I know of a few people who will be receiving this link as a gift from me today :)
Maybe they need help, encouragement and a true friend more than this kind of "gift"?
I don’t want to be an internet person
31–40 of 319 posts
Re: I don’t want to be an internet person
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you avoid being doxxed based on your writing style?
Wow. Interesting question. I don't have a second account so I checked stylometry and it gave me bunch of names that I know are not me. Maybe I will try with a new second account and confirm. Second, stylometry can dox me how? My current handle is not attached to anywhere else on internet and even if someone did HN/reddit/twitter stylometry analysis, how will that reach my home and or identity of my passport? Its not…
By themselves, none of the things we discuss are inherently bad. They are just tools. I open with this, because it is important to understand that stylometry by itself uncovers only a small facet of your online persona, by possibly identifying your footprint and allowing for ingestion and analysis for OTHER identifying information.
Using your example your passport may not be online, but lets say you link self-hosted project, your website may be registered to your company and, depending on how you set it up, your information may be relatively trivial to run against information broker database ( LX, TR ).
It is surprisingly easy to slip even if you are privacy conscious of it and it really only takes one time since internet does remember ( and it is saved somewhere ). I guess what I am saying is I would not dismiss it outright, but at the very least I would check the link parent added; it actually is kinda amazing.
Re: I don’t want to be an internet person
#33Is this journalism?
Why do you ask?
Re: I don’t want to be an internet person
#34> Like most online culture, it all feels so profound until you realize that he hasn’t said anything at all. So pretty much like TFA... Which is basically a virtue signalling hit piece (the target even asks "if they're planning to write a hit piece"). "The content of his work would repel, or simply confuse, a traditional viewer" ... and then the author points to a screenshot of a tweet (the "drop out of college, defau…
So clearly all you did was get angry about a couple of lines in the article that were disparaging to Charlie. Did you not read the whole thing and understand the larger point? That Charlie is likely in the small group of people today who are setting the norms for tomorrow?
Re: I don’t want to be an internet person
#35> I don’t want to be anything like these people. I don’t want to be an internet person. I love this. I got a similar vibe from people who were "too good at IRC," way back in the day. They had a constant, sarcastic, tired energy about them. They had difficulty being genuine about anything. They knew so much and yet they were so stuck in their life somehow. And that sucked the life out of them. It's like they were too…
> They had a constant, sarcastic, tired energy about them. They had difficulty being genuine about anything.
I knew such a guy on IRC back in 2003. We all kind of looked up to him on the channel. He was quite eloquent and had (what seemed to us) an enormous knowledge of history and philosophy. His sarcasm bordered on sophisticated nihilism. He spoke to us like Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now. His occupation was nebulous.
Now, 20 years later, a former channel member and I (both in our mid-30ies now, with families and jobs) exchange a few nostalgic mails every 1-2 months in the typical lingo of our channel. We still make fun of this guy as the personification of nihilistic evil, a kind of mythical uber-mephisto of the internet. But in reality, we all realized decades ago that he was just this strange, bitter, unemployed guy in his late 30ies or early 40ies (older than we are now), who spent his entire life in front of mIRC. His history knowledge and nihilism boiled down to repeated Nazi jokes, and his philosophy knowledge was based on a few Nietzsche texts he must have read. We were a bunch of pubertal school kids on some Quakenet channel, and he, more than twice our age, was a kind of tribal god to us. He clearly enjoyed it. It was pathetic.
Some of the people described in this (excellent) article very strongly reminded me of him.
Re: I don’t want to be an internet person
#36"I Don’t Want to Be an Internet Person" "Ginevra Davis studied Symbolic Systems at Stanford and now works in art and design. She writes about technology and youth culture." One step would be to stop using your state-issued name on the internet. "Cr4zyBoy4eva" is a bit better than the Facebook/LinkedIn-mandated "real name", but rather childish, hence why an arbitrary UUID string might be a better fit. "There are no gi…
stop using your state-given name on the internet.
I'm what country does the state decide what your name is?
I thought that was always the province of someone's parents.
Re: I don’t want to be an internet person
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you avoid being doxxed based on your writing style?
Someone could use my writing style to link my online identities together. How does that help them doxx me when there is nothing written under my real name?
See, here's the problem with the internet, you have to assume your data is out there forever. You may have fastidiously ensured that your personal information has been posted as of today, but it doesn't matter, one mistake tomorrow and the entire house of cards collapses.
Lets say you borrow your dads computer to post and it's logged in under his name. You log into a site with an incognito browser and post a message in Chrome and then close it out.
Well due to a bug in that version of Chrome the full path of user folder Chrome was in was added to the request logs on the server 'C:\users\ronald.t.devito\appdata\....'. This gets put in the servers logs with your username. That server had bad security and the logs leaked to everyone on the internet. A hacker realizes that 'belli' is also use 'causi', and a few other profiles. They see that username is pretty unique to a 54 year old male from the west coast, but the writing style is of a much younger, likely male, person which points at Ronald's son Jonny.
You are at risk of being disclosed/doxx on the internet because of security issues everywhere in the stack and its exceptionally difficult to cover all the bases.
Re: I don’t want to be an internet person
#38I'm pretty sure this generalizes to everything. People who cultivate a persona in any sub-culture or domain seem to be a fish out of water when confronted in a different context. Take someone from the rave scene and plop them down in a microbrewery bar and everyone will gawk at the brightly colored fidgety person that has no idea what to order. Take a polished SV entrepreneur and deposit them in an Idaho roadhouse and observe as they struggle to communicate with patrons that don't speak pitch-deck. Extremely online people generally don't practice the skills necessary to communicate well in person like eye contact, conversation, or manners so you'll get predictable results when gathering them in meat-space.
I'm pretty sure a bit of googling will turn up a long history of articles of this nature dating all the way back to the BBS days. Having attended BBS meetups I know that the vibe of these gatherings hasn't changed.
Re: I don’t want to be an internet person
#39The pattern here is not the internet but these people being severely autistic and so they are probably forced to thrive online where they aren't having to deal with eye contact or other social queues that they can't really process. Not even sure what this was meant to be, but it should probably be rewritten to "I don't want to be an autistic person" and it would have read the exact same way. Even down to the preferred drug use being a straight up dissociative...
Re: I don’t want to be an internet person
#40> Like most online culture, it all feels so profound until you realize that he hasn’t said anything at all. So pretty much like TFA... Which is basically a virtue signalling hit piece (the target even asks "if they're planning to write a hit piece"). "The content of his work would repel, or simply confuse, a traditional viewer" ... and then the author points to a screenshot of a tweet (the "drop out of college, defau…
You’re weirdly trying to attack the author. Why is that?
The author did exactly what the subject of the critical opinion piece did, but did a worse job of it and was entirely unself critical.