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Maigret: Collect a dossier on a person by username from thousands of sites

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Re: Maigret: Collect a dossier on a person by username from thousands of sites

#111

Post by vidarh »

shanusmagnus wrote: post #7
walrus01 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But people are commonly lazy, and you'd find that most people who don't even consider resistance to deanonymization as a concern will just use the same name on many sites.

Speaking personally, I kind of want people to know I'm the same person in different places. I do realize this is a terrible idea from a privacy perspective, and probably a lot of other perspectives. But I think a bunch of people want to use the net this way.

I use recognisable usernames in places (like here) where I'm fine with my comments being linked to my real name, and less obvious ones without explicitly hiding it places where I'd prefer my comments don't show up in Google searches for my name (e.g. Reddit - if you trawl through my reddit profile, linking it to my name is easy, and it wouldn't be a problem if you found it, but I don't get a bunch of reddit comments when I Google my name), and then totally separate user names for anything I actually want to be anonymous for.

My situation is a bit unusual in that I almost certainly have a globally unique name (my last name is a corruption of an uncommon name in Norway; said corruption occurred two places independently, and there are less than 500 people with that last name in Norway, and probably about the same in the US, and to date I've seen no indication of anyone combining it with my first name), my first name plus last initial is also unusual enough that I only rarely can't get it as a username.

Re: Maigret: Collect a dossier on a person by username from thousands of sites

#113

Post by kataklasm »

Semaphor wrote: post #80
BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in the United States we choose “John Smith” as the most generic and common name for a man. What name would a German pick? Curiously, for a supposedly common name I have never once met a John Smith.

It depends, probably Max Müller or Hans Müller, just anything Müller. Unlike the US, we don’t normally use a real name as placeholder name [0], the options there would be Max or Erika Mustermann (literally example or pattern man), for an average person it’s Otto Normalverbraucher (Otto Average-Consumer) and Lieschen Müller. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placeholder_name

Holy shit. I never made the connection with Otto Normalverbraucher. Thanks for making me click with this little piece of German trivia on the day German history was made! :)

Re: Maigret: Collect a dossier on a person by username from thousands of sites

#114

Post by kataklasm »

glitchcrab wrote: post #88
tempodox wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you used the same username on different accounts, you should have different passwords anyway.

I'm pretty sure they meant that using a password manager means you don't have to remember the _username_ for every site.

I've started to just generate a 10-char alphanumerical string with the password generator feature and use that as the username on new accounts, starting to update them retroactively, too (by scrapping the old account and making a new one).

Re: Maigret: Collect a dossier on a person by username from thousands of sites

#115

Post by daitangio »

Tested docker version: nice but the report is a long list, much like an "index" of the provided username present on a set of sites.

It should provide at least some numbers/graph to "measure" your presence on the web, like I do not now, number of GitHub repositories, instaram photos and so on.

A user with little instagram photos but a lot of GitHub repositories is different from a guy with a lot of Blog posts, Pinterest entries, Twich videos...and so on.

Re: Maigret: Collect a dossier on a person by username from thousands of sites

#116

Post by nottorp »

JustHiThere wrote: post #91
motoxpro wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a commentary on the conundrum, not so much your post. I always think it’s strange when people make the argument that it’s good for harmful tools to be out in the open because people can/will change their behavior because of them. 99.999999% of people will never see this repo, never know things like this exist, and don’t visit sites like HN but can, and probably will be, affected by it in some way.

Wrong approach imho. This means, all the tools developed for ethical hacking are "bad" because they can used for "bad". This is like saying we shouldn't sell knifes because knifes can be used to kill someone. It's just silly. This tool could be used to teach people, e.g. in OSINT challenges, it could be used to gather information for a pentesting job, it can be used to teach people about best practices online etc ...

> This tool could be used to teach people, e.g. in OSINT challenges, it could be used to gather information for a pentesting job, it can be used to teach people about best practices online etc

Or just... look yourself up. Like most of the people on this HN thread have done.

Re: Maigret: Collect a dossier on a person by username from thousands of sites

#117

Post by faeriechangling »

This is why I use many different usernames, I must have used maybe three dozen different ones by now. The only time I use the same username is for games because I want people to know what other games I play.

My opsec is pretty awful but I at least try to not be "simply type in the username I always use into google or some tool on GitHub" bad. I at least want somebody to have to use a few hours or pay a data broker to reveal all my secrets because my bet is that nobody cares about me enough to do that.

Re: Maigret: Collect a dossier on a person by username from thousands of sites

#118

Post by marginalia_nu »

tempodox wrote: post #81
barbariangrunge wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess with password managers, this is easier than ever

Even if you used the same username on different accounts, you should have different passwords anyway.

Really, why is that?

Re: Maigret: Collect a dossier on a person by username from thousands of sites

#120

Post by EdwardDiego »

vintermann wrote: post #93
EdwardDiego wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but none of them are readily available to someone you argued with on /r/politics who has taken agin you.

So, the question is: are you more afraid of random nobodies online, or are you more afraid of already organized, already powerful people who had similar capability already?

I'm a nobody, and fiercely proud of it. And I pity the NSA employee who has to monitor my Internet usage, they're going to see an awful lot of Javadoc, programming blogs, websites about plane crashes (and I hope they read some AdmiralCloudberg on Medium for themselves), and websites about rocks and faultlines.

In reality, as mentioned by other commenters, I'm not anything they're interested in, at best I'm a datapoint that advertisers try to categorise into a demographic (male, 30 - 50, doesn't give a shit about cars, into tech).

And anyway, they're already doing it, but impersonally.

It's the person who is very personal that I'm not enthused about.

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