Russians Caught Out by IP Address
This is of course, a very old story now but it’s interesting to see that things haven’t changed that much. In 2022, the Russian state media is still nothing more than a propaganda machine with very little truthful content. This story was surprising not for the lies that were told but how little care was taken to hide the deceit. Fortunately, many more Russians in 2022 are able to access other sources of news and at least some are able to discover the truth.
It’s astonishing to think that a Russian state media channel would go around changing Wiki pages in order to pass blame in a different direction. But possibly even more amazing that they were stupid enough to do it from a PC connected with an IP address registered to their company, no proxy or VPN like this!
So what’s happened is that a journalist or other person employed by the All Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VGTRK) has sat in the office and changed a story about the Malaysian Flight MH7 air disaster.
IN the very likely true initial version the sentence read –
“by terrorists of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic with Buk system missiles, which the terrorists received from the Russian Federation,”
However an hour later that was modified to this –
“The plane was shot down by Ukrainian soldiers”
Maybe they were hoping that the edit wouldn’t be noticed, in fact it was picked up by a Twitter bot, but the reality is that the edit would be visible for years to come. Russia seems to have lost a bit of ground in the digital propaganda wars, modifying such visible sites whilst using an IP address registered to the Russian government is a bit hopeless unless you wanted to get caught and look even more guilty!
It seems that the realisation that we are all tracked and logged by our IP address still seems to have not dawned many. I mean you would have thought the Russian Government would have a few paranoid ex-KGB types to figure this stuff out. Reports are all over the news with American and UK agencies routinely monitoring huge amounts of internet data. Sneaking an edit into a Wikipedia page, looks rather amateurish especially without using a fake ip. It’s rather good to know that there are a lot of Bots out there routinely monitoring activity on these sites from known addresses of the world’s governments. Although it also worries me slightly that they keep catching them out so easily.
References: https://www.theninjaproxy.org/privacy/change-your-ip-address-instagram/