Footprints on the Internet

So the deal is that an Spanish team published about this new object before an American team who had been sitting on the data for a while. But the Americans claim the Spanish guys found some of their data on an open website, and used it get into print sooner.

BrooklynDodger doesn’t care so much about these priority issues. What bothers the Dodger is that browsers on a web site can be tracked down. In this case, the tracker was the master of the website which was visited. The Dodger wonders whether a third party – the cops – can track visitors to a site as well.

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One Find, Two Astronomers: An Ethical Brawl
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: September 13, 2005

…“In fact, Dr. Brown himself had inadvertently made such a leak possible.
In the abstracts he referred to "Santa" by a code name, K40506A, which was the same code name his team had used in its observing logs. As a result, as Dr. Brown discovered to his horror the night of Dr. Ortiz's announcement, any astronomer who read the abstracts and typed "K40506A" into an Internet search program would be taken to a Web site containing the observing logs of Smarts, the Small and Moderate Aperture Research Telescope System. It was one of those telescopes, at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, that Dr. Brown and his colleagues were using to track the object.”
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Dr. Pogge, who maintains the Smarts telescope Web site, decided to investigate the traffic on the site.
He found that computers from an unfamiliar address had visited the Web site eight times from July 26 to 28, when the Spanish group was making its announcement. Each time the computers went straight to pages deep within the site that described the Brown group's observations of K40506A.
The first three visits happened a few minutes apart early on July 26, a day and a half before the Ortiz group made its announcement. Another cluster of hits came on the morning of the July 28 before the object was observed in Mallorca and Dr. Ortiz made his more complete report to the astronomical union.
Dr. Pogge was able to trace the computers through the so-called IPP numbers, which the Internet assigns to each computer on it. Those numbers eventually led him to the Web site of the Andalusian Institute. Dr. Pogge said he gasped out loud when it popped up.
"I remember saying, 'Oh no, oh no, oh no,' over and over again," he said.
Moreover, the IPP numbers of the intruders match the numbers on the e-mail messages Mr. Santos-Sanz and Dr. Ortiz sent to the Minor Planet office, according to Dr. Marsden.