Alex Cazes had bad op-sec. His #2, DeSnake, didn't, and is still alive and well and has restarted his marketplace and gives anonymous interviews to media outlets:
https://www.wired.com/story/alphabay-desnake-dark-web-interv...
Be anonymous
11–20 of 260 posts
Re: Be anonymous
#12Exhibit A: Was Mary only from Syracuse, or was Kash, kg.dev, using dating apps in Syracuse
well, I got tired of caring already, but maybe others havent.
Re: Be anonymous
#13The conclusion is a weird one, given the premise. The crux of the argument is basically true. Its an all or nothing proposition. Or you can lead a double life. One for your public persona, where you don't care at all about security, and your real persona, where you do. This has been my approach on the internet since basically it started and handles were a common thing.
I don’t think it’s all or nothing. Look at anonymous public personas like Banksy or Dril. People have tracked them down, and you can look up who they are if you try.
But for the most part these people are anonymous, and get to enjoy some of the benefits of that.
Re: Be anonymous
#14Be anonymous
Become ungovernable
Re: Be anonymous
#15The title is misleading, clickbait. The article is in fact about why it probably isn't necessary to be anonymous and even then says nothing particularly important.
A title not precisely describing the premise and conclusion of the article is neither misleading nor clickbait. The article is about online anonymity. It could be "On being anonymous" or "To be anonymous"; "Be anonymous" is fine, too.
Re: Be anonymous
#16I would strongly advise anyone who really wants to be anonymous on the internet such as a freedom activist in a totalitarian country, not to follow the advice listed at the end of the article. Or rather: these are very basic and very naive recommendations, certainly good first steps, but absolutely nowhere near enough to guarantee strong anonymity on the internet. Remaining truly anonymous on the net is extremely har…
Would the solution be a digital version of the old newspaper cutout ransom letter?
Generate via GPT-3 a text giving roughly the impression you want to make and then copy/paste sentences from online news media if you need the names of particular persons or events.
Would be rather crude though, but less tedious than literally cutting and pasting letters was.
Re: Be anonymous
#17I don’t know if dating app users understand that it doesn’t take much information to find out who they really are. Sometimes all that’s needed is a first name, profession, or university is enough if one of the three is somewhat unique for the area. If you’re concerned about privacy on dating apps, you’re better off being really vague about basic aspects of your life, or trying a bar instead :)
Re: Be anonymous
#18> Don't use macOS or Windows -- only Linux
> Move to Brazil and live in the rainforest
Juvenile, snarky, irreverent and irrelevant advice I'd expect to read on a 12 year old's Reddit post.
Re: Be anonymous
#19> Don't use macOS or Windows -- only Linux > Move to Brazil and live in the rainforest Juvenile, snarky, irreverent and irrelevant advice I'd expect to read on a 12 year old's Reddit post.
> I don't know about you, but I don't want to do all of that. [...] I don't recommend being on either extreme of this spectrum.
It's a list of extreme techniques for protecting ones' identity online. Of course, completely sanitizing your online presence is difficult, and probably unnecessary. I thought the two lists were a nice rhetorical framing - present a dilemma (total openness vs. total anonymity) and then wiggle out of it to a compromise.
Re: Be anonymous
#20I would strongly advise anyone who really wants to be anonymous on the internet such as a freedom activist in a totalitarian country, not to follow the advice listed at the end of the article. Or rather: these are very basic and very naive recommendations, certainly good first steps, but absolutely nowhere near enough to guarantee strong anonymity on the internet. Remaining truly anonymous on the net is extremely har…
>especially in these days where ML can be used to statistically narrow down and pinpoint who wrote a specific piece of text only based on things like use of punctuation, vocabulary, sentence structure and style.
I think you can fight ML with ML - for example, use GPT-like algorithms generate text for you. But then you must also be careful about when you post - I remember some of the Russian trolls were exposed because their bursts of activity coincided with 9am-6pm Moscow time. So you have to use a random number generator decide when to appear online if you want to hide your location. There's always something which can narrow down their search. One small mistake and you are busted. They don't even need to pinpoint you exactly, if it's narrowed down to 1000-10000 people who meet the criteria, they already win because they have the capacity to go through the list one by one and eventually find you.