According to Forbes, Griffith insisted that his reasoning behind creating these tools isn’t to invade anyone’s privacy or encourage better privacy protection. Although, he does believe that if something like this could be created by a hacker so easily, they Wikipedia should create better anonymity tools. In any case, he believes “if people are anonymous, the quality of their contribution is probably much lower… Wouldn’t you want Wikipedia users to be held accountable for what they change?”

He's done this by exploiting a bug in Wikipedia (which has been fixed since he wrote the tool). The Wikipedia bug involved a glitch in the system that sometimes exposed the IP address of Wikipedia's registered account holders if they took too long to edit a discussion page on Wikipedia while logged in. What would happen is the session would time out and would submit the account holder's change with his or her IP address instead of the username, as it was supposed to do.

Griffith says that generally when this happened, the user would quickly log back into the account and replace the published IP address with a user name to retain his or her anonymity. But in doing so, they actually exposed themselves in a more damning way that could be tracked.

"It means you can troll all of Wikipedia looking for any cases where an IP address was removed and a user name was added and have a connection between an IP address and a user name from a single edit," he says.

Paterson, New Jersey. NetRange: 71.96.0.0 - 71.127.255.255