Santa was here! Merry Signal Analysis!

It's that time of year again, when millions of humans stop behaving like who they really are and pretend to be good people for a short time. But some people just keep doing what they do, for better or worse. Case in point is another peek at the Impossibly Stupid site logs:

Saturday, 25 December 2010

4:56am

A new user account is created with an email address at 85.9.25.17 (epages.ro), located in Romania. That site doesn't appear to offer public email accounts, so there is a strong indication that the user was somehow connected with that geographic region.

4:58am

A login is attempted from 61.244.235.34, located in Hong Kong. This is the same IP that the account registration came from, but the login fails because a new user must respond to the email verification.

5:01am

The email verification link is followed from 212.26.44.100, located in Saudi Arabia. This is thousands of kilometers away from either of the other locations.

That means that, somehow, an email account set up in Romania was used in Hong Kong and then checked from Saudi Arabia all in the span of 5 minutes! Who could do such a thing? You might think I'd explain it away as a botnet, but the Impossibly Stupid answer for today requires far less critical thinking:

It was Santa! Santa is a registered user here!

I'm pretty honored, and I hope he finds the time to post some comments. As far as I know, impossiblystupid.com is the first site with an account setup verified on Christmas to be Santa Claus. Welcome to the Internet, big guy. If you need any help moving when the arctic sea ice melts, be sure to give me a jingle!