So what's next? Get these people fired from their jobs for having unapproved ideas? Also, who decides what is or is not toxic?
Researchers Say They Found IP Addresses for ‘Anonymous’ Econ Forum Posts
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Re: Researchers Say They Found IP Addresses for ‘Anonymous’ Econ Forum Posts
#12Using ChatGPT for a "neutral and expert question" is really broken: it gives the public the opinion that ChatGPT output could be trusted whereas it's so often wrong...
That's really dangerous (beyond the immediate stupidity of asking such question to a LLM) because it may give an impression that ChatGPT answers should be trusted and neutral... It's neither.
Re: Researchers Say They Found IP Addresses for ‘Anonymous’ Econ Forum Posts
#13Re: Researchers Say They Found IP Addresses for ‘Anonymous’ Econ Forum Posts
#14this is rly awful "research". ederer prob got bullied on there and got mad, cause he has a reputation as a bitch. more importantly, ejmr has been important in uncovering multiple cases of research fraud (including one of the literal damn authors, this is some vindictive ass bs) and is the best source for actual unfiltered info on opinions of econ departments. includes important info like info abt people's political b…
> this is rly awful "research". ederer prob got bullied on there and got mad, cause he has a reputation as a bitch.
No. Also name calling, while commenting on something you clearly don't understand is not a good look.
EJMR claimed to be anonymous. It was not, and what they were doing skipped the most absolutely trivial of steps for actual anonymization.
The only difference between this week and last week, is that now people know that their IP addresses were leaked rather than believing that they were anonymous. I would argue, it is beneficial to people to know that anyone could have done exactly what this researcher did, and we would have no way of knowing.
Blaming the person who found out how terrible EJMR's "anonymization" was, is classic shooting the messenger.
It's also a really good example of why we so "don't roll your own crypto". Any person who specializes in cryptography (or hopefully anyone who has done a basic intro to cryptography course) should have been able to point out the issues.
> more importantly, ejmr has been important in uncovering multiple cases of research fraud and is the best source for actual unfiltered info on opinions of econ departments. chilling effect of stripping anonymity is awful.
This sounds like the kind of thing where people need anonymity, it's a good thing that this research has demonstrated that ejmr was not providing such. Again, this research has not "stripped anonymity", there was none to begin with.
Re: Researchers Say They Found IP Addresses for ‘Anonymous’ Econ Forum Posts
#15"found" aka ran 3 quadrillion hashes on an A100 to crack the IPs
End result is the same.
Re: Researchers Say They Found IP Addresses for ‘Anonymous’ Econ Forum Posts
#16So what's next? Get these people fired from their jobs for having unapproved ideas? Also, who decides what is or is not toxic?
From [1]:
Snippets of posts with IP addresses at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, University of Chicago, and the National Bureau of Economic Research headquarters include: "Rapefugees Welcome!!!!! - Merkel"; "bietches are fugly"; and "Its about ching chong taking bubba's job and bubba putting on a white pointy hood in response."
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/harvard-yale-toxic-posts-ejm...
Re: Researchers Say They Found IP Addresses for ‘Anonymous’ Econ Forum Posts
#17So what's next? Get these people fired from their jobs for having unapproved ideas? Also, who decides what is or is not toxic?
People have always been fired/distanced/exiled for antisocial behavior. Not to mention employees are terminated for much, much less justified actions all the time. This isn't new, it's as old as time. Bigots can go mask off when they're not on my payroll.
Re: Researchers Say They Found IP Addresses for ‘Anonymous’ Econ Forum Posts
#18My dad has been saying for years, even before the internet took off, never write anything you don’t want the whole world to see. When the internet came along he reiterated the same message saying don’t write anything online you don’t want your friends, your boss, the police, a judge or anyone else to see. Anyone who goes online with the belief that they are anonymous and writes things that can seriously hurt their career or something that might put them in jail is foolish.
Re: Researchers Say They Found IP Addresses for ‘Anonymous’ Econ Forum Posts
#19Because people keep on acting like these researchers have retroactively removed the anonymity of this forum, or somehow everything was anonymous before this published, lets go over the facts:
1. ejmr made a system that includes hashes that could be trivially linked to ip addresses
2. ejmr claimed posts were anonymous
3. this researcher realized that the hashes could be trivially linked to ip addresses
4. the researcher presumably informed ejmr (as ejmr changed their scheme prior to publication)
5. the researcher published the findings
The posts made on the forum could be linked to ip addresses from step 1, if this series of events stopped at step 2 or 3, the posts would still not be anonymous, and forum users would still believe that they were.
We know that at step 3 this researcher realized that the forum posts were not anonymous, we have no way of knowing how many other people may have also discovered this.
At step 4, we know ejmr changed their hashing scheme to actually make it [maybe] anonymous, and despite now knowing their existing scheme was not anonymous they did not inform any existing users that their posts were not anonymous.
At step 5 the people using these forums finally discovered that their posts were not actually anonymous, because they were never anonymous. People on that forum, and commenters on HN, act like the researcher was responsible for the technical failure of ejmr, and somehow the act of telling people that their posts were not anonymous is what actually removed anonymity.
Because people continue to struggle with this, let's imagine I made a forum where every post had an id that was computed as the first 10 characters of base64(rot13(ip || iso date)). A decade later someone goes "hang on, this looks like base 64", and then publishes their findings: you can get a post's IP address by decoding the truncated base 64 and reversing rot13.
Is that person responsible for de-anonymizing the users of my forum, or is it my fault for misrepresenting the anonymity of my forum?
Re: Researchers Say They Found IP Addresses for ‘Anonymous’ Econ Forum Posts
#20Since when trying to dox people is called academic "research"?
Since when is it ok to create a forum that is not anonymous and then advertise it as an anonymous forum that is safe for whistleblowers?