Source Memes

Well, this image here is a screenshot, presumably of a desktop pc, of this person reporting what theyve done on a discord server.

Just from the image alone, they've blocked out their name and avatar, which is good. Further, they've also cropped out every other part of the discord server and it seems to be using default font and styling, so you cannot really get much from that.

Important to note: You seem to be assuming this posted image is from the same person who actually wrote what we read. There is no actual reason to assume that. Could just be another person in the same server, could be a copy pasta from anywhere, who knows.

Even if you looked at the exif data of the image, best you could possibly get (assuming this is the original and not a copy) is the OS, and /possibly but most likely not/ the person's user name on their computer, as well as a very, very general geolocation, probably about as vague as a city or county.

And these days you can just run an exif scrubber program on images before you upload them, or (more complicated, probably only.possible on linux), set it up so any image you capture or edit or create just automatically has all that scrubbed.

Now, you are correct that using a VPN would hide the IP of the person connecting to the Nazi server in their server logs.

However, again getting someone's IP alone is far from a surefire way of indicating that much about them, other than again a general location, their ISP and their like timezone or whatever.

(This is a whole thing about using IP logs /alone/ to prove a specific person did something bad online to a court of law: the IP will only be specific to basically your home router, and you can say that other devices connected to your router, like other family members on other devices, or even someone outside your house framing you by cracking your wifi password or using your router via some other exploit, and it is also possible to just spoof an ip to look like a specific other one via various methods, or, pretty unlikely but technically possible, hack into the ISP handing out the logs and manually edit them before theyre handed out.)

But what I am referencing here is your SteamID.

Not your IP.

Time for me to be an internet dinosaur.

Though these days on the Steam Communitt pages you are able to change your user name and avatar and even have a custom URL for your steam profile page... thats all stuff built on top of an earlier more rudimentary system.

Every Steam user has a SteamID. It is the unique identifier in the database underlying steam that /everything/ about your Steam Account is ultimately tied to. All the games you own, every comment you've made in Steam, all your achievements, literally everything.

When your account is banned from Steam, or banned from a particular game server that utilizes some version of the Source engine for multiplayer connectivity, this /directly/ references your SteamID, not your IP. Many games with their own multiplayer protocols indirectly ban you by banning an account id that is ultimately derives from your SteamID as well.

You /could/ try to IP ban someone from a Gmod server, but even a decade ago people figured out lots of ways to get around that.

You cannot spoof your SteamID without functionally finding a system wide exploit in Steam itself, or, more likely in this case, basically doing an exploit in the lua end of Garry's Mod /so hard/ that it breaks some part of Garry's Mod and/or the networking protocol it uses within Steam.

While it is, or at least was possible to do this (I know of at least 2, possibly 3 people who pulled this off /and personally proved it to me/ in earlier Gmod days)... it requires a significant level of programming skill and knowledge of Steam and Gmod code. It is functionally hacking, and is arguably illegal.

One person from that list (who went on to make many other exploits for many other games) eventually had their entire Steam account banned when they were caught doing some exploit or another, lost all their games on their account, everything.

The two others basically stopped fucking around before they found out.

This is all a very long way to say that spoofing your IP to avoid being pinpointed from connecting to a Gmod server is possible and might fool an idiot server admin, but any one with any competency at all would be looking for SteamIDs. And if you can spoof a SteamID, you are basically hacking all of Steam, which will get your account banned if you get caught, and if you use that exploit to fuck with other peoples accounts in terms of making purchases with another accounts saved credit card info and then gifting it to your actual account, at that point you could actually be looking at Federal Prison if the monetary value is high enough.

So... you technichally /can/ spoof your SteamID if you are a hacker, but /you really shouldn't/.