Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations • Hacker News Board

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#231

Post by softfalcon » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 4:20 AM UTC

GekkePrutser wrote: post #81

softfalcon wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately there are whole services offered to find said nicknames and tie the crap back to your real name. Frequently used for high profile job positions and their “background” checks.

Oh really?? First I've heard of it, I wasn't aware of that. That is indeed worrying. Do you have any examples? Would be good to try out. To see how much it knows about me. Also time to start rotating identities more :) It's a bit more complicated not to mix them up now because almost every email service requires a phone number and I only have so many (here in Spain you can't just buy a prepaid sim over the counter, t…

It’s a service offered through LinkedIn for corporate accounts. One of my former bosses was able to do a crazy level of snooping into my private life.

They also were able to contact an advertising firm with it and get most of my Facebook activity. I had some albums with my drinking exploits (young and just out of college) and my boss could see it all even though he wasn’t friends with me and that info wasn’t public.

He told me all of this a few weeks into the job. It was shocking just how much info he could pull on me by just being corporate and asking the right people and paying some cash/using a background check.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#232

Post by GekkePrutser » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 11:42 AM UTC

softfalcon wrote: post #231

GekkePrutser wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh really?? First I've heard of it, I wasn't aware of that. That is indeed worrying. Do you have any examples? Would be good to try out. To see how much it knows about me. Also time to start rotating identities more :) It's a bit more complicated not to mix them up now because almost every email service requires a phone number and I only have so many (here in Spain you can't just buy a prepaid sim over the counter, t…

It’s a service offered through LinkedIn for corporate accounts. One of my former bosses was able to do a crazy level of snooping into my private life. They also were able to contact an advertising firm with it and get most of my Facebook activity. I had some albums with my drinking exploits (young and just out of college) and my boss could see it all even though he wasn’t friends with me and that info wasn’t public.…

Thanks, too bad it's corp accounts only so I can't try it :( I wasn't aware of this, I will be more careful in the future and start cleaning up some nicks (starting with this one).

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#233

Post by matkoniecz » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 4:20 PM UTC

shagie wrote: post #219

matkoniecz wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github discussions scale quite poorly if you have hundreds or thousands posts each day. Also, for nonprogrammers Github is a really alien place. And it is still proprietary lock-in. But yes, it can be a viable alternative and at least is not asking phone number for read only access.

The discussions scale is a problem of you need people specifically triage and moderate the content. For large projects, I'll grand that this could scale poorly but for preserving information and discussions, it remains better than other options. And yes, GitHub isn't the proper spot for non-programmers. All the workflows around it are geared to hosting a software or at least a site. The proprietary lock-in... I don't…

> The proprietary lock-in... I don't agree with in that if that is an issue

I was thinking here primarily about network effects.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#234

Post by still_grokking » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 10:19 PM UTC

mjr00 wrote: post #59

aliqot wrote: post #3

Are they searchable and indexable? What made PHPBB and all that cool was that it'd turn up in search queries. As a hobbyist, this was an incredible wealth of information for me that has mostly dried up with the advent of walled gardens like slack, discord, etc. Some might point at BBS and IRC and say that those were the same, but I'd argue that they had lower volume, and less rich media, and I'd go one further to say…

On the modern internet, I don't know that being searchable and indexed is always a benefit. I like the idea of a semi-private space. I don't want people on the internet to be able to drudge up out of context statements I made 10 years ago by googling "site:discord.com ". I can tell a lot of people are the same way just by their behavior; the discussion that happens on Discord is a lot different than anything on, say,…

> People are a lot more open when they're not worried about being watched.

I have bad news for you.

As long as you're leaving unencrypted info on other peoples computers you're being watched.

This info can and will be used against you should someone in the right position feels like that.

Only proper end-to-end encryption (combined with plausible deniability where required) can protect you from that, iff of course you're in full control of the keys at any given time.

In any other circumstance there is no privacy on the internet. You're being watched, as the internet became the ultimate surveillance machine by now.

Since Snowden this—since a long time actually quite obvious—fact can't be talked away even by the most ignorant people.

The only sane way to deal with this given reality is to consider just everything done on the internet, where no very special protection measures have been applied to, to be compromised. As you're being watched you better behave like you're being watched. There is no other option, sad as it is.

Btw. in the days of the yore everybody knew that you never ever put any personal info on the internet. This was one of the first things you told people before you showed them how to use a news server.

But today people seem to act without due consideration about just nothing on the net.

For example people today hand out happily credit card info to more or less whoever asks, and than wonder that they get robed. I actually still remember the times when people were saying that it's extremely unlikely that anybody could do business on the internet because "Who would be so stupid to type in their name, address, and credit card number into some form on a 'webpage'? Trusting someone on the internet, LOL!".

Now the trust goes even so far that most people really think that there are "private spaces" on the web, where they're not watched. Well, LOL.