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How We Uncovered the Real Identity Behind “Startup L. Jackson”
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- gkoberger 11y agoGreat analysis, and really glad Josh didn't out SLJ. SLJ is great because, due to his anonymity, his ideas stand on their own merit. Being outed killed Fake Steve Jobs; it'd do the same to SLJ.
- elektromekatron 11y agoI do wonder though, given the outcome, whether they did get a knock from the wolf.
- joshdickson 11y agoi'm on the lookout
- mhartl 11y agoHe's thirty minutes away. He'll be there in ten.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Cherian 11y agoThe page is down.
- elektromekatron 11y agoThen why are you under the table?
- sulam 11y agoUnlike Fake Steve Jobs, I honestly get real insight out of things SLJ says. I guess it's possible outing him would force him to be a little less snarky, which would be really disappointing. SLJ snark is an awesome antidote to the SV cheerleading that dominates a lot of people's twitter feeds.
- aaronbrethorst 11y agoI haven't got anything to back it up, but I've always assumed it was Dave McClure. I'm much more curious about who FAKE GRIMLOCK is.
- ghayes 11y agoI once heard Dave say who knew who SLJ was, and he directly denied it was himself.
- joshdickson 11y agoIt's not him.
- eli 11y ago> The more I dug into the real SLJ, the more wrong it seemed. It felt uncomfortably close to doxing. I'm having a hard time seeing how it could possibly be anything but "doxing."
- david_shaw 11y agoI think that depends on how you define "doxing." Yes, you're identifying a person's real information. On the other hand, malicious "doxing" usually means publishing phone number, address, kid's name, personal email address, Facebook, etc. I think there's a clear difference between correlating a pseudonym to a real-life identity, and malicious "doxing" that could cause harm.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago> I think there's a clear difference between correlating a pseudonym to a real-life identity, and malicious "doxing" that could cause harm. People use pseudonyms for a reason. Deanonymizing them can cause them harm, ranging from getting fired to getting arrested to causing severe social strife. Not your decision to make.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- mbrutsch 11y ago> Deanonymizing them can cause them harm, ranging from getting fired to getting arrested to causing severe social strife. Luckily I committed no crimes, or I would have had a hat trick. > Not your decision to make. There's actually a lot of debate and discussion about this issue; I am always surprised at the number and tenor of those who wholeheartedly support making this kind of decision.
- RIMR 11y ago>Luckily I committed no crimes, or I would have had a hat trick. Your secrets don't have to be criminal to be secrets.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Perceptes 11y agoOne thing I've always wondered about these types of anonymous "Internet famous" people: How are they not instantly outed by someone who works for any of the providers in between their Twitter client and the readers? Are they all taking extremely careful steps to use things like Tor and anonymous email to prevent the process of tweeting from leaving a trail of bits anyone with access can see?
- betenoire 11y agowould it be worth risking your job? for what?
- patio11 11y agoIf your adversary is a Twitter employee, you graph "Payoff for 'outing' vs. likelihood of being fired" and come to the conclusion that no Twitter employee has cared enough. If your adversary is substantially better resourced than a Twitter employee or would not suffer equivalent costs (e.g. if your adversary is law enforcement), assume the inevitability of compromise. An interesting question is "How would you rate the ability of e.g. investigative journalists on this score?", to which I answer "Equivalent to their ability to ask someone in their social circle to tell them what the answer is."
- hkmurakami 11y agoI'd add that the potential is worse than just getting fired. This could cause a fall in the stock price and a subsequent lawsuit.
- azernik 11y agoThose probably don't hit the employee themselves; those hit the company. Classic principal-agent problem.
- nostrademons 11y agoCompanies will often sue for the difference. If random company X employee doxes a client of X, and then the market cap of X falls by $Y on the news and consequence loss of trust, company X has a pretty good case that financial damages of $Y are warranted through the actions of the employee's breach of contract. Chances are, the employee has nowhere close to $Y in assets, but will settle for $Z << $Y to avoid having a huge lawsuit with the potential to garnish many years worth of wages hanging over their head. Many people who might think that the risk of being fired is worth having the inside scoop on a story might reconsider when the threat is a lawsuit from Google/Facebook/Twitter.
- juiced 11y agoThe posts top picture of Eminem is already telling me it is Ben Horowitz.
- tsieling 11y agoProps for not going through with the outing. There's a weird sense of entitlement that people have, that they have the right to unmask someone doing nothing wrong but choosing to be anonymous. I'm really glad to read the author overcame that urge, it helps keep the world a little more interesting.
- joshdickson 11y agoAuthor here. I'm not sure it's directly a sense of entitlement, though you could certainly argue that it's in play whether or not the author seems to notice. There's a sense that you found out the truth, and people want to know the truth. That's where Gawker got stuck; when one of your mottos/mantras is something like "we put truths on the internet," you feel like it's your job to go through with it. You feel like people are entitled to know. This is certainly borderline, and I feel like I could have defended either call, but I think we made the right decision.
- biot 11y agoI think some people get a high/rush/satisfaction [0] from revealing privileged information. Others get the same feeling from guarding privileged information and being one of the trusted few to know. [0] I'm sure there's a nice, concise word that fits what I'm unable to articulate here.
- uxp 11y agoIsn't that the same feeling that comes when one believes what is popularly construed as a conspiracy theory? I mean, you have this bit of information that the entire world doesn't know (or doesn't care or believes differently), and you _know_ that it's correct. Granted, one like this story is factual information where as conspiracy theories are theoretical (obviously), but the sense of responsibility of knowing that information makes people want to share it as wide and as far as they can muster so they can be the leader or originator of a movement changing the status quo.
- raimille1 11y agoGreat job man!! This is awesome, on point ethics lesson as well.
- joshdickson 11y agoThanks, the last part was the hardest to write, by far. I revised it a number of times. The goal there was really to sort of draw a comparison with the Gawker post, which I found abhorrent when it happened, and getting caught up in your own thing and not seeing the situation clearly. Seems to have come across OK.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jsnk 11y agoAm I the only one who can't see the scrollbar on the page? Looks like a misuse of overflow:hidden;
- cryptonaut 11y agoI'm missing the scroll bar too, it's really annoying. After looking at the stylesheet it looks like it's due to this rule: body::-webkit-scrollbar { width: 0!important; }. If you remove that rule the scroll bar will be visible again. Here's some JavaScript that you can copy-paste into the address bar to fix it (only tested on Chromium): javascript:void(_(document.styleSheets).chain().pluck('rules').map(_.flatten).flatten(true).findWhere({selectorText:"body::-webkit-scrollbar"}).value().style.removeProperty('width'))
- doughj3 11y agoDoes this website not have a scrollbar?
- RIMR 11y agoYou know how you're never supposed to screw with the scroll elements in a web page? Syrah.co missed the memo... I guess everyone in the whole world has a scrollwheel and/or touchscreen. Screw anyone who doesn't, you can just read the top of the page...
- joshdickson 11y agoI wrote the post and made the site it's on. There are really people who don't have either of those? But really, we just don't have everything done yet, I wrote everything on my own. We'll fix it in an upcoming update, sorry for the issues.
- mindcrime 11y agoThere are really people who don't have either of those? Ummm, yeah, lots of them.
- joshdickson 11y agoit's a joke (a bad one?)
- Camillo 11y agoI have a trackpad and scrollbars hidden by default. It still sucks that I don't get the thumb showing up when I scroll. I have no way of knowing how far along I am.
- nfoz 11y ago> we just don't have everything done yet, I wrote everything on my own. Scrollbars work perfectly when you don't write anything.
- bsmith 11y agoCached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://syrah.co/joshdickson40/5604e5e10fc1786b0152a51a http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/... Looks like HN has hugged it to death...
- joshdickson 11y agothank you for linking this!!!
- bsmith 11y agoAnytime. Thank you for a fascinating read :) Any idea why the images aren't working?
- joshdickson 11y agoyes our hosting provider is having problems with them, and when we get them mounted it kills the site. when traffic dies down a little they'll go back up. unfortunately #4 on HN is a little late to make a site arch change lol
- NamTaf 11y agoThis cache throws 2 Ajax errors then doesn't load the images. The main page also doesn't load the images. :(
- keithwhor 11y agoFantastically resourceful. Great read.
- vermontdevil 11y agoI'm sure he's prepared for being outed one day in the future. Glad it's not now. Always enjoyed his tweets.
- sarciszewski 11y agoI'm extremely delighted that they spelled doxing correctly (one X, not two).
- joshdickson 11y agolol it was wrong in drafts!
- syllogism 11y agoGreat article. If nothing else, spreading the word about the severe limitations of stylometry is very important. This stuff gets used in forensics, and like other oversold forensic techniques, causes some terrible injustices. Once the court has allowed some expert testimony, the jury is instructed to take it at face value.
- joshdickson 11y agoI am by no means an expert, in fact, it was really that having no expertise led me to dismiss it from what I ended up doing. I still wanted to mention it because (1) it's super interesting, (2) I think that it's not well known about, and (3) maybe I could catch someone who is only sort of tangentially into code or engineering, and hook them in with this sort of use case. Probably asking for a little too much on the last part ;)
- ajsharp 11y agoReally cool article. However, I found myself thinking, "ok, that's nice of you for not doxing the guy, but, you kinda just handed the keys to the kingdom to the internet." Doesn't seem like SLJ cares one way or another, but, I got the feeling that the author knows that this article will undoubtedly lead to SLJ's outing within a month, two months tops. There's more than enough bored programmers out there who'll just apply the methods described wholesale, and throw it out there on reddit, or wherever. So, I'm not sure how I feel about the whole "doing the right thing by not doxxing" issue, b/c it seems like we're sort of splitting hairs on the issue.
- joshdickson 11y agoEverything that we used is now completely gone.
- Schwolop 11y agoRight, so now we need to look for people who've recently deleted posts, and recently followed you, and ... :-)
- flashman 11y agoThis is the (ultimately fruitless) approach I used: 1. Find the people who were within SLJ's first few hundred followers (the API gives an account's followers in the reverse order they followed the account). 2. Assuming some of the early followers knew SLJ's real life identity, find which accounts many of them were following prior to following SLJ. 3. Accounts which are followed by relatively many of SLJ's early followers, but relatively few of SLJ's later followers, are candidates for SLJ's real identity. Ultimately I couldn't make it work, although my guess is that SLJ has some connection to Pivotal (either is a former employee or has worked with them on projects).
- sireat 11y agoTrue Names and other dangers.
- teddyh 11y agoFor those who might not have gotten the reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names
- robgibbons 11y agoHe won't talk? Time to grab my wrench...