Photos easily pinpoint you too, any pictures you upload + user name is pretty much game over
Be anonymous
61–70 of 260 posts
Re: Be anonymous
#62It's good advice. The problem with anonymity in an environment of ubiquitous surveillance is that it's paradoxical. The point of anonymity is achieving freedom, but staying anonymous expends energy and makes you a target, so you can't actually do any things that anonymity was supposed to get you. If what you really want is sovereignty, which is what most people confuse anonymity with, the goal is to be like what Erns…
> If what you really want is sovereignty, which is what most people confuse anonymity with, the goal is to be like what Ernst Jünger called the anarch (in contrast to the anarchist), which is someone who complies and renders herself indifferent to authority, rather than standing out and drawing attention.
This works right up until the thing you want to do - or the person you find yourself to be - is something authority is not indifferent to.
Re: Be anonymous
#63I mix @realname and @pseudonym accounts. I'm generally pretty careful about what I post under my real name and less so under an alias. However, over time I drop enough clues that people could figure my real identity with a little work. That leaves me with the worst of both worlds. It seems safest to assume that your identity is always tied to everything you do online.
I think with ML getting smarter and people posting (either with their identity or anonymously) more and more content, it will be trivial to crossmatch anonymously posted content to real identities by ML examining "styles" of text: from punctuation to sentence structure to vocabulary use, and it will have an accurate estimation of who that "anonymous" person is.
This would be pretty easy to counter by having a tool that would analyze any comment you post and strip all the identifying marks out of it; no punctuation other than periods, no complex or compound sentences, all words replaced by equivalents from the list of the most common thousand English words, all voices and tenses normalized, no paragraphs, no capitalization, etc.
Re: Be anonymous
#64The article touches on a good point: one mistake and you're out. It doesn't even have to be your mistake - you didn't choose to put your SSN out there after all, yet here we are. This gave me a radical company idea, on the other end of the spectrum: spam as a service. Something that'll take your name, email, and other things and put it all over the internet in questionable and plausibly denial ways. That way, even wh…
This is essentially the premise of Neal Stephenson's Fall or Dodge in Hell.
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Re: Be anonymous
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess none of these suggestions really work without the last one "Move to Brazil and live in the rainforest" :)
Even that didn't work for John McAfee
To be fair he never lived in a rain forest. He was always around people and often managed to upset many of them.
Re: Be anonymous
#66As careful as some of the things he suggests are...if you're truly wanted by a state-level actor or sufficiently motivated attacker, you won't be able to hide by simply using VPN and Tor. Especially if you're running something with many transactions like AlphaBay. You would need to obfuscate quite a bit more: - if you're using VPN traffic but most people "around" you aren't, you're a suspicious node; your ISP could e…
You're absolutely right. It is not enough to use anonymity tools, you also have to make sure everything else around you doesn't compromise your anonymity. Made me think of a Harvard bomb threat incident where the student posting a fake bomb threat (through Tor) to avoid final exams was the only person using Tor on campus at the time, which trivially identified him. https://theprivacyblog.com/blog/anonymity/why-tor-fa…
Many anonymity tools have the k-anonymity property. It’s really unfortunate for k to be 1.
Re: Be anonymous
#67There's a middle ground somewhere here, in between "Don't be a criminal" and "Don't be stupid."
I don't think the lesson we should take from AlphaBay is "Take better privacy safeguards" but "Don't set up an illegal dark web operation."
Re: Be anonymous
#68As careful as some of the things he suggests are...if you're truly wanted by a state-level actor or sufficiently motivated attacker, you won't be able to hide by simply using VPN and Tor. Especially if you're running something with many transactions like AlphaBay. You would need to obfuscate quite a bit more: - if you're using VPN traffic but most people "around" you aren't, you're a suspicious node; your ISP could e…
What you said and much more.
For example, you buy a burner phone, but the place you bought it from, even if a second hand shop, had a security camera. Maybe they also record IMEI's before selling phones.
Or you carry your burner phone together with your real phone. Or alternatively, you leave one at home when using the other. Both of these things can be linked by a sufficiently determined actor (FBI/NSA level).
Or they track you to using a public square WiFi one day. Again, cameras are everywhere.
If they got your real name, no matter how, it's game over. You will be surveilled and they will find proof to link you. This is why all those posts "if only DPR used this kind of encryption or dead-men-switch" are ridiculous. Once they knew his real name it was just a matter of time and building a case.
Re: Be anonymous
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're absolutely right. It is not enough to use anonymity tools, you also have to make sure everything else around you doesn't compromise your anonymity. Made me think of a Harvard bomb threat incident where the student posting a fake bomb threat (through Tor) to avoid final exams was the only person using Tor on campus at the time, which trivially identified him. https://theprivacyblog.com/blog/anonymity/why-tor-fa…
Many anonymity tools have the k-anonymity property. It’s really unfortunate for k to be 1.
This is the big problem of crypto coin mixers. 99% of their users are trying to launder illegal bitcoin.
Re: Be anonymous
#70As careful as some of the things he suggests are...if you're truly wanted by a state-level actor or sufficiently motivated attacker, you won't be able to hide by simply using VPN and Tor. Especially if you're running something with many transactions like AlphaBay. You would need to obfuscate quite a bit more: - if you're using VPN traffic but most people "around" you aren't, you're a suspicious node; your ISP could e…
It’s a bit like Schneier’s Law. You can put in place protections that you personally cannot workaround, but that doesn’t mean someone with sufficient means and motivation would also be blocked.