Skeleton wrote:Jimmy it appears has found the geolocation sites that track an IP address down and provide a map all the way down to street level, but he is missing the bit that they are not accurate, and are not designed to be, either that or he stupidly thinks he can convince the ISP's to cough up the information.
In the past it was often possible to trace US users down to a regional level due to the use of geographic identifiers in the reverse DNS for the IP address. The practice of using locality names in the DNS was just traditional, however, and wasn't required behaviour and didn't see widespread usage outside of the US - and is of dubious reliability there. Elsewhere, the location given by such geolocation sites is usually taken from the whois data which is typically only accurate to the country - though some niche suppliers only operate in their own local area, and others provide services globally which can lead to their IP addresses being utilised elsewhere in the world. Using Whois data for a location typically gives the address of the offices of the ISP, which is useful if you need to obtain a court order to release customer data, but otherwise is of little value.
Obtaining an address from a comment on YouTube is doubly difficult. First, you need to persuade YouTube (operating in one jurisdiction) to hand over the IP address of the commenter to identify the ISP, then you need to persuade the ISP (probably in another jurisdiction) to identify the customer. There are ways to make this simpler: for example if someone was to post the same comment on GOODF and on YouTube, it may be possible to infer a link between an IP address obtained from GOODF and a YouTube account name, and from there link further comments from the YouTube account to the address gleaned from GOODF. This would still require co-operation from the ISP to obtain the customer details, but half the job would be done.
It should be noted that ISPs will usually keep track of which dynamic IP addresses are allocated to which customer at particular times, so it is usually possible to track an action associated to an IP address to a customer. The release of customer information is protected under the Data Protection Act and so an ISP is extremely unlikely to release this information freely.