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Be anonymous

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Re: Be anonymous

#111

Post by BeFlatXIII »

mindvirus wrote: post #23

The 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…

More importantly, spam out incorrect data so that no one knows which values to trust unless they already had offline verification of the data.

Re: Be anonymous

#112

Post by marvin »

kibwen wrote: post #63
can16358p wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a bit of a nightmare for communication, though. Subtlety is a thing, both for nuance and clarity.

Re: Be anonymous

#114

Post by wyclif »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #98
chaxor wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> expending energy One thing I noticed out of many of the list items given in the post here: > Only use Tor > Always use a VPN > Never use Google -- only DuckDuckGo > Disable JavaScript on your browser > Watch all incoming and outgoing network calls regularly and scan for abnormalities > Encrypt your laptop and any external drives > End-to-end encrypted communication only > Don't use Gmail -- use ProtonMail > Never p…

> Don't buy domain names I'm not sure I understand this one - anyone have an explanation? Even if you put bogus contact info (this is not a problem, honestly) you still need to pay for it somehow. If you would use your own CC for this then... Bonus/prepaid/gift cards are usually not accepted (too much fraud), so the best solution would be to actually steal someone's CC data and hope they wouldn't notice 10 bucks.

Even so, as mentioned, the problem is that they detect the fraud and yank the site.

Re: Be anonymous

#115

Post by majormajor »

notsoanonynous wrote: post #102
3s wrote: post #58

Earlier 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…

Tor is amateur hour. The Feds can easily deanomymize things where a server is up 24/7 servicing requests. The author of this article is also very wrong: Anonymity is not on a spectrum. It’s all or nothing. Like a Mario game where any mistaken encounter makes you start over (and that’s if you don’t get in trouble for what you did). First step is to understand that any system could be bugged. Every IRL confidant could…

> 3. Pay and get paid in cryptocurrency. Have smart contracts send you the money (think Richard Heart’s Hex origin address, but actually anonymous).

My first question about this plan is "what are you getting paid for and how do you advertise your services"? You need to never meet the people paying you in person, and ideally you are selling some purely digital good. So, something like underground illegal programming or hacking or such? Is there anything else that would work?

Re: Be anonymous

#116

Post by jimkleiber »

bee_rider wrote: post #55
propesh wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kidding aside, this is exactly how it will go down. Politician in a scrape of financial corruption or etc.? Deepfake s*x video or other viral blatant misinformation & obfuscation; what's the risk? Upside, no one knows what to believe. Exactly what various "countries" are doing. It will be extreme; to the point where, don't believe half of what you actually see.

It should be noted that this is a pretty bad end state. Reporting is already an extremely weak force for preventing corruption on the part of the powerful. Journalists entering a state of total uselessness is only going to make the problem bigger. In a realm of total bullshit the winners are the one who are best at lying. "I don't know what to believe and everyone involved is probably corrupt" is usually just an excu…

> It should be noted that this is a pretty bad end state

I agree. The parent poster didn't ask what's the downside, and I think it's this: when no one knows what to believe and starts to distrust most things, society may start to fall apart, as society relies on us trusting each other.

So while I think disinformation is one of the best privacy strategies (not so different from differential privacy efforts by Google and others, suggested by the OP but without the term name), I think the more we lie to hide, the more we spin others and ourselves in circles.

I really like Sam Lessin's essay on this at The Information, where he talks about how, with the nature of the internet being so easy to share info, we have to start spreading disinfo to even close colleagues, so far as even lying to ourselves.

I think this paradox is one of the most challenging paradoxes of our time: the internet makes it so easy for us to open up and share and yet it makes it so hard for us to not open up and share.

[0]: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/the-future-of-privac...

Re: Be anonymous

#117

Post by imnotlost »

Or you can just be a known drug lord, launder billions of USD through a respected international bank, no one goes to jail, small fine, and they're probably still laundering 10 years later and no one cares. No one is anonymous. They're probably all using SMS and corporate email.

Sell a little bit of drugs through the silk road and you'll get royally f-ed! Sell all the opioids in the world through a public pharma corp and you can keep enjoying your jet-set life and yacht.

The allegedly smartest people in the world are focusing on the dumbest problems while being reamed by the frat-boys that went to Wall Street and Politics, guns and drugs. LULZ.

Re: Be anonymous

#118

Post by wyclif »

aqme28 wrote: post #13
nickstinemates wrote: post #3

The 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.

Handles like that provide plausible deniability, not bulletproof anonymity.

Re: Be anonymous

#119

Post by scaramanga »

I wonder if the author lives in a democracy or in a state which has rule of law. Because it strikes me that the solution space also includes many political, legislative, and judicial options such as, perhaps most obviously, the regulation of tech, or the effective policing of online abuse.

Re: Be anonymous

#120

Post by jrd259 »

I miss the point of this discussion. Does the HN readership really include a substantial number of drug lords, cyber criminals, spies, informants or live under a regime where they fear for their lives from state actors? I'm not cheating on my taxes or my spouse. Are there really many people being paid in cybercash from a genuine need to avoid state or corporate interest?
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