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Blog Anonymously

uglyduck.ca

21–30 of 482 posts

Re: Blog Anonymously

#21
post #7

Somehow the instruction that "Don't connect to your home/work WiFi" is down 3 lines before the end (Point 8 of "Notes"). I'd expect it to be between points 1 and 2 of Instructions. Just as a mental exercise, it seems going to a local coffee shop would make me easily spottable on CCTV, especially if they can correlate visits and posting times...

If you always blog from the same local coffee shop, or from places around your house, it also makes it easier to nail you down as the author

Re: Blog Anonymously

#22
post #7

Somehow the instruction that "Don't connect to your home/work WiFi" is down 3 lines before the end (Point 8 of "Notes"). I'd expect it to be between points 1 and 2 of Instructions. Just as a mental exercise, it seems going to a local coffee shop would make me easily spottable on CCTV, especially if they can correlate visits and posting times...

Never turn on the burner outside where you want to blog.

Re: Blog Anonymously

#23
For "casual bloggers who wish to keep their identities hidden from the general public", a good number of suggestions seem totally unnecessary, e.g. using a burner device, or avoid home/work networks (when you're already using Tor). What's the attack vector here? Someone hacking into wordpress.com servers and getting your OS/browser signatures (both pluggable)? Then what? And assuming they can hack into wordpress.com servers, your email alone would be a lot more valuable than aforementioned signatures.

Meanwhile, for people worried about nation state actors, using a free blogging service is probably not enough, since it's damn hard these days to sign up for popular services that don't eventually link back to you.

Re: Blog Anonymously

#24
post #4

This goes into the how, but to me the more interesting question is the 'why'. Why should someone interact with something that the author doesn't throw his/her/their name into? I only have one example of why; I'm a genuinely curious and open person and I like having my beliefs tested, some of my beliefs are nuanced enough that I sometimes break down my current beliefs and my reasons into blog posts. Things that I thin…

While mobs have existed since eternity, the internet amplifies mob voices and makes everything you ever said available to a determined adversary. Since it isn't possible to predict what will be acceptable in society 10 years later, it makes sense to blog anonymously, lest the mob comes for you and even your loved ones who may not even share your opinions.

Re: Blog Anonymously

#25
post #14

> Why should someone interact with something that the author doesn't throw his/her/their name into? We currently live in a "there is only one correct opinion, all others must be canceled" culture. They've already come for anyone who showed even the faintest trace of dissent from the mindlessly woke mob's narrative. Next they'll come for those who have stayed silent. Failure to project virtue signaling will soon be us…

I’m not sure if you’re aware or not. But you just proved a point I made.

I read it as supporting your point.

Re: Blog Anonymously

#26
post #14

> Why should someone interact with something that the author doesn't throw his/her/their name into? We currently live in a "there is only one correct opinion, all others must be canceled" culture. They've already come for anyone who showed even the faintest trace of dissent from the mindlessly woke mob's narrative. Next they'll come for those who have stayed silent. Failure to project virtue signaling will soon be us…

I’m not sure if you’re aware or not. But you just proved a point I made.

Because you started your comment with a question asking why, people thought you were genuinely asking a question rather than trying to make a point.

Re: Blog Anonymously

#27
post #9

When the author started with "this is not fool-proof by any means" the first thing that came to my mind was linguistic fingerprinting.

He does advise to use google translate to move the content from the original language to a different one and then back to alleviate this.

I think this is a great first stab at the problem, but for two reasons I think a robust solution needs more work:

- The first is that, as someone else pointed out, Google is almost certainly logging your translation queries.

- Secondly, even if you do it offline (as someone else suggested) the approach itself might not work. Success in linguistic forensics isn't based (as we might naively assume) on catching obscure words that a particular individual has a tendency to overuse. It's based on subtle shifts in the relative frequency of functional words. Depending on the proximity of the source and target language, round-trip machine translation might not change this.

Re: Blog Anonymously

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha, "Hey Google, NSA here, do you have the server logs of people translating this passage?" Wait, why ask Google, they probably can just look in their own surveillance database. Geez, if Google Translate queries are logged, that's... a lot of information.

If you use wordpress.com from Tor and use Google Translate from Tor, what do they learn more about you than just using wordpress.com? (I have no clue)

They can see the original text, which can the be analyzed.

Re: Blog Anonymously

#29

> Why should someone interact with something that the author doesn't throw his/her/their name into? We currently live in a "there is only one correct opinion, all others must be canceled" culture. They've already come for anyone who showed even the faintest trace of dissent from the mindlessly woke mob's narrative. Next they'll come for those who have stayed silent. Failure to project virtue signaling will soon be us…

> We currently live in a "there is only one correct opinion, all others must be canceled" culture.

I fully blame twitter (and the medias obsession with it) for this.

Re: Blog Anonymously

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha, "Hey Google, NSA here, do you have the server logs of people translating this passage?" Wait, why ask Google, they probably can just look in their own surveillance database. Geez, if Google Translate queries are logged, that's... a lot of information.

If you use wordpress.com from Tor and use Google Translate from Tor, what do they learn more about you than just using wordpress.com? (I have no clue)

I think what we’re concluding here is that using Google to obscure the linguistic style is flawed, because a state actor could obtain the original linguistic style from Google records, or from their own records of snooped traffic.

In other words: the blog should find a way to obscure linguistic style offline.

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