Neil Harris (usenet(a)tonal.clara.co.uk) [050122 06:06]:
Because of the way that AOL runs their network, even a
single user in a
single session will appear to edit from a wide number of different IPs.
More than this, they deliberately hide the IP addresses of their
customers, by not revealing it in the proxy headers. Even if you go to
HTTPS, you will still get a proxied connection. In effect, AOL is a
giant anonymizing server farm for its users - and some of them know it.
AOL hosts quite a lot of good users, as well as a fair few relatively
The real problem is not its anonymising nature - we have several known
special-case ISP proxies which are effectively unblockable to avoid
collateral damage, including one current en: Arbitration Committee case -
but its sheer size. AOL has 30% of all Internet users. That's one hell of a
special case!
- d.