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Pseudpocalypse

dynomight.net

41–50 of 92 posts

Re: Pseudpocalypse

#41
post #21
post #10

One potential solution here I suppose is to make deanonymization or contributing to it a serious crime. I doubt that will happen in most places, though, since it’s often the government that wants to do this to its own citizens.

downvoted because the government doing stuff is communism

I don't have the ability to downvote, and I disagree that the downvote should be used, but I disagree with your disagreement about the downvote.

The proposal that seems to infringe on free speech, but mostly I take issue because there just isn't really a precedent for what such a thing would look like. What constitutes doxxing? It is easy to accidentally doxx someone by mentioning some offhand fact in conversation, because you may not know what series of facts can be connected to form a doxx. Typicially, people doxx themselves by accident, and someone else is merely pointing it out. I know I have many times. You live and learn.

There isn't really a right to privacy in the way that there's a right to free speech. Free speech is important to processes of public transparency and justice which I think this would interfere with. But it's also true that justice is blind and doxxing can interfere with a judicial process.

Also, if everyone is going to have access to super-stylometry tools in the future, which is the premise of the article that GP reacts to, it will be fruitless to uphold such a right because anyone can just run doxxyou.exe themselves. There's no need to spread doxx because it can be reproduced individually.

The term doxxing came from a certain hacker culture where it was implied that you connected some real-life identity to a criminal pseudonym. It essentially meant "snitching". So the idea that doxxing itself would be a crime is interesting. It's a reversal of the original meaning.

But it's also true that the public has discovered sybil-suseptible techniques (like swatting) where you can screw with ordinary people's lives by knowing their identity. Which is interesting because we live in a new culture of "share everything online" vs old the hacker ethos of "don't use your real name online". The attackers have become stronger and the defenders weaker.

Re: Pseudpocalypse

#42
post #16

As long as you're fine with losing your distinctive voice (which should be taken as table stakes for people who value anonymity to the extent of worrying about this), it's perfectly reasonable to use tools to stymie stylometry. I'm not even suggesting using an LLM (which may or may not be sufficient, it would be difficult to verify either way); it would suffice to have a tool that rewrites your prose (or analyzes it…

https://github.com/psal/anonymouth

Re: Pseudpocalypse

#43
What a phenomenal article, wow.

This is one of the best things I've read on this site.

I have a side project/experiment that's tangential to this (wafertown.com), so my interest is 2x the usual.

Re: Pseudpocalypse

#44
then you'd imagine the inverse is possible: fabricate text that matches a fingerprint - poisoning someone's (psuedo-anonymous) reputation.

Re: Pseudpocalypse

#45
post #14

One would think that it could be possible to make a tool that takes some text and "anonymizes" it by making it a little more standard and boring (uniforming punctuation and sentence structure, changing words with some synonyms, etc). Maybe wouldn't make it particularly compelling, but would be valuable for political dissidents and other people with a high threat model. Does anyone have some tools to share?

[dead]

Re: Pseudpocalypse

#46
so really, all these people using LLMs to comment aren't being lazy! No, they're using cryptographically linguistic security to ensure untraceability!

Re: Pseudpocalypse

#47
post #41
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

downvoted because the government doing stuff is communism

I don't have the ability to downvote, and I disagree that the downvote should be used, but I disagree with your disagreement about the downvote. The proposal that seems to infringe on free speech, but mostly I take issue because there just isn't really a precedent for what such a thing would look like. What constitutes doxxing? It is easy to accidentally doxx someone by mentioning some offhand fact in conversation, b…

probably means publicly identifying an individual

Re: Pseudpocalypse

#48
post #47
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have the ability to downvote, and I disagree that the downvote should be used, but I disagree with your disagreement about the downvote. The proposal that seems to infringe on free speech, but mostly I take issue because there just isn't really a precedent for what such a thing would look like. What constitutes doxxing? It is easy to accidentally doxx someone by mentioning some offhand fact in conversation, b…

probably means publicly identifying an individual

It takes many bits to identify an individual.

Let's say I offhandedly mention your email in this comment, for example, like we had an out of band conversation somewhere else. Then, someone takes that email and links it to another forum where they find your phone number. Then another person looks up that phone number in a phone book. Then another person finds your github account from the email associated with your PGP and finds where you work etc. Let's say a comment you wrote 7 months ago vaguely mentions something about where you live, which in combination with the previous information narrows it down to a single place.

At what point does that become doxxing and who is responsible? Pseudonymous people nessisarially, slowly leak small amounts of information about themselves when on the internet in order to engage in communication.

It is only when you collect "enough" bits of information that it becomes threatening doxx.

You could say publishing this collection of facts is the doxx. But the point of the article is that stylometry and AI tools can do this investigation for you. Anyone can trivially assemble the collection themselves.

I think ultimately, it's a matter of personal responsibility. It has to be. If you have perfect opsec, I can't touch you AI tools or not. And if I have perfect opsec and I'm doxxing you, then no laws will be able to catch up to me.

Re: Pseudpocalypse

#49
post #33

Eh isn't authorship linking a whole field of study? Yes it is, called stylometry. Here's a review paper form 2006 [0]. Its an old subject, with literally thousands of papers. Really wished the author had taken a cursory glance at the literature. [0] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/11889342_20

The article contains Dynomight’s thoughts on the literature of stylometry. Search on the word “stylometry”.

Re: Pseudpocalypse

#50

"Pseudpocalypse"... why not "pseudocalypse" or "pseudoapocalypse"? As an aside, it's always surprising to see how English speakers split Greek words like "Apocalypse". That is to say, they always split them in the middle of Greek syllables, or just drop letters like "pseud[o][a]pocalypse" and often in a way that ends up sounding clunky and weird even in English. Can't think of other examples now. Brain going to sleep…

Let's see, expanded it's "the (or an) apocalypse of pseudonyms." In Greek, this would roughly be "ἀποκάλυψις ὧν ψευδωνῠ́μων." It's not impossible for a genitive like this to become a word, possibly "ἀποκάλυψευδώνῠμοι" (think of "φιλέλλην") -- although it's a little fanciful. There may even be precedent for a construct that puts "ψευδώνῠμοι" first. But ultimately I agree that the word the article offers seems tortured.
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