hckrnws

This vaguely reminds me of years ago when a friend got hit at an intersection and went to court to fight that he wasn't at fault. I ran the numbers a bit and found that whoever hit him would've been moving at a very high though not outlandish (think maybe 60mph in a 30mph or something) speed. But they never showed up and he won by default

A whole other part of this argument that could be made is about the inherent assumption that a ping timeout is caused by an event that only affects one machine.

For sure. Having lived on IRC for a while many years ago, I assure any bystanders that this is assuredly not always the case.

Ergo isn't a federated server, it's meant to scale vertically

The internet is a "federated" network though, so their point still applies.

Glad to see a case that could've very easily gone sideways due to its technical nature come out right.

The facts were never argued, the other party failed to follow procedure.

After "being warned of the consequences on multiple occasions the Schestowitzes never provided any witness statements", so that's hardly Matthew's fault.

See also https://techrights.org/i/2025/12/case-judgment-summary.html

Ironically I think the technical analysis argues that he could infact be guilty.

He goes from, 11 seconds is a big gap to, anything within 90 seconds could be the same person.

The real question is, how often did the timeouts coincide.

It does not. He said that if we're using approximately similar times to establish identity, then by using that logic, it could also establish that Schestowitz was that alleged sockpuppet account. (Transitively, does that mean Garrett and Schestowitz are the same person? Have we ever seen them in a room together? Hmm.)

But honestly, anyone who ever spent any amount of time on IRC is used to seeing 50 people drop from a channel at once. That was usually due to netsplits, which isn't the case here since there was only one IRC server involved, but that wasn't the only cause. "Uh-oh, the IRC server got too laggy and couldn't service all requests within the configured timeout. Time to disconnect everyone!"

Your assumption is that a 11 second delta is a somewhat better evidence than a 90 seconds delta, but the provided article successfully defended this isn't the case IMO. It depends on the last activity of the user

The article also shows that there's a 40 second delta between the harassing account and the harassed person himself, further semonstrating this doesn't mean anything and can happen purely by chance

I do agree, though, that a pattern of synchronized account activity actually suggests something more than a single example.