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EFF Guide To Blogging Anonymously
jacksonwest writes "Annalee Newitz and Kurt Opsahl just published a great how-to on blogging anonymously. How To Blog Safely About Work (Or Anything Else), covering both the legal and technical aspects of blogging about your job and staying truly anonymous. A must read for those blogging from or about their office."
that this person didn't see this article earlier
Quote: California has a law protecting employees from "demotion, suspension, or discharge from employment for lawful conduct occurring during nonworking hours away from the employer's premises.
Posting pictures of yourself isn't illegal, but it didn't help the Queen of the Air...
We always 'google' our perspective new-hires. People have been not hired because of the content discovered.
Just be careful in what you do, and it should be good.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
I do most of the things mentioned in the article in my unnamed blog. For one, I wrote my backend to let me mark certain posts as "restricted" only to certain users, so the public can't even read most of them anyway.
And two, the evil woman I work with is referred to as "The Demon" in big red letters instead of by her real name. Pseudonyms do indeed rock.
I don't see how you can stay anonymous and say anything really interesting about your office. Of course you can say "my office has cubes" and nobody will smell you out, but if you say "I know all about the shape of the new iMac" there are only a few people that could have known that, and they will figure you out. Certainly there are variations within those two extremes, but the more unique and valuable your knowledge, the more likely they are to nail you.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Not sure if I2P has been mentioned in any of the slashdot headlines yet.. most likely in a month or two after the UDP transport has been implemented and most of the bugs ironed out.
I2P is basically the network layer anonymized, apps like apache/jabber/irc/etc work fine over it with sometimes only minor mods (to ensure anonymity is preserved.) And no, it's not freenet replacement as some have thought.. different beasts they are.
I'd plug my own eepsite but that would defeat the purpose of using i2p wouldn't it....
Lol that's so funny that you said that. I disagree with some of the censorship that takes place at our school. We used to have Bess installed but they found out that we were using webproxies to get around it so they switched to Sonicwall (which is terrible...some of my faviorite sites it blocks are: Disney, both the republican and democrat webpages, and classroll, a site we use so kids can check their grades online. Sonicwall was a pain because it was hard to get around. He that's exactly what I did to get around it. :-).
But there are many ways to write a negative web log that still tries to be completely fair and see things from the other person's point of view. I read a number of these (I actually started reading their logs for some tech project they were on but kept on after finding out that they have lives that don't revolve around first person shooters). They seem to write out of a need to get some sort of honesty about what's going on.
One fellow in particular that I enjoy reading writes about his boss, problem clients, assertive sex partners, and demanding family members. He's fun to read because he's figured out that in most cases he is the "problem" rather than all of these people he writes about. He is, after all, the only common link between all of these problematic things. When he writes about a stressful change at work he's not bitching about "the worst decision his boss ever made" but rather "a change his boss made that eluded his understanding".
If I were a future employer and came across his blog, the level of maturity he displayed would go a lot further than whether he mentioned someone by name. Not everyone's that way, but jeez, if you are completely anonymous writing stuff seems like a waste of time.
If you want to leak a secret wrongdoing, send it to a reporter's email address. If you want to write about your stresses and successes, do so in a mature way. If you want to bitch and moan and try to assasinate someone's integrity, be prepared to take the consequences for your juvenile tantrums.
While there are some good tips in EFF's suggestions, the guide is alarming in its willingness to chill free speech.
By the time you finish following all the guidelines, there would be little point in writing at all.
The best advice surely is to consider that you may lose your job for voicing your opinion -- and that as the EFF points out, a little bit of vagueness will generally not be enough to hide your identity.
Beyond that, weigh seriously the importance of your job versus the importance of publishing your thoughts.
Advice to Chinese dissidents: If you are going to be anonymous, use a pseudonym and digitally sign your stuff .. so that others know it's actually you and/or your dissident group .. that way you can build credibility with a reduced chance of being screwed.
Being totally anonymous isn't very effective, unless what you are saying can really stand on it's own (that is, it's stating provable logic rather than facts/events).
You can't lawfully do that. If someone found out, they could sue you and whoever posted the information for defimation. It is the reason why former employers never can say anything bad about a former employees.
Likewise, my personal opinions have nothing to do with my ability to do a job. Googeling to find out what political party a person belongs to, their world views, and the like is a bad practice. I know of a guy who sued a company because they asked for his social security number on an application, then did not offer him work. According to state law, that is illegal. The only reason to ask for a social security number is to pay taxes, and an employer that asks for it is implying they have offered you a job. Same thing goes for asking about marital status, or age.
People should know thier rights and sue when violated. Otherwise corporations will keep crapping on people, paying less money, forcing people to get work as contractors, hiring temps, and the like. It all means the death of good paying jobs with health care and job security.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Let me be the first to say that I, and many others, within the information gathering business use blogs including slashdot to collect information about our competitors. Competitors can be from business to government agencies.
Passive information gathering from open sources goes on all the time especially here on slashdot where certain people give away pretty useful information about the current state of where they work including technical and operational matters.
Some of this information might seem innocuous to many of you but for us 'in the know' we realise that some of you posters provide us with a goldmine of competitive intelligence because we recognize its context. It's basically reverse social engineering in action and it works because humans are social beings who want to 'connect' with their online social peers. We don't even have to resort to using 'recruitable weaknesses' like ideology, money or sex. Some of you people just blurt it out just because you want to be accepted.
Here this bloggers who work in sensitive environment: Awareness of your surroundings can be a wonderful thing.
I was curious as to what Slashdot's IP logging policy is, particularly for AC posts. From the faq, fyi:
We log the usual stuff (IP, page, time, user, page views, moderation, and comment posting, mainly). A few other odds and ends too, but mostly the data is used to make moderation possible. We keep the logs for 48 hours.
"Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." --Eric Blair
Wow, today my friend got fired for blogging about the Nintendo DS. He was working for Guillemot in NYC and didn't say anything that hadn't already been made public by Nintendo, and Guillemot OK'd that he could blog about it so long as he didn't reveal anything proprietary or whatever, but then after some DS hacking site linked to his blog as a source of "insider information" (their words), Nintendo caught wind and sent a notice to Guillemot about it, and they considered it a breach of contract (after they'd already said the blog posts were okay), and had to fire him. Oh well, he hated the job anyway.
I'm on a road shaped like a figure eight; I'm going nowhere but I'm guaranteed to be late.
I did the same thing and apparently I climb mountians, was a painter in the 50's and work at Motorola, microsoft and the MPAA.
I also seem to have several degrees I do not remember...
maybe I need to go to the doctor cince I must be blacking out alot and doing this stuff.
FOOLS think that googling a name provides any real information.
See, the "you're the only link" guilt trip only applies when one really is the only link. I.e., when it's about people _you_ chose to interact with, and interactions _you_ had some control over. Simplifying the awfully complex graph of social and corporate interactions at work into "you're the only link" is an _awful_ over-simplification and just plain old false.
Example: a lot of the people you meet daily (including on the street, in the train, at the restaurant where you "did lunch" with a client, etc) are below average IQ. About half of them in fact. That's why it's an average. Does that make _you_ the only connection between stupid people?
I think you can see the problem by now.
Again, that kind of thing doesn't really apply for things that weren't under one's control to start with, and when indeed there was no other external common factor. E.g., if the 5th girlfriend just dumped you, yeah, you're the common link. E.g., if the 5th customer brought to you by the company's marketer is a clueless PHB, then chances are you're _not_ the common link. The common link is the marketter that brought them. E.g., if it's the 5th project which where you're asked to do overtime to implement changes, because the boss can't bring himself to tell the client "nope, we need more time to implement those", then you're _not_ the common link. The common link is the boss. Etc.
So just to clearly summarize it, in the case of an average employee:
- For the co-workers he's _not_ the "only common link". The real common link is the manager or HR person who hired them. Those decided the level of competence they wish to pay for, so, yeah, sometimes you're stuck working with incompetent or lazy people.
True story: I know of one department where they actually did a reverse auction for employees. No, it's not an urban legend. The ones who wanted the least money got hired, regardless of qualification or credentials. Needless to say, much to the existing workers' grief, their new coleagues were about as sharp as a bowling ball. Even if a really cheap bowling ball.
And methinks there it's a bit unfair to blame it on any team member as "you're the common link." No, the common link was the manager who had that stupid idea, in a misguided attempt to cut costs.
- For the clients, the real link is the marketting department that brought those.
- For the tools or technologies one has to use, or to support, again it's a tad unfair to blame the team member or tech support guy. He's not the one who chose them. The real common link is invariably a manager there.
Etc.
And in some cases the only honest thing to say is that someone is incompetent or lazy. It has nothing to do with "assassinating someone's integrity". Some people just do an awful job, and that's that.
Sure, you can pretend to be in some Wonderland where everyone is competent, noone makes any mistakes, everyone gives 100%, and half the corporate decisions aren't an equal split between ass-covering, brown-nosing, ego trips, corruption and nepotism. Quite a happy wonderland is that.
Unfortunately the real world doesn't work that way.
No ammount of soul-searching, seeing the other's point of view, or "maybe I'm the link" guilt trips can really explain stuff like: Coworker A needed 3 years to write the same module that Coworker B wrote in 6 hours. And Coworker B's version had far less bugs (we only found 1 so far, and it was in a library he used, not in his code), and ran 50 times faster. Actually benchmarked on very large real-world data sets, so no micro-benchmarking effects apply.
There's also the fact that Coworker A doesn't even know the very basics of the language he's paid to program in. No, seriously. He hadn't even heard of "call by value", so I had to help him debug his trying to assign a value to a parameter in a method, to change the variable used as a parameter to the method. Also hadn't ever heard of "linked list", "hash table" or the other absolute basics of computer programming.
So please tell me: how should I see that situation. What point of view should I see for him, that makes that one a perfectly competent and productive co-worker? It's not even a flame. I'm genuinely curious by now.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.