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I didn't mean to say our hypothetical founder joined the thread in a fiendish attempt to unmask the throwaway. I don't think this is a very likely possibility.

I didn't mean to say our hypothetical founder joined the thread in a fiendish attempt to unmask the throwaway. I don't think this is a very likely possibility. I do think that they may, opportunistically, hunt through their logs. My point was that people are not going to go through the effort to set up a proxy, they're going to let the matter drop.

dalke 11y ago
People who go through the effort of installing and using Tor, and are HN readers, are not likely to consider setting up a proxy to be much effort. "they may, opportunistically, hunt through their logs" That doesn't address my other points. Why should the founder jump on this specific comment, and draw attention to it? Why should that conversation be on HN rather than responding on the company's blog? How easy is it to take the conversation on HN to another story which excludes the whistleblower from participating?
- deleted 11y ago
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- fabulist 11y ago
  I guess my bias is revealed in my conception that Tor browser is something everyone has lying around. If you aren't using plugable transports, installing Tor browser is trivial (single-click configuration after you've extracted the archive). In my experience, setting up a daemon to do something trivial is always "not much effort" until something goes wrong and you throw in the towel an hour and a half later. I suppose that SSH port forwarding is zero-configuration, however, so perhaps you're right, and my suggestion is unnecessary. I was really trying not to paint a picture of a malicious founder who is scheming to paper something over with spin. The founder responded in the thread because they're an honest business person who feels tempted to use a piece of information that fell in their lap, as we all might. That was a bad example, so I'm not going to try and defend why that conversation should happen on HN (you're probably right that it shouldn't). The reason someone might anonymously start a conversation on Hacker News would have to be that the community has a vested interest in it's outcome, it is embarrassing to the influential, and the consequences of revealing it openly outweigh the perceived benefits. But maybe my struggle to find a better example is indicative that this situation is too rare to account for.

dalke 11y ago

People who go through the effort of installing and using Tor, and are HN readers, are not likely to consider setting up a proxy to be much effort. "they may, opportunistically, hunt through their logs" That doesn't address my other points. Why should the founder jump on this specific comment, and draw attention to it? Why should that conversation be on HN rather than responding on the company's blog? How easy is it to take the conversation on HN to another story which excludes the whistleblower from participating?

deleted 11y ago
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fabulist 11y ago
I guess my bias is revealed in my conception that Tor browser is something everyone has lying around. If you aren't using plugable transports, installing Tor browser is trivial (single-click configuration after you've extracted the archive). In my experience, setting up a daemon to do something trivial is always "not much effort" until something goes wrong and you throw in the towel an hour and a half later. I suppose that SSH port forwarding is zero-configuration, however, so perhaps you're right, and my suggestion is unnecessary. I was really trying not to paint a picture of a malicious founder who is scheming to paper something over with spin. The founder responded in the thread because they're an honest business person who feels tempted to use a piece of information that fell in their lap, as we all might. That was a bad example, so I'm not going to try and defend why that conversation should happen on HN (you're probably right that it shouldn't). The reason someone might anonymously start a conversation on Hacker News would have to be that the community has a vested interest in it's outcome, it is embarrassing to the influential, and the consequences of revealing it openly outweigh the perceived benefits. But maybe my struggle to find a better example is indicative that this situation is too rare to account for.