As much as I'd love to know if those IPs came from Tesla too, I am very much against asking HN to expose information about users because (unlikely as it is to happen) it would very easily set a precedent for witch-hunting.
Hopefully somebody smart enough will uncover another way to correlate this information back to Tesla.
For this submission, I can say I'm definitely not working for Tesla. I found the link in my twitter feed ( https://twitter.com/chrismatthieu/status/717797775912480772 RT by Brendan Eich ). Didn't realise it's been posted before, apologies for that.
For the future: please send questions like this to [email protected]. It's totally hit and miss whether we'll see them in the threads like this.
I looked and found no evidence, not even a tinge, of the things you're asking about. Seems most likely that a bunch of people ran across the story on the internet and thought HN would like it. Tesla is one of a few strains of high-grade local catnip, so they weren't wrong.
Btw other users posted the article too but hit the dupe detector. The ones who varied the URL made it past the dupe detector, which is how it's designed to work.
Do companies like Tesla have identifiable IP blocks in this day and age?
Yes they do. Although they are not necessarily the only IPs that a company uses.
Tesla's ASN is 394161 and I only see one block of IP's allocated to them 209.133.79.0/24. So that's obviously not enough IPs for the entire company.
Can we ask for an investigation here? I'd like to know:
- Do the IPs of the 3 people who posted the articles match an IP of Tesla Motors?
- How did the 3 people discover the articles?
- How come they posted different urls, with different titles, to the same article?
If my intuition is correct, you might flag the accounts; but even more interesting is you might happen to uncover an deceiving behaviour from Tesla. Passionating!