Slashdot Mirror
Can Internet Pseudonymity Be Saved?
jfruh writes "Imagine that you're a lawyer who also runs a popular sexual fetish podcast. Or that you're a blogger on political issues and you want to determine for yourself who you're going to get into political arguments with. Or you're a transgender woman who isn't out to your real-life associates but you want to explore your gender identity online. Or that you're a female gamer who wants to play World of Warcraft without being hit on or harassed. All of these people have perfectly good reasons for wanting to use a pseudonym online. And yet more and more websites are making it difficult or impossible to do so, often for perfectly legitimate reasons of improving civility and stopping anonymous abuse. How can pseudonymity — one of the key foundations of early internet communities — be saved?"
Are you sure all of these people have perfectly good reasons ?
Absolutely sure ?
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
and clear your cookies*
* browser state, including cookies, cache, history, etc.
I have maintained a pseudonym online as much as possible, and will continue to do so. The guy out in Colorado or somewheresville who has the actual name probably is none too pleased
It's not a perfect solution, but most of these real name policies have no actual way to vet the users.
Give people the choice of creating a "Real Name" account with proof or a "Pseudonym" account, and make this choice visible to everyone else.
citation needed: what kind of pseudonym restriction actually does improve civility?
You can't just speculate that it does. You can't even play games of association that don't prove causality. You need to actually show it. I understand it matches your intuition, but I think your intuition is wrong.
Our local newspaper publishes almost everything online. It also allows people to make comments. A few years ago, they decided to deal with the level of uncivil comments by requiring everyone to establish an account before posting. After a few months, it was mostly back to normal, but marginally better. Then this summer, they switched to requiring a Facebook or Linked-In login, and almost all commenting stopped--not just the problem comments, all comments.
They killed the commenting system by trying to force real identities.
Few social networking sites... almost none... are really able to figure out your real name. They might ask you to give a "real name"... and you can do that... but it doesn't have to be your real name.
You can be Bruce Wayne... Or George Washington... or whatever. How are they going to stop it? Pull a credit card off you? Who is paying for social networking? Exactly.
There are a lot of data bases with a lot of information on everyone. But how much of that information is actually accurate? The dirty little secret is that most of the information in those databases is garbage.
Which is good for us. Keep filling it with garbage. When the data miners open wide, stuff their mouths with trash and keep shoveling until they're full. They'll believe they have some means to filter fact from fiction but they're welcome to try.
This is the price of an automated system. Computers as we all know are stupid. Very easy to lie to them. And are we under any legal obligation to not lie to these people? No we are not. And even if we were, and I'd love to see a lawyer try to get a jury to convict someone of such a thing, then would it be worth the effort even to set an example? Not really.
Lie and keep lying.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I've always wondered about some web of trust available for this. For example:
I have a website, and want people to comment. Someone decides to authenticate with a keyID. My server checks what certificates are associated with the public key. One cert from a semi-trustworthy source shows the anon ID is actually associated with a live person. Another cert from a decently trustworthy source shows the person is a frequent poster at a website. Still another shows that the ID has been in use on sites on a daily basis without any site bans for a few years.
With this info in mind, even though I have no clue whom the person is, I can reasonably assume that it will be either someone good at ID theft, or someone that likely won't be trolling/spamming.
A reputation based system would be useful. The public key can be anonymous, but with CAs (of varying trust levels), I can find that the person has been proven to be not a bot, has a positive reputation on various sites, is known by friends and people I do trust, etc. Of course, on the other hand, I get a key that has absolutely zero certificates on it, I'd probably not bother to allow it on.
Internet STRONG anonymity should be enforced as default over the tubes.
Our protocols should be revised for the future with that consideration in mind.
You might like the idea or not, this is the future, there's no escaping.
With tracking cookies and javascript hacks being as prevalent as they are I've been using separate sandboxes for browsing profiles for some time now with Sandboxie. I suppose I could go extra paranoid and throw in a proxy, too.
As long as the sites which know your real identity are walled away from the rest of the internet tracking then some level of anonymity can still be expected.
Except for that last one ( female gamer who wants to play World of Warcraft without being hit on or harassed), I can see why you might want to be using a pseudonym, but I wouldn't expect it to really cover your identity either. If you have a big online presence, people will be able to figure out who you are.
As far as games go, I like online games using the "Mario Kart" model much better than anything else. When you're playing against the general public, it's more enjoyable to just play. No talking, no messaging, no real names. I actually prefer the private server model, where I only play against people I know, but that sadly seems to be going away.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
You can't legislate or regulate intent. And that's the problem here. A pseduonym protects identity. It would be great to create "anonymity for those who need it" and not "anonymity for those who will abuse it." But separating the groups is difficult to impossible. Unless you're doing detailed independent background checks on people, how can you possibly know who's who (and even then it's questionable).
Even some kind of "report abuse!" function with abusers "giving up" their anonymity will be abused (specifically, trolls will use it to "unmask" legitimate users).
The internet is a big place. I'm sad that it brings out the worst in so many people. But it's not changing. Get used to it.
I'm not sure "anybody" has to "do anything" at all - there are many models for communication and people can - for the moment, anyway - use whichever ones they like.
I'm an old Usenet fan, but am perfectly aware the ability to nymshift led to a culture of spamming and verbal harrassment that are basically unacceptable and that helped kill Usenet as a communication platform (not totally; I'm still on it, as are others, but it's a shadow of its former self).
Slashdot allows a pseudonym and if you want to advertise your website or Twitter feed, you can do so. You can also be anonymous if you like.
Reddit allows pseudonyms and even throw-away accounts, and many people think that's been a big part of its success. On the other hand, Facebook requires you to use a real name. At first, that kept people honest, but now we've seen it's not that hard for spammers and scumbags to set up fake accounts and Facebook is somewhat powerless to stop it. So that did or did not work.
My point is just that there are many existing models, and they compete for attention. If your transgendered lawyer wants to run a podcast, s/he'll decide whether to do it under her own name on Facebook or using a pseudnym elsewhere. The platforms compete. Bloggers who want to get name recognition can use their name; bloggers who want anonymity can blog under a fake name.
There's a good debate waiting about the merits of the different platforms. And it's essential Netizens fight against any effort to do away with anonymity at the policy level. But for the moment I'm not convinced there's a crisis of any sort, or any need for people to "act now" to "save the internet."
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
There's no enforcement. Just captcha-style checks in place to prevent "fake" account info they can't sell to marketing partners. Fuck em.
Well, use "internet communities" that accept pseudonyms - if you want pseudonyms!
But don't demand it from those "internet communities" that don't want to use them.
They're not doing it to improve civility or stop anonymous abuse. These can both be solved by other, less intrusive mechanisms. Even Slashdot manages it: penalise anonymous users a lot, penalise new members a little bit, and require users to establish a reputation to gain full participation. If they lose that reputation, their ability to participate drops off. The real reason that they want real names is because it makes the information that they harvest and sell to advertisers more valuable if it's tied to a real name and address.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If your pseudonym is persistent, reputation still matters. It does not matter whether your pseudonym can be connected to your meatspace identity; reputation is still reptuation.
The real problem with online harrassment, trolling, etc is that people lend credence to transient identities. Not a problem here, because we have persistent pseudonyms and transient identities. Transient identities get treated with skepticism and ignored if they're being abusive. Persistent pseudonyms which have earned a reputation are granted wider latitude to make their case.
The problem is not pseudonymity, or even transient identities and anonymity. It is that most public fora do not make it easy to distinguish between a member in good standing and a drive-by-troll.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
How about those who wish for pseudonymity should use websites that allow for pseudonymity? There are some excellent arguments both for and against an anonymous internet, but I have yet to see one that requires *all* of the internet to conform to the desired policy, and I find it highly unlikely that the whole internet will require personal authentication anytime soon.
If you cannot use Facebook for fear of being discovered by your neighbours, why not use something else? I can understand someone wants to use the most popular social network, but it seems a long shot to convince such a large company to provide a service that runs counter to their economic interests.
Or as Bobby pointed out above, do some magic and create a fake persona with noone the wiser.
Posting as Anon Coward to prove the point.
People say they want free speech, which they do. Just not more than they hate trolls.
So trolls win.
Not on Slashdot (my account predates getting married and having kids... back in the days when I only had myself to worry about and didn't think anything bad could come of having my real name out there), but on my blog/Twitter/etc. My wife and I use pseudonyms because we often discuss parenting issues and will post photos of our kids. We don't want someone tracking us or our kids down, though, so we don't use real names and obviously don't use our address or name of our kids' school. It's not impossible to track us down, but it makes it hard for some random Internet stalker (yes, I've encountered at least one) to call my work to "report" me to my boss for crimes she imagines I committed. (Said Internet stalker has harassed lots of people online and has contacted at least 1 person's employer because he used his real names/place of business online.)
One of the big reasons why I don't use Facebook or Google+ (besides lack of time to be on a million social networking sites), is that they require that you use (and reveal to the world) your real name. (If they really wanted to require real names but support pseudonyms, it wouldn't be hard to devise a system where your real name was hidden to all and your pseudonym was displayed instead.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
If you want to be anonymous then you have to actively seek it. You can only have privacy if you choose too and you will have to make sacrifices to achieve it.
As a contrast, we live in a society that thinks nothing will come of their stupid youtube video and if it does it will only be awesome. We are so very narcissistic but to be a real narcissist you have to attach an identity to it. Most people do not want anonymity, they want fame. (Some exceptions being people who are really confident and/or serial killers.) We need more people to understand that you don't have to put your name on every thing and no not everyone thinks you are cool because maybe you are not cool. (high probability of not)
The people of this story want to be concealed but can't figure out how to. At this point they must decide what is more important, anonymity as an alternate self or presentation of actual self. (I will interject that the advice to "be yourself" is often bad advice that should be replaced with something like "become something better" or "improve yourself.")
Posting as AC for obvious reasons :-)
When you have 10,000 trolls and 10 people with legitimate reasons to stay hidden, you need to pick which is more important to you.
I know quite a few people, myself included, who either have two profiles on Facebook -- the public one and the private one -- or go with a pseudonym because they want to preserve their privacy. And not for nefarious reasons, because they only want to be connected to people significant to them and not to everyone. Like for instance, a lawyer may have a professional presence but keep the family elsewhere, or a teacher keeps everything out of where students and adminstration could see it.
It's been mentioned already that you can be shitcanned for what you put online, even if it's not a picture of your junk or a status update about a party you're at. It has been done for the weakest of reasons because somebody with some power doesn't agree with your private POV. Some people would like to be netizens like everyone else without having to deal with oversensitive vindictive dickheads snooping on them.
I just tell people I don't trust I don't have a Facebook since my username doesn't involve my given name in any form and usually don't friend anyone I work with, and without a lot of work some HR spy isn't going to find how how much I love kittens and midget bowling.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
Google killed a good part of "pseudonimity" with this crazy move to link your Google+ profile to your play/market reviews (even for just giving X stars without any comment).
WTF? Ok, google knows a lot of stuff about me, where I am, it reads my email, some documents, knows a good chunk of what I browse, etc. WHATEVER. However, I just don't want to have a list of apps and apps rating associated with my name. It just feels wrong.
Pseudonyms are just as bad as real names.
How can pseudonymity — one of the key foundations of early internet communities — be saved?
By not using services on the web that don't allow it.
I wonder how this will shake out for a major Puget Sound newspaper that a couple days ago they announced they are going that direction, using Facebook logins and dropping the anon/pseud posting ability. But this would be where the nonpersonal/semipersonal throwaway Facebook accounts come in...
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
a SkinnyChick ...
There are 3 Pre-req's to real Freedom. The abilities to:
1. learn;
2. speak; and
3. spend...
anonymously.
W/o these, authentic freedom cannot exist. The battle against anonymity is a battle for control. You cannot exact costs on people for their speech or political views if you can't identify them. You can't stop an idea, only the messenger. That's all we are talking about. That's all that matters. That's what's at stake. Nothing more. Nothing less.
The ability to "explore" (aka "learn") and then speak about what you've learned, or, worst yet, put your money where your mouth is (the highest form of speech) threatens business models, governments, etc. Basically, when we learn, we speak, and spend... and cause change. It is perfectly understandable why a company or government would want to have total control over this power... less someone question the foundational assumptions that belie a particular value proposition... of a product, service, institution or governing principle. Increasingly, we will have to figure out how to trust ourselves with authentic freedom... or decide if it is better to eliminate it. The lion used to rule the jungle. Today, it lives in a cage. People may find their way into cages one day as well, but by choice... or the perception of it. The digital cage is already under construction and accepting early applications from interested parties. Now back to a game of Candy Crush...
And see how long their "real names" policy lasts.
They were having problems with fake reviews, and this solved a good chunk of them.
I don't like it either, but I don't have any alternate suggestions, you know?
Admit that the reasons are not "perfectly legitimate", but have no basis in reality. Real names don't make people civil. Communities that are willing to kick out people who are abusive make people civil -- or, at least, omit the people who aren't.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
'In the olden days", i.e. the 70s and 80s, computer accounts were rationed one per user by a central bureaucracy. It was almost always part or all of your real name. I did not have psuedonomy on uset then. Even though I would make "what if" arguments, people would still infer my known background had something to do with my argument. Many fewer trolls then too. the in 90s it went the other way and you could have as many accounts as you wanted in whatever handle you wanted. This caused account-remembering problems and well as poor troll behavior. Still you are only one level away from having your true identity known, either from clever detective work or a search warrant. I would not be totally boorish online.
The problem of abuse on forums and online can be solved with good moderation. Unfortunately, most online sites don't bother to have someone ban users or delete posts based on users abusive behavior.
A properly moderated site enforces civil behavior - psuedonym or not.
You stereotypers are all the same...
a lawyer who also runs a popular sexual fetish podcast
OMG! It's like, I have a twin!
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
I prefer to use my name. I get banned everywhere.
I am impotant -- no woman worries.
I am disabled -- no employer or employee issues.
I'm Moses. Fucken carte blanche legally... or insane.
I don't give a fuck except what God thinks.
Terry Davis
God says...
C:\TAD\Text\QUIX.TXT
ver, copper, tin, in lowly state
Off the bare earth and on earth's fruits didst dine;
Live thou, of thine eternal glory sure.
So long as on the round of the fourth sphere
The bright Apollo shall his coursers steer,
In thy renown thou shalt remain secure,
Thy country's name in story shall endure,
And thy sage author stand without a peer.
DON BELIANIS OF GREECE
To Don Quixote of la Mancha
SONNET
In slashing, hewing, cleaving, word and deed,
I was the foremost knight o
being left the fuck alone needs to be the "default" setting
and no participating in society (going out in public, talking to people, posting online) does not imply that the participant is willingly anonymity rights
anonymity is the only defense the powerless have against the powerful, that is why powerful people hate the idea and are working so hard to get rid of it
How about giving us an update on how you protect Anonymous Cowards? Is the web server a ram disk that erases everything when shut down? You guys are pretty technical... let us know!
If you can't find a community which supports anonymous users, then you should be able to start one yourself.
As long as your community is small (under 100 users), then the costs should be tiny.
If you get larger than that, it may be harder to get advertising to pay for costs.
But I think you should be able to run a reasonable community for a couple thousand bucks a year (including a business class internet connection so you can run your own server).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
It's 2013.
Technological progress "killed" Usenet as a communications platform, not nymshifting trolls.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Short answer: Usenet
Long answer: Usenet
None of these posts have addressed the very real possibility that pseudonyms may be made illegal by various governments. We need vigilant legal defense.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
I deleted my FB, google+ and twitter accounts in June. Things are better without them.
Websites that want me to login with social and force that will get fake accounts if these things persist. They add nothing.
No it wasn't one of the key foundations of early internet communities. Quite the opposite in fact - it was seen as a great threat to Internet communities. Lemme cut and paste a post I made last year...
Once upon a time, when I first got on the Internet (late 1980s), there was no anonymity. Sysadmins voluntarily adhered to a policy where each user's online identity and their real identity were linked. If someone ever found a way to break this link, it was considered a bug which needed to be fixed. (Also notice that all the people in those old USENET posts are using their real names.) This system was staunchly enforced by admins who believed the net would devolve into chaos and rampant misbehavior if people were allowed to post anonymously.
There were a few people running their own servers who bucked the trend, but it wasn't until AOL joined USENET that pseudonyms became a fact of life on the Internet. AOL allowed each account to have up to 5 usernames, ostensibly so family members sharing a single AOL account could each have their own ID. Obviously these extra usernames were quickly used to make pseudonyms by people wishing to post things online anonymously, which was good for free speech. But not surprisingly, spam was invented shortly thereafter.
All that's happening now is that the pendulum is starting to swing the away from complete anonymity as netizens struggle to figure out the best balance between real names and pseudonyms. The people at the pro-anonymity extreme won't like it, just like the people at the pro-real-name extreme didn't like it in the early 1990s. But as with most things in life the best balance is probably somewhere in between.
Some collegues and friends know about her fetish? The truth is basically already out there since multiple people can already connect the dots.
As for the full story, yes I'm sure you can still maintain your pseudonymity. I don't think many people in the online fetish scene will display their real name, so some service will always cater to that need.
Of course the big data aggregators like google/facebook/ad services and your local ISP will probably be able to connect the dots as well, but that's why it's pseudo-anonymity and not full fledged anonymity.
I never use Facebook or Linked In login, ever.
If a site wants me to, I go elsewhere. No exceptions.
I will also not connect my FB or linked in account to my cell phone, which include installing their amazingly intrusive applications.
Handwaving and alarm is unwarranted at this time. If your favorite site switches to a system you don't like, that doesn't mean a national crisis.
And yeah, anonymity killed USENET. It isn't an unmitigated good. There is only so long you can swim in filth before you get out of the pool, or the pool gets drained and it's metaphoric value recycled into cars and Hitler.
Umm, what's to stop somebody from setting up a pseudonym on facebook? A good pseudonym and they won't know the difference. I'm talking about if your name is Sally Richter you go by John MacDonald. But we've already established that spammers are setting up fake accounts en masse. And they've never complained about my very obvious pseudonym either.
Use different ID's and email addresses wherever possible. That way the likes of Google can't build a real picture of you.
I'm one of the Tranny's who aren't out to their family. I use a number of aliases all over the internet.
I value MY and my families privacy over everything else.
Sadly we live in a community where coming out as a Tranny is as bad as 1st degree murder. I'd be ex-communicated in an instant and I'd lose my job a second later.
Until there is general acceptance that people are different and those who are are not always a threat to Life and Limb we will all have to keep things to ourselves.
It wasn't so long ago that some people 'tarred and feathered' a gay man simply because he'd come out to a friend, in the next county to mine.
Sounds like this is merely a case of the next self-righteous asshole promoting the primitive concept of guilty before proven innocent.
All it takes is a web site that signs its visitors customer certificates by itself.
This allows visitor to send encrypted messages to be send, even without the site reading along.
With proper protection from a Perspectives-like certificate log, it protects against MitM attacks.
With DNSSEC in the mix, it protects against phishing and hostile takeovers.
With independent channels, people can keep communicating, even when the original site goes down.
Read: http://eccentric-authentication.org/blog/2013/08/31/the-holy-grail-of-cryptography.html and http://eccentric-authentication.org/blog/2013/09/05/a-subversive-idea.html
Guido.
Sites who demand real info only want people posting who are politically correct and stay obediently inside the box. The real info requirement forces people into conformance with societal norms under the threat of mass social rejection, which might make it more comfortable for the site admin and/or the kind of user he covets, but it is not necessarily better for open discussion of controversial components of the site's topics (just about everything has its controversy).
The admin can assume "oh well I don't want to hear from those batshit loons anyway", but like I said above, he's not really enabling discussion at that point. He's towing the subject's PC party line, in which case, the honorable thing to do is not allow any 3rd party commentary if he doesn't want his position challenged. A lot of sites allow comments but heavily censor to create a false sense of consensus (see? everyone agrees with me!). Its very misleading for the unsavvy reader. As we know, argument from consensus alone is a fallacy, but peer pressure is quite powerful, falsely projected or not.
How to repair anonymity? Well that's technically easy, but would require politicians and corporate officers to actually work for a living, and have cultures in their organizations that respect personal liberties.
1. Reinstate the US constitution's bill of rights as the preeminent law of the land. Free speech is more important than spurious considerations, like remote threats to 'safety' (terror, pedophiles/rapists, political correctness/identity politics) which are just excuses to force others not to acknowledge the emperor's revealing attire. Retrack the NSA to do its intended job: gather intelligence on the activities of foreign nations who might do us harm. Repeal obviously unconstitutional law, etc. Restrict lobbying to publicly available verbal or written communication. No payoffs, vacations in the tropics, planerides, hookers and blow etc. Violation of this earns the politician a bullet.
2. ISPs cannot be allowed to keep logs. Penalty for doing so is death, or something close to that, for the principals. If the information isn't recorded then it can't be abused. Implement End to end encryption for all networked applications, even mundane ones like games. This crypto standard would have to be open source and easily verifiable. In order to verify security in running code, all source code to routers and operating systems sold to and/or used by the public must be made publicly available and buildable. This wont' make it impossible to snoop, but does make it really hard. Someone will have to be highly motivated to do so. This effectively limits scope of wouldbe government/corporate dragnets due to cost. Obviously, stuff like CALEA ports would have to go.
3. Of course, all of this requires a culture that embraces self reliance, freedom (real freedom, not the current US federal party line), and respect of the individual. What we have now is a soccer mom consensus culture that thinks what the idiot box tells it to think and fears what it is told to fear. Good luck.
No one can tell what a dirty slut 2001:0db8:85a3:0042:1000:8a2e:0370:7334 is.
The internet is a dangerous place. People have been lulled into believing that this is not the case.
No lulling involved. Only a massive increase in user base that was not raised on the idea that the Internet is an unknown outside of your normal neighborhood.
People who rode the rising tide of the Internet from early on learned where you could share your identity and where you needed to maintain anonymity. Those who jumped onto the bandwagon in the past decade have failed to recognize that such a distinction was even necessary.
Exactly why should it be saved?
^This.
TFS (and, if I were to read it, I suppose TFA) make it sound like there's a one-size-fits-all global identity model for all websites. If HuffPo or Facebook or even gmail decide to eliminate trolls by requiring proof of real identity, then it must follow that SecretKinkySex.com must also do the same.
No.
I actually agree that mainstream news sites have good reason for reducing anonymity for exactly the reasons stated -- to eliminate, or at least reduce to a manageable level, trolls. They could even argue that it is in their best interests to do so.
Sites where just your presence on the site may cause irreparable damage to your personal life, your job, etc. -- not so much. It is in THEIR best interests to provide anonymity to the best of their ability.
So, yeah. If you are willing to have your name associated with your inflammatory posts, give your real name to the sites that require it. If not, avoid those sites and stick with places that allow anonimity; they will always do so or they will go out of business (even if "business" is just selling ad space). Problem solved.
[R]egister
-
First Name:
Last Name:
Handle:
Show [R]eal name or [H]andle:
From the very underlying infrastructure, where you are who you declare you are, to all kinds of social interactions enabled by technology Internet is pseudonymous. 'Real Name' is a very recent fad pushed on us by social sites that are unhappy with limitations imposed on their data mining (and profits) by the very nature of the Internet.
Internet does not forget and you have no control over audience of any of your communications. Considering vast number of people involved, you can't even assume that your audience is reasonable or objective.
As a result using Real Name is not unlike talking to a room of armed schizophrenic psychopaths - no matter what you say you have very little control, regardless of presentation or content, as to if you are going to end up lynched for what you said.
Google+ even follows some of us to Slashdot. Fortunately my Google+ name is a pseudonym using the first and last names of two different actors. Real-looking is all they care about, not that you actually use your real name.
I'm the co-founder of www.ukchatters.co.uk which is a UK Chat site. Long story short, not only can our members choose any name they like within the practical limits of the software but the staff can also remain anonymous if they want to. As part of the Staff we know their identity but it isn't revealed with the public and for us that's quite fine and normal - in fact staff that have revealed too much information have been victims of bullying so we actully prefer the anonymity.
Solved, as in destroyed the system where people stopped wriing reviews? I can easily disregard any Google+ comments, because now with certainty I can say that reviewers ether lack clear judgment and penned a review under their real name or are accepting monetary compensation for exposing themselves to a potential harm.
Internet 2.0, which requires certified real identities and protocols which prevent ID spoofing.
Let Internet 1.0 remain for services which desire annonymity.
When some web form demands me real name, address or country with no reason I do some Godwin law violation there. Or alternatively Afghanistan is the first country on the list, so there goes some Osama Bin Ladens on the internets. For my google account I put in some guy more creepy than Adolf as my real name (after being nagged for the 126th time), I could then see that changing it was not an option. In the end I deleted my google account since it was tied to my main e-mail address.
About pseudonyms, one mistake is using the same one on many services. Try destroying some old accounts if you can.
Did Internet pseudonymity ever truly exist? If people want to explore non-public sides of their personality or gender preferences, the Internet is the last place they should be doing it.
99% people don't know Usenet exist, and it is/was behind a paywall if you want to access it. So people used the web instead.
Korea has a national internet ID which is used as a verification step in almost all online account creation. You could allow anonymous posting or pseudonym posting if the user is willing to apply for an internet id. And limit it to one account per forum. If that account is doing abusive or illegal things a course of action is available and the identity could be subpeonad. Problem.here is slippery slope. Eventually the government would probably require all internet users to register like south korea.
At least they are trying to do something in that (and others) respect.
Slashdot implemented Karma. Other sites have up votes and down votes. Make those persistent and you have the core of effective Troll Control, and conversely, the basis for a decent reputation online. It can be portable across all the sites operated by a particular owner, but of course it is difficult to be portable across the Net in general without a lot of cooperation between Owners. You don't need to know who I am IRL. You need to know I'm the same person you dealt with yesterday, will deal with tomorrow, who pays his debts with valid plastic, etc. That would be true for both a shining Sir Lancelot and the lowest asshole Troll
What is karma?
Your karma is a reference that primarily represents how your comments have been moderated. Karma is used to determine who moderates and who doesn't. You can improve your karma by posting intelligent, funny, informative or comments generally impressive to your fellow readers.
Karma is structured on the following scale "Terrible, Bad, Neutral, Positive, Good, and Excellent." If a comment you post is moderated up, your karma will rise. Conversely, bad karma usually indicates a user account used to spam or otherwise hurt the discussion.
Factors besides moderation also affect karma. Having a story submission accepted raises your karma. Also, metamoderation can cause your karma to change. This encourages good moderators, and ideally removes moderator access from bad ones. Don't worry too much about it; it's just an integer in a database.
Are there anti-troll filters?
A handful of filters have been put into place to try to make sure that people don't abuse the system. For instance, the same person can't post more than once every 120 seconds. Also, if a single user is moderated down several times in a short span, a temporary ban will be imposed on that user ... a cooling off period, if you will.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
lawyer who also runs a popular sexual fetish podcast
Really? No "I am not a lawyer" acronym jokes yet?
It can't.
It's like asking, how can politicians have a normal sex life without the media weighing in and the public thinking it's their business? The only difference being, most people believe that politicians should have no private lives while the rest of us schmucks can. The internet is become the great equalizer in many respects, some good, some not so good.
It is used as a tool to investigate prospective students, clients, employees, etc and whatever is found is fair game for using against a person. It was once playground and now, like everything else it has become a weapon.
The old bbs days when everyone had a nick is long gone. Huge databases are busy taking the anonymous and connecting it to real world identities. My nick here started as an anon account back in 97 and I think I managed to keep it separate from my real world identity for about 18 months. The OP is being nostalgic for something that hasn't existed for a long long time.
This is hilarious - all the examples given are of 'protected classes' - you know, the 'special' groups who white people have to be careful not to 'offend' all the time, by saying the 'wrong things'... Absolutely sickening.
We need internet anonymity so we can fight back against the Bolshevik Jews who have taken over your banking system, your media, your academia, and your government - THAT is why we need absolute, anonymous free speech.
Aah... the poor lawyer with a 'sexual fetish' - boo hoo for him.
What about the 95% of white people who don't want to live in a 'multi-cultural' society, but can't speak out against it because we'll be sacked from our jobs?
That differs from pseudonymity. (Is that a word?) With anonymity, there is no reputation at stake even within a community. People can game the system by posing as multiple posters and generally make asses of themselves.
It all depends on the purpose of the forum. Slashdot has pseudonyms and a moderation system to encourage some semblance of civil behavior and to push back on the troll threads. But it isn't intended to allow participants to develop 'fully formed' online reputations. Just cull the real bozos.
There are other sites that are purely anonymous. One in particular has gone back and forth between thread IDs and pure anonymity, presently selecting the latter. In spite of a rash of gaming and abusive nonsense. But then, that appears to be its purpose.
Have gnu, will travel.
The main problem is not whether pseudonymity is allowed or not, the main problem is who has the right to decide it. Generally, it should be the decision of a community of people whether they allow pseudonyms or not. So there could be one community (like web forum related to some topic) that allows pseudonyms and asides another community that requires proper names.
But since the advent of centralised social networks like Facebook, communities are often dependent on these networks and do not have independent infrastructure and therefore such communities are not able to independently choose their rules, because it is really an owner/operator of infrastructure who can set rules. So Facebook (and other social networks) sets their rules based on its needs (like legal protection), not based on needs of communities hosted on it.
There is one solution - be independent. Do not host your community on some third-party infrastructure whose owner reserves rights to meddle with your internal affairs just because it is offered to you for free.
When I am in a debate with somebody over their Islamic Belief vs my Christian belief, and the Radical muslim on the other hand thinks it's his duty to kill me and my children, all because some web site thought that I should reveal who I am, which leaves my children in immediate
A big reason to require real names, which is not covered in the article, is to collect information on users. Tracking "SloppyJoe22" on your website isn't worth much, but data on Joseph Brown, of 1493 Main St in Middleton IL is gold.
I suspect that is behind many businesses decisions to use real names, especially places like Facebook whose whole business model is to collect that data. There are many other ways to have good discussions without requiring real names (such as the discussion we're having now).
Just look at the reactions on twitter to the not-Aryan Princess being crowned Miss America. It seems people are willing to prove their ignorance to everyone under their own name.
Don't use the services that require linkage of your real life identity with the publicly visible account name. For instance: Even though Amazon arguably needs my real identity to purchase and sell items it lets me use a NickName instead of linking my real world name to my customer reviews.
IMO, we should let folks change their publicly visible user names.
Furthermore: In the real world people have the same names. WTF is wrong with places that make you put a damn number after your user name? This is leaking identity authentication up into the interface layer. If you're going to do that, then provide a UID number or some other uniqueness (image hash for an avatar) in addition to the user name. That way, two folks with the same name can have the same name, and folks can still tell them apart -- Just like in real life. No one mistakes me for a colleague who has the same first name: We look nothing alike. They use further qualifiers when referring to us both to clarify to whom they're speaking. Online, this sort of "who are you talking to" problem is gone, since you can link to or reply under the comment to which you're replying.
I've yet to finalize the online username system for an upcoming game, but I'm experimenting with the identity options. The prime need for uniqueness in my instance is in identifying which user profile you're trying to log into. Trying all the matching usernames is no good, it makes hacking similar accounts easier. So, I'm going with logins that use an email address OR unique username (append numbers or whatever), and publicly you can display a different nickname. Matching identical nicknames can be distinguished by the imagehash icon next to their name, or visiting their profile.
For my purposes I could simply go with the unique username approach, it's not like I expect but a handfull of players anyway (most indie games aren't popular), but with the software and games I develop for fun I always try to experiment with new things. I think what we really need is something like Open ID, or "sign in with facebook" or whatever (I run my own OpenID server), but we need to be able to pick a nickname to display when we're logged in with that system. I have several different accounts on my own Open ID server, and I select which one I want to use for each different service... I'd like it if I didn't have to do this manually, and we just had the login page for Open ID allow multiple names to be associated with one account HOWEVER, it would require the services you're authenticating to by proxy to support the concept of multiple IDs better.
We're almost there with solutions like the 3rd party authenticator, in that multiple folks with the same username can then be displayed on the service, distinguished by the uniqueness of the 3rd party authentication, however, now we need to apply "yet another layer of indirection" to the 3rd party auth systems too -- These have given us abstraction for the account verification, but not abstraction from the username associated with the accounts. It could be an extension to the existing openID system, if open ID were not built with reliance on username as the ID for the third party: eg: URLs such as:
http://yourname.signon.com
or
http://claimid.com/yourname.
Perhaps if the places you're signing into would allow you to associate multiple 3rd party sing-in accounts with one name, AND allow changing the publicly displayed name, it could be a step in the right direction for pseudonymousness. The other prospect of anonymity is harder still to tackle -- A trusted proxy along with a publicly shared OpenID account goes along way, when combined with Tor it's better still, however, the network itself is not built for anonymity (or security), hence both have been difficult to maintain. If the very platform is against you then either your battle is uphill or you're taking it laying down...
I think we're going the wrong way, fundamentally. We need to start with a system that provides
No, not immediately, unless you count five minutes later and semi-automated as close enough. Man, do you ever underestimate the scope and resources of the surveillance-industrial society.
Not only do they have human ears for every language of the world on tap, but probably also strange fish who speak seven different conlangs, some of whom can place your Klingon dialect to America, central Europe, or Japan. These are the kinds of seriously strange people who inhabit comic book shops.
How quickly your call percolates through this system depends on precisely what shit list you're on. It's nothing more than a routing problem. At the highest level of alert, I would guess an unintelligible fragment is dispatched within fifteen minutes to enough desks to cover 99% of the world's spoken languages. And if that verdict isn't clear, another 30 minutes later they've covered Basque, Sindarin, Klingon, proto-Semitic, Esperanto, and Hungarian pig Latin. Obviously they can't route more than a tiny fraction of what they capture through the cauliflower-ears switchboard. Nevertheless, what gets expedited doesn't stand a chance unless so peculiar that it's permanently archived in the bootstrap corpus of automatic speech decoding. You better hope your off-the-cuff adaptations are incalculably different from your unknown soul-mate of cute obscurity who vanished from the planet five years prior.
At this stage in the process, they don't actually care if you're a terrorist. They care if you cast a large enough footprint of capabilities, connections, and motives to engage in terrorist activities, should you choose to take that path at the next spur-of-the-moment major life setback.
PhD in mathematics or synthetic chemistry? Strike one. Fluent in Farsi? Strike two? Too much money, or too little money? Strike three. Scuba license? Strike four. Longtime Tor user? Strike five. Loss of child custody? Strike six. Attend a Unitarian church? Strike seven. Caught exchanging short messages with another code orange individual, couched in a street slang that not even Henry Higgins crossed with a wind-talking Kimball O'Hara can decipher? Strike fifty-five. Congratulations, you've just a scored yourself a priority routing code on the cauliflower nexus for everything they ever capture that comes out of your mouth, which will be plenty, because you've earned a gold star for that, too.
The exact bumps and gradations within this filter-feeding behemoth have been refined with methodical vigour since about 1940, incorporating in their regression database everything that ever slipped through their fingers, where in retrospect the clue dawned either a little bit or a lot too late. There are small pockets of competence ensconced in these hidebound, dysfunctional organizations that would render Danny Hillis or Craig Venter the dumbest man in the room—or at least put enough fright on them to seriously consider the matter for the first time in their lives (perhaps excluding Danny's private lunches with Richard Feynman, or Craig's lunches near a reflective surface).
For the people who built this system, the Manhattan project was a one-shot dry run. Of course, any program on this scale that runs for sixty years with have more than the normal share of dysfunction, especially at the intake maw concerning the enormous flow of public funds, where the proud bow to the vain. My oh my, that can't be a fun place.
I bet the NSA has some seriously interesting psychological criteria concerning the men who ultimately take on these roles (the highest level of career functionary reporting to anointed bozos). That's one file the bozos will rarely see. The NSA probably has some internal Masonic order to guard over exactly this.
Make no mistake, though, it's a comedy of the hyper-competent.
Google is really bad with this. They kept trying to link my youtube account and google+ account. After constantly saying "No, I don't want to use my real for my youtube" they caved in and randomly created a google+ page for my youtube account without my permission....
I really wish Google could understood why some people don't want everything they watch on youtube tied to their real name.
How is it "lacking clear judgement"? If I leave a review for a product under my real name, it means I believe in what I'm saying enough to put my name to it. (Which clearly isn't the case on Slashdot, but never mind that for a moment.)
Should I stay up nights worrying that someone searching my real name will see that I left a review on Google Play for a note-taking app and a review on Amazon for a motorcycle chain? What's the threat scenario to me here?
"... often for perfectly legitimate reasons of improving civility and stopping anonymous abuse."
I found the problem, neither of those are legitimate reasons. There's no such thing as "anonymous abuse", the recipient can choose to disengage at any time. Civility is generally an issue only to those new to the internet, you can always choose to go somewhere else if you don't like how a certain place is run.
The internet is a pretty crude place, however it's a vastly more honest place, and I would choose that over more "civil" behavior any day.
I don't understand how it solved the problem with fake reviews. I think you need a google account to even have google play working at all so if I'm going to write bogus reviews I can still make it a Google+ account and use whatever name, it isn't like they're checking.
Google knows who you are if you're using an android phone (they DO know a lot about you, think, they have your location, your IPs both from inside and outside the network, your IMEI, IMSI, possibly your phone number, your address book, your email, even before you start giving them credit card no, pictures, documents, etc). It's not hard to weed out the non-users.
The only problem they had was that nobody was using Google+. This is why they're pushing it to play store, youtube and who knows where else too.
Those "perfectly legitimate reasons" are not, in fact, legitimate at all. Worse, they don't work.
I bet you wouldn't be so happy if you were looking for a job and the first 666 things that appear when somebody searches your not-so-common name are reviews of Angry birds spin-offs. Written on a phone in "SMS-English".
And by the way Amazon does accept reviews under pseudonym.
No one is calling them out on using a power law?
http://phys.org/news/2012-02-frank-discussion-power-law-linking.html
Who guarantees you that SecretKinkySex doesn't see your Facebook login? If you want to be pseudonymous online, don't have a "real name" account on known spy sites. And even a pseudonymous Facebook account is a treasure trove for data collectors.
The game of "human interaction" has different winning strategies when "replay with knowledge/reputation" is allowed.
I'm a professional in health care. The general comment in my professions newsletters, magazines, and from malpractice companies is: anything you say on the internet can and will be used against you. People have lost their licences, business, been sued, harrassed by disgruntled patients, employees and probably competitors or strangers with an ax to grind against people who have my license. Some of the 'evidence' used against one of my group, has been things posted by others about that person on Facebook. Even though they tried and tried to lock down such comments by anyone else.
Every few months I get email aggressively trying to recruit me on Facebook. Even though I have ignored or tried to do nothing with Facebook, I know they have a lot of info on me they make available (same and Linkedlin, however it's spelled), but I've figured out that trying to find out more about that only exposes me more.
When I put on my tin foil hat I think the whole thing is a plot by people in power (the power elite, the Ruling Class, the military industrial infotainment porn fast food complex) to make as a large a percent of the population vulnerable as possible.
I think I'll go back to books, trees, whistling...
The irony.
They were having problems with fake reviews, and this solved a good chunk of them.
All the reviews are fake anyway, just like comments on Youtube, written by Yes-men. People are usually over-optimistic, blindly liking things without thinking a bit. Real names or not, here come the sheeps.
Well, don't do that then.
Geez, that was easy.
I'm totally fine with looking for a job and having my name show up with well-written stuff and my competitors show up with SMS-English reviews of 4chan autoposting apps, though.
I was a hardcore USENET user back in the 80s, as well as a BBS'er back in the days of 300-1200 baud dialup modems. So I've seen quite a bit come down the wires. I've never been comfortable with using my real name on a system, especially these days when everything except your toilet is owned and tracked by Google, Facebook or Microsoft. It's just not needed for most online discussion forums. But let me shine a flashlight on a couple of things: 1. A lot of people here have decried the use of real names by Facebook, and indeed it seems like good cases have been made. However, keep in mind that there are over a billion people out there who do NOT mind using their real names (except for those who use fake IDs) on Facebook. You're talking to something of a choir here. 2. There are some instances where using real names has been extremely beneficial, when the users had a sincere interest in knowing who they were talking to. For example, I'm on a Facebook group consisting of people who grew up in a certain town. We get on there and talk about the good old days. There must have been 15-20 times somebody has posted something like, "I remember being in Ms. Hall's 4th grade class back around 1954...." and his Facebook name is, fictitiously, "Greg Williams." And next thing you know he's getting a response like, "oh, my GOD!!!! Are you the Greg Williams that lived across the street from me in that green house on South 8th? I can't BELIEVE it!! It's been SIXTY YEARS!!!!!" Honestly, more than once I have sat at my keyboard almost in tears from this kind of situation. If we were all using names like "hotdog88," it never would have happened. Other such real-name forums or groups may be those for high school graduating classes, or members of a club. So there is definitely a place for real names on a system, although the concerns about security and privacy are absolutely justified. Roowark (not my real name....)
Technological progress "killed" Usenet as a communications platform, not nymshifting trolls.
Yes, the demonstrated technological superiority of Google Groups was the opening salvo, and the beautifully masterful new Neo interface for Yahoo Groups has been the final nail in the coffin.
None of them use Facebook.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Why is this news, it's just Huffington Post!
And to answer authors question, YOU LIE!
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Regarding the social networks: At least once I've been on Facebook and it threw a popup, one of my contacts' photos, and "Is this person's real name XX YY?". It wouldn't even let me cancel the popup (I just closed the whole browser application instead of answering). So if that tactic is used widely, then you also have to depend on all your contacts to lie for you by default all the time.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
It's trivial to start up an account with Google with reasonable-sounding information. So you can be clever about it and make several such accounts, and even tie them to other services, like AOL or whatever the hell kids are into these days. I think the key is to cultivate these false identities on-line. Visit web pages that persona would visit. Post to forums that person would post on. And if you crank you tinfoil hat on just tight enough, you'll think of other things to do. Only surf as that person with your screen resolution set a certain way. Use a different browser, and never clear its cookies. Misspell the same word all the time.
All joking aside, I actually do have a fake Google + identity that I use to post negative reviews about places. I keep it civil, but you never know what a man might do if you say something negative about his brisket in Texas.
I think the question of privacy and whether it should be allowed or not is disingenuous, as is the claim that it has some effect on content quality which will then make the world a better place and save the children.
The primary purpose of requiring real names is not for your benefit or to fix the world crushing problem of crappy comments, but to create value or control for someone else.
What is it that you get in return? I am not sure that many people are actually aware of the transaction details and all of the short and long term implications of the transaction.
Dip the voter in an indelible ink, of course. Standard practice throughout the world where records and IDs are a problem.
I actually agree that mainstream news sites have good reason for reducing anonymity for exactly the reasons stated -- to eliminate, or at least reduce to a manageable level, trolls.
Why? That's just silly. How oversensitive are people?
There was a brief period after Google bought DejaNews when you could request and have your Usenet posts deleted from their archive. Thank goodness. I was one of those loud ignorant linux fanboys back in circia 1996. Well before it was as uncool and derpy as today, but its good that I was able to erase the part of that I did under my real name.
The thing that always vaguely bothers me about that, though, is that if everyone can hide or delete their embarrassing activities, then that stuff remains embarrassing, instead of us as a culture growing up and accepting that past behaviours don't damn a person forever. If the majority of us have things we wouldn't want people to judge us on (which I think is a fairly reasonable hypothesis), and then we all knew those things, I'm pretty sure our culture would change to be less judgmental. It's the same principle behind people generally becoming less homophobic once they know that people they love and/or are friends with are gay; in times past, people could be extremely judgmental because it seemed like such an aberration, but once the (relative, compared to how it was once perceived) commonality of non-hetrosexuality is actually out in the open people's views soften.
What I'm saying, in part, is that if most people are able to purge the embarrassing moments from their history, then the few that aren't able will be judged and potentially punished unfairly. So the ironic part of it is, anonymity and/or the deletion of records helps perpetuate the need for that anonymity.
Full disclosure, though: I'm not posting under my real name, so it's not like I'm a fervent Real Name person. I do suspect that radical transparency might be better for humans in the long run, but I'm not going to claim it wouldn't be pretty painful along the way.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
How is it "lacking clear judgement"? If I leave a review for a product under my real name, it means I believe in what I'm saying enough to put my name to it.
More likely, it means some are too scared to say what's really on their minds. Not to mention that people who give away their names are imbeciles, anyway.
What's the threat scenario to me here?
Employers who don't like something you said, for one.
There's no reason your pseudonym needs to look like an IRC handle. Just start using a new name.... something like "Mark Twain". It's perfectly legal to take an assumed name, and use for any legal purpose.
Obviously, you cannot use a false name with intent to pass as another person/to further a criminal act -- as that would be wire fraud...
But for legal uses, you can take an assumed name as a legal alias. I would use a tool such as notwhoami to help generate this name.
Well, don't do that then.
Geez, that was easy.
Have fun pointlessly restricting your own activities out of fear that some idiot in a position of power could take offense to just about anything you do.
Da derp dee derp da teedly derpee derpee dum. Rated PG-13.
Usenet behind a paywall is the anti-usenet. It had been free (of cost) for most of its life, then later most ISPs dropped. Those that kept it around had a lot of people that charged for access (ie, direct Usenet access as opposed to a web interface like Google). That is, you have the order of events backward, as it became a pay service only after it lost popularity.
(it's still free though if you use google groups, some things like comp.lang.c++ seem to be in use)
As for 99% not knowing it existed, I'd say far greater than 99% even knew that the internet/arpanet existed until the twenty years (since this month is the 20th anniversary of Eternal September).
> I'm an old Usenet fan, but am perfectly aware the ability to nymshift led to a culture of spamming and verbal harrassment that are basically unacceptable
No, it was the AOL users. The darkest day in the history of Usenet was the day they started allowing people to post to it from AOL.
face recognition, doxing by friends, and crowdsourced phonebook-slurping.
Boy, there are software ways of changing MAC. Then there are cars and directional antennas. Then there is proper education, which you lack.
You CAN be an efficient operator on the net.
In general, it is about education. Educate yourself about technology and about general methods of the shadow and war world.
Most important:
* Stealth
* Plausible Denial
* Don't live too long on one pseudonym
* Travel like Stalin
* Always expect emotional attacks
* Have two buddies to back you up. Single guys can't fight for long.
* Ability to reflect about your actions and effectiveness
As a rather disillusioned gov operator, I can tell you the Russkies have grown incredibly stupid. Whenever I am in their land I connect to some random WLAN access point by means of an exploit furnished by hq and sure as hell I change MAC&browser string every time. When they work here, they physically meet some guy and use the same MAC address all the time.
If only my gov weren't dumb and corrupt to the bone. They have tech issues, we have culture issues.
"On the other hand, Facebook requires you to use a real name"
Or something that sounds like a real name
John Smith, Alabama, USA
John Smith, Leeds, England
John Smith, Sydney, Australia
John Smith, Shenzhen, China
Jump on board... 7 billion John (or Jane) Smith's can't be wrong :)
I first used the internet in the lates 90s, early 00s and there was no free usenet already. And I wonder if usenet was ever mostly a US-centric thing, I've never seen a usenet client running, ever (unless you want to count netscape/mozilla and such, but not running the news protocol)
At most some people mentioned it on forums, but only for the warez and porn/etc. on the binary newsgroups.
Pseudonyms are just as good. I'll protect the good name and reputation of this invented persona. Many worry astonishingly little about the reputation of their real life identity.
Ya, that was late stage Usenet. It was definitely world wide (how else would Tanenbaum bicker with Torvalds?).
The height was back before there were web browsers so that text-only interfaces were considered normal, even though graphical readers existed. It was typically store-and-forward, very similar to email, so that you didn't connect to a server for interactive use but instead downloaded all the new messages to a local computer. The early ISPs would download and store locally, providing a Usenet gateway as one of their major features for customers.
There are plenty of trolls who post w/ their real names.
Revoking pseudonymity retroactively can be dangerous.
A news forum here in Denmark decided to force everyone to use their real names, and as you registered with your real name they simply made a small change in the application so it showed your real name as author instead of the user-chosen username/pseudonym. This had the effect that old posts also suddenly were linked to real names, and those people with unique names were thus easy to track down physically.
Now, this happened around the time with the Muhammad Cartoon controversy, and we all know how crazy certain Muslim people are when it comes to 'insults' against their beloved prophet. Care to guess what happened? - Let's just say that visits by groups of baseball-bat wielding fanatics were involved. No deaths but that was mostly due to luck, not lack of trying. They took offense not only in the cartoons themselves but also that a few people commented on Muhammad's sexuality, specifically on the historical fact that he married a 6-year old (Aisha) and consummated the marriage when she was 9 years old.
The forum is mostly dead now. They still force posters to use their real name and nobody dares say anything, knowing what had happened and what still could happen.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Very relevant to this post: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1433811/?ref_=sr_1
They were having problems with fake reviews, and this solved a good chunk of them.
citation needed.
First Amendment case law dating back to the 18th Century has consistently defending the right to anonymous speech. The courts have long recognized that being forced to reveal one's identity in order to, say, criticize the government can have a chilling effect on free speech. The Bill of Rights doesn't generally apply to private citizens, of course, but the world doesn't seem to be going in that direction these days. Or even over the last hundred years -- see, e.g., J. Edgar. The problem now, I guess, is that we have the technology to easily make anonymous speech almost impossible -- so why not use it?? I think there's an Oscar Wilde quote about how the need to censor is one of the most powerful of human motivations -- next to it, the sex drive is nothing.
Yeah don't participate in sites that force you to real your actual identity gender etc. That will solve the problem pretty quickly. Don't see at Huffpo anymore , do ya? Don't see me at Salon anymore , do ya? No, ya don't.
Why can't they just leave things alone?