200 or so a month for that plan I just use DDNS with my domain and setup a small app that the domain provider gives which periodically checks your public IP and changes it where your DNS settings are hosted.
It was a pain when my friend used to set up Minecraft servers. New month? Well shit time to fix the server again.
It's not super useful for doxing by normies necessarily but you better believe ISPs also log which customer gets which IP and keep that historical data (because they can definitely send copyright notices for torrent seeding) and law enforcement can subpoena or sometimes just ask nicely for historical IP data.
And that's a dangerous thing when regimes come to power and want certain speech squashed, especially if you believe you're reasonably anonymized.
I can confirm that not only is this true, but it's been this way since the 1990's. The metadata correlates the IP address, date/time information, and customer account number. It's highly likely that any given ISP will have this data going back years, if not decades. It really doesn't take up much space.
I can also confirm the "just ask nicely" part. I've seen it with my own eyes that it really comes down the scruples of the people guarding said data. There exists no law that prevents that information from being disclosed to anyone.
Sir. This is a meme community. Please refrain from making sense.
Yep and even better than that; most if not all residential ISPs use Carrier-grade NAT so one IP (which changes), now represents hundreds if not tens of thousands of their customers.
At the very best, you could maybe narrow an IP to a very vague geographical area like several suburbs, or a specific town maybe.
Well yeah. IPs are basically worthless nowadays. As in, if you have a public v4 address you probably have a domain registered to that IP anyway. And v6 addresses can be changed on request too.
Yes
If it’s serious enough, I’m sure they could trace it back with a request to the ISP. I’d have to imagine they keep a log of everything.