Ask HN: Could Wikipedia show hashed IP addresses instead?

1 points by u-dissolve 6 years ago | 2 comments

When an unregistered Wikipedia user makes a contribution, it shows the IP address from which the edit was made instead of a username. In the interest of privacy, could Wikipedia instead display a hash of the IP address? They could still keep track of an IP address's contributions, and ban them when necessary. IP range blocks could still be issued server-side.

The IP addresses of registered users are hidden anyways (accessible only by a few certain users, and only if warranted[1]), so could Wikipedia offer this to all users?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CheckUser

pnako 6 years ago |

It would be trivial to brute force, so almost pointless.

u-dissolve 6 years ago | |

Yes, but brute forcing would take longer to do. Could they also hash it, say, a few thousand times in order to increase the cost of brute forcing?

Isn't some layer of obfuscation better than a bare IP address?