How can I find out who is behind a Web page ?

October 21, 2006 9:14 AM

How can the identity of a web page creator be discovered?I have a problem with a local web page that is letting out sensitive cave locations and I want to try to contact the owner and let them know and perhaps inform/convince them to remove the problem.

The web page is rather odd for 2 reasons.

1) There are many spelling mistakes and the offending data is in the background images. The web page creator states emphatically that they will not give out the locations ,yet they inadvertently do with the background. This makes me think it is a neophyte web user and new cave explorer who is just enthusiastic about the caves. The fact that is in an Angelfire host adds to my neophyte thoughts.

2) Some of the terminology used on the web page indicate a very high level of cave and karst knowledge. I rarely use the terms and I work with cave scientists/geologists daily.

This leads me to believe the web page is created in a neophyte style to cover for someone in the "know" to disseminate information that should not be shared. Caves unfortunately can have a lot of politics and some disgruntled people will purge information in retaliation for real or imagined "slights"

This web page has become a problem for a few reasons.

1) Damage has already increased dramatically due to extra traffic in these rare and fragile examples.

2) The caves are partially on private property and the posting of the locations is severely threatening years of negotiated access.

3)Directions shared on the page lead to certain locations where severe bodily harm can easily happen due to certain biological elements and as well trespassing instructions.

I will not post the web page as that would add fuel to the fire. Does anyone have any legal methods they can recommend to perhaps find this persons email/method of contact?

posted by plumberonkarst to computers & internet (11 comments total)

If by "legal" you mean "through the legal system," you'll probably have to talk to a lawyer to get those arranged anyway, so why not just ask them?

If by "legal" you mean "not illegal," I can't think of anything short of the legal system. If there's no contact information on the site (and you might want to glance through the source to check and make sure it's not hidden in some metadata), then the only people who have that information is Angelfire, and I doubt they're going to share it with you without a very good reason. Like a subpoena.

This sucks, but people are generally allowed to be jerks, within limits.
posted by brett at 9:26 AM on October 21, 2006

There may be a clue in the source of the page, like a username or some such that could be used to identify the guy behind the page. If you can find anything that looks like an identifier you can try searching for additional appearances of that, or you could use the info in a social engineering exploit to gain further info, but how to do that is beyond the scope of this discussion.

You should consider posting the URL, because as the thepurification.org question showed, people around here love digging into things, and would probably view it as a challenge.
posted by Mr. Gunn at 9:56 AM on October 21, 2006

no whois.org? dnsreport.com?
posted by prodevel at 10:01 AM on October 21, 2006

I have some experience tracking down spammers, which might be applicable to your problem. However, without seeing the site it is difficult to offer any specific advice. I assume that when you say "Angelfire host" you mean they are using AngelFire's/Lycos' free hosting, not their for-pay domain hosting. Tracking down the owner of an anonymous site hosted by one of the free web hosts can be difficult if you don't have the cooperation of the host. Here are some techniques sometimes used by anti-spammers back when "post throw-away sites on uncooperative free hosts" was a common spammer tactic:

• "Follow the money" - spammers generally had to have some way collect the benefits from their spam. This probably doesn't really apply to your situation.
• External links - carefully examine all links away from the site, including the URLs for inline images. Sometimes you can deduce that another site is likely also maintained by the same person (perhaps an image host, another free provider, etc.). This site may contain contact information, or if not, the host for this other site may be more cooperative. Links that contain affiliate codes can also be useful in tracking down a site maintainer (although this, again, probably applies more to spammer's sites than your site).
• Hidden information - sometimes you can find clues in documents hosted at the site. HTML documents sometimes reveal information when you examine the HTML source. PDF and Word documents sometimes contain names in their metadata or other details. In particularly, a binary examination of a Word document might reveal content from earlier revisions of the document, such as contact information that was deleted. Even JPG images can have clues in EXIF tags or other metadata.
• website traffic packages - check and see if the site uses one of the free statistical pages. If you examine the source you can often see the account code. The free statistical packages sometimes default to having the gathered statistics being publicly viewable. You might be able to glean clues from this.
• website referrers - if you have reason to believe that the maintainer of the site occasionally examines the referrers to his or her site using a stat package (perhaps because they are interested in finding out when someone links to them), then there is a rather underhanded trick you can use. Over a period of time send a series of requests to their site that contain as their referrer a site that you operate (and to which you have access to the logs). If their stat package is one of the ones that produce reports using HTML (and many are), then if they click on your referrer to see your site you'll get their referrer (and more importantly, their IP address) in your log files.

There are many other things you can try, but those are some good things to start with.
posted by RichardP at 10:16 AM on October 21, 2006 [3 favorites]

prodevel: whois won't help because as the OP stated, the website is hosted on Angelfire.
posted by doomtop at 10:18 AM on October 21, 2006

Is there any way to bait him out? For example, lets say *cough* a university professor who actually does do research in karst environments were to get in touch with him/her (is there an email, even a throw-away one?) and ask some flattering questions that could lead to them. Gotta protect the karst, sometimes from being loved too much.
posted by Rumple at 10:44 AM on October 21, 2006

And, if no email, then lure them out with another karst oriented site hosted at a respectable institution and a mefi-conspiracy to drive a lot of traffic to their site in the hope that they'll get in touch that way - again via flattery.
posted by Rumple at 10:51 AM on October 21, 2006

After a quick search I found what I believe to be the offending page. I didn't see any obvious clues as to the author's identity, but other pages on his site have pictures of the author-- is it possible one of your caving friends would recognize him?

The best idea might be to ignore it-- do you have reason to believe the webpage in question is a popular one?

As an alternate solution, could you type up a very polite letter mentioning that a caver has may be inadvertently revealing the cave's location on his angelfire page and post it near the cave entrance? Not sure this is really a great idea though.
posted by justkevin at 11:30 AM on October 21, 2006

www.arin.net/whois - see if the person who registered the domain has their info listed.
posted by chrisamiller at 12:38 PM on October 21, 2006

You could probably complain to Angelfire that the guy is using the site to give out sensitive information, and it contains photos of him trespassing on private property.
posted by knave at 3:01 PM on October 21, 2006

Chrisamiller, did you read the post and the subsequent comments? It's a page hosted on Angelfire; ARIN will tell the OP who the contact is for Angelfire's domain, but won't help at all with the owner of some random subpage there.
posted by delfuego at 9:52 AM on October 22, 2006