Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Real Name Fallacy

blog.coralproject.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 323 posts

Re: The Real Name Fallacy

#81

Post by syshum »

mirimir wrote: post #72
bad_user wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem was that back then you didn't have service providers with lock-in on a market, like today's Facebook and the Internet was only a thing for techies, whereas nowadays more than half of the world's population has access to the Internet. Can you just not use Facebook? There are obviously only 3 choices: (1) not use it, but then you won't have an account where all of your friends are; (2) use it with your real…

There's a fourth option: use Facebook with your real name, and separately with fake name(s). For the real-name account, carefully manage "friends" to avoid problems with family, friends, coworkers, etc. Make sure that there's no leakage between your real-name account and fake-name accounts, or among fake-name accounts. Practice good compartmentalization OpSec.

That is becoming harder and harder to do as Facebook increases their level of knowledge

Just the Facial Recognition alone has caused problems for people attempting to do this.

Further OpSec is not just on you, I know a couple of people that have tried this only to have OTHER people expose thier data or information by posting things on facebook and other sites about them.

Re: The Real Name Fallacy

#82

Post by Pica_soO »

The Real Name Fallacy is social nostalgia- if we all could go back to the village, then everything would be good?

The solution for this and fake news, would be chains of trust. I do not trust my government, i do not trust my media, but i know two or three guys, i would trust too know. If these guys vouched for the guys vouching for the knowledge i see to be true, i would trust that.

In return, i can fade the crack-pots opinions with a filter, based upon a similar chain of trust.

But this system would need to be decentralized, it would need to allow to withdraw this trust in an instant. Centralize this, and the inherent distrust breaks free time after time again.

Re: The Real Name Fallacy

#83

Post by dx034 »

robmcm wrote: post #28

Wow a 5.6 MB background image... It took me 13 seconds to load it on a 20 Mbps connection. And there we are worrying about how many Kb our JavaScript libs are.

They seem to host on Google cloud, so if the story becomes popular enough here it could give them some incentive to change that, considering Google's traffic fees..

Re: The Real Name Fallacy

#84

Post by tscs37 »

Real Names on the internet only create problems and the things it intends to solve get shoved into a backroom and forgotten about.

Moderating the content is far more effective if done right. It's probably a bit like IT security and should be thought of as such.

Real names are something you can do but it's most likely on the same level as whitelisting programs and hotglue-ing all unused ports shut. Even with all that, a determined hacker will just use the office copier and the installed OCR Text Recognition to infiltrate a microsoft office script. (DEFCON talk that I recommend to watch).

There is no 100% safety from trolls and every defense measure also hurts legit users in some way.

TL;DR Know your threat level. Real Names are not necessarily the thing you want and most likely are very rarely and still won't be 100%.

Re: The Real Name Fallacy

#85

Post by dx034 »

danmoz wrote: post #6

Real names is one thing, but I'd really like to see a "real age" system on the internet. That would make ignoring trolls -- who I suspect are frequently not old enough to drive -- a much easier task. It would be more akin to real life, if a 14 y/o tried to bully us in the street we'd laugh them off, but when they're anonymous on the internet it doesn't seem to occur to us that we may be dealing with a child.

I find that many people posting questionable views are rather >50yrs than <14yrs.

Re: The Real Name Fallacy

#86

Post by syshum »

CM30 wrote: post #62

I think this is probably the key takeaway from the article here: > Designers need to acknowledge that design cannot solve harassment and other social problems on its own. Trying to remove anonymity will not 'fix' trolling and harassment. After all, a lot of people simply don't care what others think of them, know they're too far away to be affected (in most cases) or just have nothing to lose to begin with. What can…

>Trying to remove anonymity will not 'fix' trolling and harassment. After all, a lot of people simply don't care what others think of them, know they're too far away to be affected (in most cases) or just have nothing to lose to begin with.

While that is true, many times what person A considers to be harassment, the person that is harassing them does not consider it to be harassment at all.

This is not to say the person is not being harassed, although I have seen many examples of people claiming to have been "harassed" but when I view the twitter history for example I do not consider it to be harassment. That said often abusers do not self identify as abusers for example a Wife beater does not believe they are abusing their victim.

>>Facebook and Twitter struggle with this, partly because it's impractical to manually moderate a site with so many users and partly because their model doesn't really allow it.

Facebook and Twitter struggle with this because they refuse to create the clear rules for participation you stated other sites do. They proclaim to be "Free Speech" platforms welcome to "All Ideas and discussion" while creating mushy and lose rules that are highly subjective and makes enforcing those rules problematic.

Where as the sites you describe are normally subject matter sites so it is somewhat easier to define a more ridged rule set.

Facebook, twitter, and to a lesser extent Reddits problem is it impossible to be both a "Free Speech" platform and a censor... These are mutually exclusive concepts

Re: The Real Name Fallacy

#87

Post by vog »

stupidcar wrote: post #68
vog wrote: post #39

The real name discussion is as old as the Usenet, maybe even older. I find it strange to see it re-appearing again and again every few years for almost decades. Back then, the consensus was roughly: 1. If a community accepts pseudonyms, it is polite to use either your realname or an obvious pseudonym. 2. If a community places high value on realnames, either use your realname or a realname-sounding (i.e. non-obvious)…

Yes. People using real names on Usenet did not usually face a serious risk of being harassed and endangered in real life by an army of trolls: E.g. having their address, phone number and other private details stolen and publicly disseminated. Having armed police raid their house because someone has made a bogus 911 call. Having their utilities and back accounts cancelled because someone rang up using their details. H…

> Yes.

I see the issues you are stating, but not so much a qualitative change.

> serious risk of being harassed and endangered in real life by an army of trolls

This type of trolls (aka "stalkers") have already existed decades ago. Back then I had no trouble finding such cases documented in the Usenet archives. Of course, these happened to fewer people, but then, the net was a lot smaller, too.

> For many, preserving anonymity isn't a matter of "politeness" — it's a matter of personal security

How does this differ from what I wrote? "... is considered impolite, if not aggressive ..."

> And this is without considering people living in countries with oppressive governments, where using their real name could see them arrested, beaten and imprisoned.

This may really have changed, considering that those countries joined the internet relatively lately. Yet, it still seems that this is covered by point 3) "... is considered impolite, if not aggressive ..."

Re: The Real Name Fallacy

#88

Post by sundvor »

robmcm wrote: post #28

Wow a 5.6 MB background image... It took me 13 seconds to load it on a 20 Mbps connection. And there we are worrying about how many Kb our JavaScript libs are.

That's completely nuts. Tried to upload it* to http://compresspng.com/ , and after what seemed like a few hours (Australian upload on cable is 100x slower than the download) I got a 72% reduction in size to 1604kb. That is, an identical image if you absolutely must insist on that quality.

Without having a checked, I'd venture to say that a 200-300KB jpeg would look very close and more than good enough for the purposes of the article header.

*) https://blog.coralproject.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/hat...

Re: The Real Name Fallacy

#89

Post by vog »

Pica_soO wrote: post #82

The Real Name Fallacy is social nostalgia- if we all could go back to the village, then everything would be good? The solution for this and fake news, would be chains of trust. I do not trust my government, i do not trust my media, but i know two or three guys, i would trust too know. If these guys vouched for the guys vouching for the knowledge i see to be true, i would trust that. In return, i can fade the crack-po…

> But this system would need to be decentralized

Back in the times of Usenet, this already existed: The client-side (hence decentral) "Scorefile" and "Killfile".

Re: The Real Name Fallacy

#90

Post by dirkt »

Swizec wrote: post #73
vog wrote: post #39

The real name discussion is as old as the Usenet, maybe even older. I find it strange to see it re-appearing again and again every few years for almost decades. Back then, the consensus was roughly: 1. If a community accepts pseudonyms, it is polite to use either your realname or an obvious pseudonym. 2. If a community places high value on realnames, either use your realname or a realname-sounding (i.e. non-obvious)…

Same rules apply as always: don't share your real name and address online outside very very small and personable communities. People often ask me why i still haven't changed my name to Swizec legally. This is why. You never know who out of the thousands of people you interact with online could get crazy ideas. With a pseudonym they can still identify you and know who you are, but they can't call your bank and do some…

I've shared by real name on Usenet for decades, nobody got crazy ideas (though I've encountered quite a few crazy people). "Calling my bank and doing something silly" doesn't work in the country in live in. There's not a lot people can do with just my name.
Post reply on HN