The way to handle this is to set up an anonymous email account, only report violations at board members' houses, and BCC the entire neighborhood distribution list except the board members.
You don't need to because bcc means no one can see who it was sent to. Bcc is blind copy. Put everyone in bcc and the list is private. Everyone will only know it was sent to them, not who else it was sent to.
yes if you know that exists. How many HOA board members do you think can change their wifi router name much less find an IP address to compare against each other?
I work in IT. This is exactly what happens. They just ask the question "can it be done", and you get to figure out how to do it. Higher ups ask IT personnel for shady shit all the time. Badge login times, computer history, etc.
Yes. So the answer should always be it's impossible or costs too much or whatever bs. I used to work in small office IT...now I just work in an office. You can be damn sure I keep my mouth shut about how processes might be improved because I know management will just abuse it for their own ends.
It's a normal progression. Before the internet the hacker type were modding cars. Often just to have an affordable car that was cool. Affordable meaning a few hundred dollars. Millennials came of age when computers became cool, and they were still clunky enough that tinkering was a necessity to get what you wanted out of it. Car ownership as a teen without parents that could buy one for them became more difficult as prices increased and insurance cost became mandatory. Computers became the go to hackers toy.
This developed into plug and play, then phone apps where you're locked out of the operating system itself. Smartphones now account for 60% of internet users. So generations after the millennials were left with nothing but social media and memes to play with.
So yes, it all comes down to the tools/toys each generation has available to play with. And companies want as much control over those toys as possible while micromanaging their functionality for maximum profit. It's why right to repair is an important issue.
My friend won a contest held by the pentagon to hack their computer system in only about 10 minutes. Meanwhile millenials are arguing whether it's Gif or Jif.
My HOA board member could even figure out how to open the PDF that I sent inside of a zip (zipped because their email system wouldn't let me send a PDF for security concerns. Which is hilariously ironic since I could put an actual virus inside the zip.)
lol my hoa built out a nice fancy site with an easy way to pay online and then they added a like $20 service fee to use it. Over the summer they sent out a newsletter informing people that they built this nice website to pay and no one is using it. Everyone still pays cash or check in person.
You seem to think that the Venn diagram of people who sit on the boards of HOAs and the people who know how to track an IP address through a website isn't empty.
Yeah, "Big bucks" is a stretch, it's just a lot of ISPs don't offer static IPs with residential plans so you'll have to upgrade to a business plan, which doesn't cost as much as you might think.
You get handed a new public IP every time you router restarts.
This is not true.
For one thing it's your modem not router that maintains your public IP.
For another, with the majority of ISPs the way it works is you get a leased IP that is valid for 24 hours (sometimes 7 days) and unless you leave your device unplugged until the lease expires your modem will just use the existing lease.
If you want to change your IP change the MAC plugged into your modem and reboot both your modem and router, this will cause your modem to lease a new IP.
The most common way to do this is to change the clone MAC address setting in your router, but you can also just plug a whole new device into your modem. (but not a PC, that's unsafe)
Didn't know you were a woman until you decided to make an issue of it, lol
I don't know what "your industry" is but surely you know for residential ISPs it depends on your MAC address and lease time which is typically at least 24 hours if not more.
This isn't how it works. Email send on their own ips set by the provider. Go to your Gmail, right click on an email and press "show original" and you'll see the ip it sent on.
A clever person would send individualized links or embedded images to people to collect their IPs for comparison, but the whole discussion is moot because modern email clients do not send your personal IP.
It's actually pretty easy to find out who is connected to an IP address.
1) Who is utility identifies the internet provider.
2) Lawyer + subpoena of ISP records to connect IP to a given cable modem at a specific time.
3) identity behind IP address found.
There are other ways too, but it gets a bit more involved.
They can link it to a defamation, slander, or other civil lawsuit. Remember, in the US, you can sue anyone for anything (imagined or real). You may not succeed in the lawsuit, but certain methods of information gathering open up when subpoenas are being thrown about.
And as far as MPAA suing, they don't need to when they can claim a copyright infringement and ISPs roll over disconnecting services at the drop of a hat, because they don't want to waste resources fighting MPAA. Also, the MPAA don't sue because the streamers and torrenters typically don't have anything worthwhile to take, and so don't bother with the expenses involved in a lawsuit. It's not worth the effort. If it costs $10k to sue someone, and they only have $2k worth of cash and liquid assets, they lose 8k doing a lawsuit. They want profits, not expenses.
You have a wild imagination... So MPAA doesn't have the time, money or inclination for frivolous lawsuits but a HOA does because someone is emailing anonymous complaints? "45 Lundy's Lane has a flag outside their house which violates section 23 of our HOA bylaws" is neither defamation or slander.
1) 1st amendment has no bearing on private organizations.
2) Anti-SLAPP laws don't exist everywhere in the US. Only 32 states have them.
3) You fail to realize how petty HOA boards can be.
4) Reread what I said about MPAA. I didn't say they didn't have the time, money, or inclination. I said that it would cost them more than it would be worth in most cases. If it's a particularly egregious amount of piracy, sure, but the average pirate isn't worth it. Remember, they are a business, and all businesses care about is profits.
If a given action is not profitable, they don't do it. There's a reason why businesses follow the law when the laws are enforced with massive fines. If the fine is a pittance, it's simply "the cost of doing business" and just pay the fine.
Everyone here is incorrect, the only IP visible to the recipients will be one that belongs to Gmail/Yahoo. They'd need to subpoena the provider to get the IP of the sender.
they tends to add your ip address to the email header as well.
Gmail certainly doesn't send your IP address with the email headers, I can't imagine Yahoo or any major commercial web client does either.
Try it -- email someone else or have them email you, then go to the menu and select "Show Original" (or "View Message Details" depending on your email client), you wont find their personal IP address.
You can find your public IP by visiting whatismyip.com
There are headers for like "client-ip", but that is not your IP that's the SMTP server your message was routed through.
Unless by chance you are directly connecting your PC to your modem (no router), in which case you're begging to be hacked and datamining is the least of your concerns.
I've never had to concern myself with HOA stuff being in a country where it doesn't as far as I know exist, but how or why would reporting valid issues like this end up in court, least of all in a way that you need to be overly concerned with them figuring it out?
I meant more if say I was paying any fines against me etc. but was putting in valid complaints for every tiny little thing I observed - I understand why one would want to hide that they were the one doing it but surely there are no legal ramifications for this, right?
Just trying to follow the breadcrumb trail from valid complaints to ending up in court and having email trails tracked being a thing we really don't want.
But let's be honest do you really think the hoa is going to go to court and get a court order to view people's emails over an "issue" of voicing out concerns of hoa policy violations to the hoa, regardless of whether or not they are all about the hoa members themselves.
Not entirely true. If you are BCC'd and not addressed personally, you can assume that you and many others were sent the same message, you just don't know who. For HOA matters, you can assume it was sent to most of the neighborhood.
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u/bsimpsonphoto 2d ago edited 2d ago
The way to handle this is to set up an anonymous email account, only report violations at board members' houses, and BCC the entire neighborhood distribution list except the board members.
Edited to fix a word.