>>Edit: I wonder how imprudent it was of me to not use a VPN'd account to write this comment.
Unless they can hack HN servers to check its logs, I don't see how they'd track down the IP from where your comment was submitted from.
Unless they can hack HN servers to check its logs, I don't see how they'd track down the IP from where your comment was submitted from.
@dang, you don’t?
Small traffic bursts going out, slightly larger ones coming in: surfing, reading the front page. (Or new post page.) Small traffic burst going out, lots of traffic coming in: loading an active topic thread page. Slightly bigger traffic burst going out, lots of traffic coming back in: posting a comment to an active, non-trivial thread.
Number of packets (and total outgoing bytes) are useful for bucketing the size of the comment posted. Short comments should fit into a single payload packet. Longer comments obviously have their payload split across multiple packets, and by counting the total bytes sent, you have a decent estimate to the size of the comment posted.
Combine comment timestamps with their lengths and you can infer quite a bit.
HTTPS is a great first-base — it is not enough.