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Is the question serious, or is it meant as a joke? As a riposte to the earlier thread, it is fantastic. The user writes "privacy is dead" and here, on Hacker Ne

Is the question serious, or is it meant as a joke? As a riposte to the earlier thread, it is fantastic. The user writes "privacy is dead" and here, on Hacker News, and also on jacquesmattheij.com, you have a thread with a lot of intelligent people trying to figure out the person's identity, and failing. Therefore, the user's original point is disproven simply by starting this new thread. If this was deliberate, then this was genius. This earlier thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197027 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197027 Contains this sentence: "this thread highlights a fundamental property of a networked life: privacy is dead, there is only identity management." but then this contradicts the original thesis: "If harnessed properly, these things can be useful, but it requires a mindset and workflow not entirely dissimilar to those of spies or high-end criminals - controlling information by selective disclosure, identity segmentation, disinformation, anonymization, etc. - not for sinister purposes, mind you, but simply to guard what we traditionally call privacy." I'd say the current thread offers proof that privacy can be defended. After all, here we have all these smart people, failing to identify the earlier user.

jacquesm 17y ago
Exactly! That's the whole idea here, I was quite surprised that my first solution (with a very high correlation) failed, even more surprised when the second one failed as well (especially since that person had been commenting in the same thread and had a very high correlation as well). Elsewhere in this thread someone is jumping up and down to stop trying to identify the poster, the funny thing is I think he/she is in no danger at all of being identified, at least not without his/her cooperation. The only person that could identify this user is PG, and maybe alaskamiller, and I'm pretty sure that our secrets are safe there. edit: and if that person is the original poster then they're not helping themselves by increasing the sample size :)
- jimmyjim 17y ago
  However, as I tried pointing out (in a seemingly dead thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1200091 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1200091), identity management is something that only the technically savvy can pull off. And even they are likely to stumble apart at some point, because being perfect in every way is inhumanly hard. And so, as it stands, privacy is dead in this age.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    On /. posting anonymously is as simple as checking a box, even if you have an account. Plenty of people have done so over the years, checking a box is nothing that only the 'technically savvy' can do. If you do that rarely then I think your anonymous words are reasonably safe. If you do it regularly then you are open to the kind of attack that I attempted, and then it will have a better chance of success. Privacy is dead in a general sense, companies like facebook, google and twitter facilitate identified communication and in that sense every letter you wrote using the old postal system was just as revealing, it just wasn't open to be read by the public. People are slowly coming around about all this stuff being visible online. I can see that with the 'reocities' project, on average two people every day ask for their old account to be wiped because of privacy reasons. That's not much, but it still means that 1,000 non-technical users per year that I happen to have backed up a few pages for realize this. So if you extrapolate that to the internet at large I think that the number of users that are wising up to this is much larger than you'd expect at first glance. Time will tell if there will be enough support for this, the 'think of the children' and 'war on terror' people seem to have the advantage for now, but laws that are enacted can in due course be repealed. I've never bothered to hide my identity, there is nothing that I have to say that I wouldn't put my name to, even if not all of it is received equally well, that doesn't bother me (maybe it should). There are people in positions that are sensitive that have stuff to tell us, in such cases (which are rare) anonymity really serves a purpose and I think this little experiment shows that without at least access to some log files these exercises get a lot harder. edit: your thread definitely isn't 'dead'.
rjett 17y ago
"I'd say the current thread offers proof that privacy can be defended. After all, here we have all these smart people, failing to identify the earlier user." Imagine the hassle of creating brand new identities for every action taken online. If privacy isn't dead, then it sure as hell is tough to maintain (and to do so would not be very practical).

jacquesm 17y ago

Exactly! That's the whole idea here, I was quite surprised that my first solution (with a very high correlation) failed, even more surprised when the second one failed as well (especially since that person had been commenting in the same thread and had a very high correlation as well). Elsewhere in this thread someone is jumping up and down to stop trying to identify the poster, the funny thing is I think he/she is in no danger at all of being identified, at least not without his/her cooperation. The only person that could identify this user is PG, and maybe alaskamiller, and I'm pretty sure that our secrets are safe there. edit: and if that person is the original poster then they're not helping themselves by increasing the sample size :)

jimmyjim 17y ago
However, as I tried pointing out (in a seemingly dead thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1200091 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1200091), identity management is something that only the technically savvy can pull off. And even they are likely to stumble apart at some point, because being perfect in every way is inhumanly hard. And so, as it stands, privacy is dead in this age.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  On /. posting anonymously is as simple as checking a box, even if you have an account. Plenty of people have done so over the years, checking a box is nothing that only the 'technically savvy' can do. If you do that rarely then I think your anonymous words are reasonably safe. If you do it regularly then you are open to the kind of attack that I attempted, and then it will have a better chance of success. Privacy is dead in a general sense, companies like facebook, google and twitter facilitate identified communication and in that sense every letter you wrote using the old postal system was just as revealing, it just wasn't open to be read by the public. People are slowly coming around about all this stuff being visible online. I can see that with the 'reocities' project, on average two people every day ask for their old account to be wiped because of privacy reasons. That's not much, but it still means that 1,000 non-technical users per year that I happen to have backed up a few pages for realize this. So if you extrapolate that to the internet at large I think that the number of users that are wising up to this is much larger than you'd expect at first glance. Time will tell if there will be enough support for this, the 'think of the children' and 'war on terror' people seem to have the advantage for now, but laws that are enacted can in due course be repealed. I've never bothered to hide my identity, there is nothing that I have to say that I wouldn't put my name to, even if not all of it is received equally well, that doesn't bother me (maybe it should). There are people in positions that are sensitive that have stuff to tell us, in such cases (which are rare) anonymity really serves a purpose and I think this little experiment shows that without at least access to some log files these exercises get a lot harder. edit: your thread definitely isn't 'dead'.

rjett 17y ago

"I'd say the current thread offers proof that privacy can be defended. After all, here we have all these smart people, failing to identify the earlier user." Imagine the hassle of creating brand new identities for every action taken online. If privacy isn't dead, then it sure as hell is tough to maintain (and to do so would not be very practical).