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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?"
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
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.
Are you implying that you're sure one isn't? If it's necessary to err either on the side of protecting anonymity or the side of sacrificing privacy unnecessarily, it should be the former.
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.
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.
Who are you to say what those reasons should be?
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.
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
Are you sure all of these people have perfectly good reasons ?
Absolutely sure ?
Who cares if they do or not? The point is that one should not be *forced* to carry one's real name everywhere they go (as if that wasn't easy to fake online, but I digress...)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
If I choose to, that's reason enough. No need to go any further anto it.
Every single person doesn't need a solid defensible reason in order to be able to conclude there are, in fact, plenty of good reasons why you would like to have pseudonymous use of the internet.
That there are people who will be doing it for shady purposes doesn't invalidate that not everything everybody does do they want tied to their real world names and published for the world to see.
You can be not breaking any laws and still want some privacy.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
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.
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.
If you have a big online presence, people will be able to figure out who you are.
I used to follow a pediatrician who would often rail against the conventional wisdom - he happened to be very science-based and would not put up with patients who demanded scrips for viruses, etc. He would blow off steam on his blog.
Over time he started to leak info about himself - where he went to school, some nearby towns, etc. I left a comment or two advising him to stop doing that.
A bit later he started talking about a court case he was involved in. This was about the time the "hunt was on" for @FakeSteveJobs and I was curious to see what was possible - I did a few google searches and it wasn't too hard to figure out who he was, since court filings are public.
A month or so later, he disclosed that opposing council's staff had done the same, and used his blog posts to force a settlement.
My take away: if you're going to do something like this, never include any personal details and/or never cross paths with the legal system. But if I lived near his town, I'd definitely take my kids there.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
a SkinnyChick ...
If its not up to anyone what the reasons should be, don't present a list of reasons that people will disagree with.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
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/
The internet is a dangerous place. People have been lulled into believing that this is not the case. Protecting your identity is your first line of defense against crazies and anyone else that wants to do you harm.
Allowing net.crazies as a tradeoff for enabling everyone to avoid the real ones.
A lot of the "OMG Privacy!" complaints fall away if you allow people to disassociate from their real identity.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
'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...
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!
Don't forget about The Panopticlick. Clearing stuff simply isn't enough.
Slashdot Valentines Beta Massacre: iT WORKED! The boycotts killed Beta!!
The assumed principle is that each of these people has the right to interact with others while hiding their real life identity. And to a certain extent I agree that one has the right to present oneself however one chooses.
But, what about my right to only interact with people who are willing to put their real life identity behind their words and actions? Any right that assures fetishists, trannys and political radicals a sense of anonymity also assures the rest of society the option to require a lack of anonymity.
If this means that we can't come to an agreement on how we will communicate, then that is the price to be paid for our mutual decisions.
There has never been any society in which an individual got to have full participation while simultaneously defining their own norms. Social norms are defined by the group and if you can't abide by those norms then you will have to pay the price that comes from your choice. And that is not unfair or an injustice.
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.
"I can observe or participate in a political rally without being personally identifiable."
If you are in public, you are identifiable. This doesn't mean you have been, it just means it is possible. Remember the Boston Bombing? Those guys were "anonymous" but quickly found out that they weren't really "unknown". Pictures surfaced, faces were identified, and the search was quickly started.
You are delusional if you think that you can be anonymous in public. Unidentified is not the same thing as "not being identifiable".
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Actually, its the real world that is dangerous. The Internet is pretty harmless until it leaks into my real life.
A pseudonym is my way of being a member of a community without linking that membership to my real life. It differs from pure anonymity in that I can still damage my on-line reputation by being a jerk-wad.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
But, what about my right to only interact with people who are willing to put their real life identity behind their words and actions? Any right that assures fetishists, trannys and political radicals a sense of anonymity also assures the rest of society the option to require a lack of anonymity.
Is that a new right? I don't remember anyone ever saying that it was a right.
Privacy has traditionally been held up as a right.
Courage by someone with something to lose? Not so much.
^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.
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.
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.
I work with children in a different capacity, and in a country where the public perception is that every rock hides a pedophile. As someone who works with children, I need to be constantly on my guard and display all the sexuality of a banana. I also need to maintain the most perfect PC image, and never say anything that could insult any ethnic or religious minority. If it became public that the school hired someone who considers religion in general a dangerous delusion, it could expose them to legal action - and they'd fire me in a heartbeat to save themselves.
I don't understand how people call "improving civility" legitimate. It's literally the exact opposite. The first amendment exists because you can offend people and/or not be civil. If you disallow that, you're saying people don't have a right to speak freely. Yet, we here we have craznar trolling. go figure.
Yep, pretty much by definition, the right to "free speech" negates the ability to have the right to "not be offended". It pretty much *has* to trump it.
Sadly, with all the political correctness....which seems to now be being somewhat enforced by force of law, words are quickly becoming almost criminal.
Unpleasant things must be said...or the world grows quickly silent.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
If you start verbally berating someone at my house, I will eject you. No censorship involved. Censorship is about government suppressing freedom of expression. Same goes for blogs and gaming sites.
When you post anonymously or with a moniker THIS ^^^ is how you do it with civility, not using flameboi tactics.
There are exceptions to first amendment protections. Speech that incites imminent lawless action, or "fighting words" (speech that leads to immediate physical retaliation) are not protected, at least in the US.
The purpose of letting people speak freely is to allow venting of grievances as an alternative to violent confrontation. But when those words in fact degrade civility to the point that violence increases, then we've reached diminishing returns for the first amendment. When individuals or groups can bully with impunity and induce violence against a person (sometimes by suicide), then I can start to see the problems with unfettered free speech rights.
It's not enough to justify the banning of anonymity, but civilization needs at least a little civility.
How about if the elimination of anonymity also eliminates the possibility of individual liberty? If the government has sufficient knowledge of any individual, they will be able to control that individuals life to the point where they can find something to charge against them and arrest them at will. And don't tell me you won't have anything to worry about if you obey the law, if all of your actions are scrutinized they will find something. The lack of anonymity tips power so much into the government's hands that privacy is now necessary for freedom, and we need to find a way to guarantee it for ourselves or we are condemning humanity to perpetual servitude.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
Remember the Boston Bombing? Those guys were "anonymous" but quickly found out that they weren't really "unknown". Pictures surfaced, faces were identified, and the search was quickly started.
Well... maybe.
What you need to remember is that the only reason the Boston Marathon bombers were caught as quickly as they were was because the bombers decided to kill a police officer and hijack a car. They were not caught because of pictures - they were caught because the guy who they hijacked escaped without his smartphone, which the police were then able to track.
They were only definitively identified when the first bomber was in the morgue.
Because of this, it's impossible to say whether or not they ever would have been identified by the pictures taken at the marathon itself. Had they instead just gone into hiding without killing a police officer and without hijacking a car - who knows how long it would have taken to identify them, let alone catch them?
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Actually, Censorship is about GOVERNMENT suppressing freedom of expression. Privately-owned sites are free to set their own terms. As you are in your own house.
And when sites do restrict anonymity, it happens in the marketplace of ideas. So if people are accepting the non-anonymity policy on a given site, they're the ones at fault, not the site.
Not that it's HARD to create a sock-puppet account. . .
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.
I avoided google+ initially because of the "real name unless you're famous" policy, and the fact that they seemed willing to cancel all your google services for a violation of this or other google+ policy. Since that included gmail, and I valued the gmail account I had more than I valued the potential value of google+, the choice was clear.
Well now, they've turned googletalk into googlehangout or something. And googlehangout requires a google+ login, AFAICT. Googletalk was nice, since I could forward googlevoice calls to googletalk on my PC at home (cell service had been pretty poor in my neighborhood for a while). Cell service has gotten better, at least.
From this, I assume that gmail will require google+ sooner or later, so now I'm moving away from that, since the switch could literally happen overnight like with googletalk.
I am not a crackpot.
The concept of "rights" is not to benefit society. It's to benefit individuals. So the idea of "diminishing returns" is absurd. If people don't have the control to keep their hands in their pockets, it's jail time and bye bye. The first person to throw a punch gets punished. This whole "induce to violence" is bullshit.
I challenge you to "induce me to violence". Go ahead. I give you the freedom to say whatever you want and I can guarantee you that no mere words and pixels on a screen are going to drive me to hit you or anyone else.
I'm waiting for your "inducements to violence".
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.
You're welcome to ignore anonymous posters, or ban them from your site, but this topic was about the wane of anonymity in a culture that used to hold it as one of its most important characteristics.
But, what about my right to only interact with people who are willing to put their real life identity behind their words and actions?
Conviction of one's beliefs is not proof of their veracity. So while you can accept/ignore on this basis, it's not a good way to determine truthfulness. My point was that identity is not important unless the goal is to hold the speaker to your personal ideals via implied threats (public shaming, legal action, character assassination etc) should he go where you don't want him to. Why is it so important that you know for sure who it is that you're communicating with? If the argument is sound, accept that you've learned something from someone you'll never know, alter your content to acknowledge it publicly if applicable, and move on. If it's garbage, refute it to strengthen your position in the eyes of your readership who haven't made up their minds yet. Without this discipline, it's too easy to flip the switch at posts you don't agree with for emotional reasons, creating a nice shiny beacon of false consensus for your opinions. Of course, the kind of people who build these beacons usually aren't in it for telling the truth about much of anything. They have political angles or products to sell you for their own emotional or fiscal benefit.
Any right that assures fetishists, trannys and political radicals a sense of anonymity also assures the rest of society the option to require a lack of anonymity.
That can't be true. The two positions are mutually exclusive. Demanding that others identify themselves so that you can 'feel safe' isn't compatible with respecting those others' rights to anonymity, whatever they may be.
There has never been any society in which an individual got to have full participation while simultaneously defining their own norms. Social norms are defined by the group and if you can't abide by those norms then you will have to pay the price that comes from your choice. And that is not unfair or an injustice.
Yes, and those consensus driven, emotionally justified rationales were the driving forces behind most of the negative events in our history. They are a part of human nature, yes, but they shouldn't be encouraged, or lauded as honorable, because consensus is a poor way of gaining wisdom. Allowing anonymity allows people to stir up the mud, but denying it allows those in control of communications outlets to lie without challenge. That is far worse for a free society.
..or you could simply stop changing the terms used to describe your status whenever you feel like you want to be offended when someone uses the 'outdated' term. If term after term starts to make you feel dirty, then maybe you should look elsewhere for the source of those feelings.
Wrong. This argument comes up a lot from the government alone is the source of all evil crowd. Look up the definition of censorship in any dictionary, not one of them states that government action is required to constitute censorship. Censorship is any action by any entity intended to suppress or conceal information. ClearChannel Communications is every bit as capable of censoring things as the FCC.
From Merriam Webster: "censorship noun \sen(t)-sr-ship\ : the system or practice of censoring books, movies, letters, etc."
The first amendment exists because you can offend people and/or not be civil. If you disallow that, you're saying people don't have a right to speak freely.
I'm sorry, but you're wrong. The first amendment exists to protect people from being punished by the government for having a dissenting view. It prevents those in power from using force to silence those whose only power is their speech. It's to prevent the U.S. from becoming Russia. Individual people, businesses, and non-government organizations are free to retaliate.
If you don't like the things that Orson Scott Card has to say about marriage, then you are free to boycott his books/movies, write angry letters to his publishers, and do many other things to tear down his livelihood and discredit his name. What the first amendment does is prevent some sheriff/judge/politician from having him imprisoned, and his possessions confiscated.
That is not my problem with the whole argument, its that it makes no damned sense! I mean lets take /. for an example where I personally think ACs should be banned since they have become nothing more than trolls these past few years, no different than those little punks that scream racist slurs all over console shooters....why would making everyone have an account be a bad thing, as long as you can put whatever you want as a UID? Its not like my business cards have "Hairyfeet" on them yet there are several sites that know me as such, this way a user actually has to stand by their words (or be willing to waste a lot of time replacing accounts as they burn through the karma) but at the same time can keep their privacy intact.
Frankly the whole argument is probably moot anyway as folks have their own distinct style of writing which is no different than a fingerprint and is easy enough to catch on to if you pay a little attention. To use myself as an example there is a couple of old sites that i still use that I used my old gamertag instead of the Hairyfeet tag which came later but I ended up having to put in the bio part "yes its me Hairyfeet" because it never failed that I'd post and I'd get a half a dozen "Are you Hairyfeet? because you sure as hell sound like him" posts. while I can change my UID changing my manner of speech would be a HELL of a lot more difficult and anybody who had read a few of my posts wouldn't have any trouble spotting any post written by me.
So I see no reason why one can't have their cake and eat it too in this case, no reason they can't make up a UID and spend the whole 3 minutes to register on a site while at the same time not be forced to put in their real name and ID.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I'll never forget what my grandfather taught me about free speech, after he helped liberate one of the camps he spent nearly 2 years in a full body cast thanks to one of the rag tag "werewulf" squads at the end of WWII dropping a wall upon him so if there was ANYBODY that had the right to hate Nazis it was him...yet he supported the right of the Nazis to march in Illinois. He said "that is what made us better than them, we let anybody speak, even though we don't agree with them".
I took his words to heart several years after he was gone when I was living in Dallas and saw skinheads recruiting, trying to feed on anti-Mexican sentiment. I just went to a store down the street and made up my own little sign, it said "ask me about the camps" and told those who stopped and asked what my grandfather had saw, the bodies piled up like cordwood, traincars overflowing with broken bodies, people so starved you couldn't tell male from female. needless to say the skinheads weren't too happy about that but one of the cops sent to keep an eye on the skinheads just parked his butt right next to me and said "he has as much right to speak as you do" and that ended that.
This is why I have fought against so called "hate speech" and "hate crime" laws as they aren't only trying to make some speech verbotten but they also seem to be designed around the concept of "protected classes" such as how they say nothing if you burn a bible but will throw you in jail if you burn a Koran. in America you should not be able to EVER ban speech, if you don't like what they are saying? Make your own sign and come up with a legitimate counter-argument,freedom of speech is too important to allow the politically correct to decide what is and is not acceptable.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
You make far too much sense to be posting on slashdot. Maybe you should run for office; we need people like you in leadership positions.
Yes, there are some context where real names would be good, like that which you showed. But I think people will normally figure that it in some context when they go to such a place. Most of the rest of the time, people are interacting with the world, which is often dangerous in many ways. People should have this choice. Too bad we cannot trust these companies to have our real name and keep it secret, if they claim they would let us use their service under a nym. If I were putting up a forum, I would not care if one uses a name or a nym. But for some forums, it's necessary to be sure users have only one identity, name or nym. That makes things complicated, too.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Also seen today on /.
"As part of a broader, chilling Chinese crackdown on Internet dissent, Chinese blogger Charles Xue appeared on Chinese state television in handcuffs on Sunday, denouncing his blog and praising government censorship."
Doubleclick Cofounder Responds to Patent Troll by Filing Extortion Lawsuit ... "The patent troll's attorney also made the claim that calling someone a 'patent troll' was actually a 'hate crime' under 'Ninth Circuit precedent' and threatened to file criminal charges"
Freedom of speech is constantly under attack, especially by those who want their freedom at the expense of yours.
Gary Dunn
Open Slate Project
Freedom of speech is about being free to express ideas and opinions, it is not about being free to express those ideas and opinions in whatever manner one chooses. Hate speech is not about express ideas and opinions but instead about intimidating and threatening others. You don't like blacks or Jews, fine, that is an idea or opinion you are free to express. Doing it in a manner that borders on inciting violence or is threatening or is an excercise of speech, but instead is one of power.
Either your grandfather fought to stop leaders of the Nazi party from excercising their right to free speech or he fought to stop the tyranny brought on by the leaders of the Nazi party. You can't have it both ways. Likewise, if hate speech is just another example of free speech to be protected, then so is child pornography, snuff films, and all sorts of other things. Maybe the Boston marathon bombers were simplly using an extreme method to excercise their free speech?
No, all the right enshrined in the notion of freedom of speech means is that one is free to express one's ideas and opinions. It does not protect all the means of that expression my take.
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!
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) --
Freedom of speech never included harassment
Well, I'll just have to reread the first amendment, then.
That said, "harassment," to you, is clearly nothing more than speech you don't like repeated more than you'd like, or just the former. Have your 'safety' (I'm not sure how the government bullying some kid who killed people in a video game will make you safe, but whatever.), but move to a country that doesn't claim to be the land of the free and the home of the brave that's foolish enough to arrest a kid for killing people in a game.
Da derp dee derp da teedly derpee derpee dum. Rated PG-13.
It was because it was all done in such a way to make them see it and the implications that made.
There was literally nothing. This was a non-issue until the police got involved. The only bullies here were the government thugs, as usual.
Harassment is - yes - passing a threshold. If you were an ex-boyfriend and you called your ex-girlfriend, that's just a phone call. If you call every night at the same time for weeks, that's harassment.
Again, whether or not it's harassment has little to do with whether pieces of garbage from the government should ruin people's lives.
A boss paying a single sexual compliment to his employee can be considered harassment. Shouldn't always be, but can be.
And if that results in the boss being punished by the government, that is absolute garbage.
Physical violence isn't usually OK. At some point, verbal abuse crosses a line and I don't see a problem with having a structure in place to deal with it.
Then you don't really care about freedom of speech. Not a surprise, but don't pretend otherwise.
Yes, it's true that the line can start to move down a slippery slope - and it's part of our responsibility as citizens to ensure that doesn't happen.
There doesn't need to be a slippery slope; the restrictions you suggest are bad enough as it is.
You're becoming an eyesore, you insolent insect.
Da derp dee derp da teedly derpee derpee dum. Rated PG-13.
The chance of snuff films or child pornography being protected by free speech laws is zero, they're both specifically illegal by other laws and have clear victims.
The problem when you move to any censored version of free speech is that someone will come along and try to force a think-of-the-children argument as to why they should be given the moral authority / power to decide which speech is acceptable, and which is not.
As you do here.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall on Voltaire
Amen, and thank you.
When I was in school, many of my teachers were veterans, not a few combat. The guy who taught high school civics was adamant about the right to speak and the right to vote. He offered some examples from his life, though none quite as stark as your grandfather's.
Circa '52 I spent a morning walking around Dachau. The gallows, ovens, and human-skin lampshade made a lasting impression that got only reinforced as I got older and learned more of what happened there and, by extension, the kinds of thinking that led to such places.
Fear may be the mind killer, but to be unable to speak freely is a soul killer and of benefit only to the tyrant.
I'm not an anarchist, but the fact remains that the government often acts as nothing more than a group of thugs. From the drug war to the TSA to the NSA, our government is corrupt, and you seem to like it that way, since you don't seem to care about the first amendment in the least (I'm not saying you don't seem to care about what some judge ruled was in the first amendment, but about the first amendment itself.).
Da derp dee derp da teedly derpee derpee dum. Rated PG-13.