24 ms·

The real name discussion is as old as the Usenet, maybe even older. I find it strange to see it re-appearing again and again every few years for almost decades.

by vog 10y ago

The real name discussion is as old as the Usenet, maybe even older. I find it strange to see it re-appearing again and again every few years for almost decades. Back then, the consensus was roughly: 1. If a community accepts pseudonyms, it is polite to use either your realname or an obvious pseudonym. 2. If a community places high value on realnames, either use your realname or a realname-sounding (i.e. non-obvious) pseudonym. 3. Unmasking someone's nonpublic realname, or other private information, is generally considered impolite if not aggressive, regardless whether the community places high value on realnames or not. Has anything substantially changed since then?

Swizec 10y ago
Same rules apply as always: don't share your real name and address online outside very very small and personable communities. People often ask me why i still haven't changed my name to Swizec legally. This is why. You never know who out of the thousands of people you interact with online could get crazy ideas. With a pseudonym they can still identify you and know who you are, but they can't call your bank and do something silly.
- dirkt 10y ago
  I've shared by real name on Usenet for decades, nobody got crazy ideas (though I've encountered quite a few crazy people). "Calling my bank and doing something silly" doesn't work in the country in live in. There's not a lot people can do with just my name.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    I wonder about treating home address as such a secret. If someone wants to kill/kidnap me, they could always find me at my workplace or on a conference or sth. So what else are people going to do with my home address? Send me a postcard? In the good ol' days, we had this thing called "a phonebook", which was basically a big printed book of alphabetically sorted mappings of surname to phone number and home address...
    - vog 10y ago
      And as the internet and the possibilities grew, many people started to feel uneasy about it and requested their deletion (or did not register again after changing address and/or ISP). Nowadays, nobody uses the phonebook anymore, the demand vanished and so the supply.
    - brainfire 10y ago
      > So what else are people going to do with my home address? Send the police to save your (non-existent) hostages: http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/03/the-world-has-no-room-for-cowards/ http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/03/the-world-has-no-room-for... Or to arrest you for the drugs you ordered (or were sent to you): http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/07/mail-from-the-velvet-cybercrime-underground/ http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/07/mail-from-the-velvet-cybe...
    - pavel_lishin 10y ago
      > I wonder about treating home address as such a secret. One of the searches for my name results in my parents' current address. If I'm a sufficiently flagrant asshole online, there could be reprecussions, anything from a glitterbomb[1] to being swatted[2]. (And what worries me that I don't even have to be a sufficiently flagrant asshole, I just have to run into one.) [1] https://www.ruindays.com/collections/all/products/glitter-everywhere-envelope https://www.ruindays.com/collections/all/products/glitter-ev... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting_(hoaxing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting_(hoaxing)
    - squeaky-clean 10y ago
      > So what else are people going to do with my home address? Send me a postcard? I had a friend who got brigaded by 4chan in high school (I think she posted nudes and got doxxed, don't entirely remember, and I didn't ask for too many details). Long story short: hundreds of letters over about a year addressed to her house, her parents' workplaces, our school, all with really fucked up messages. Telling her to kill herself and other terrible things about her or her family. Letters listing everyone in her family or including pictures of her family from myspace (this was just before everyone was on Facebook) with names, phone numbers, and other details. Phone calls to her parents insulting their daughter. No "real harm" ever came from it aside from the threats, and her parents handled it very well, but still... It's not so much one person knowing "your" address. It's an unknown number of people knowing you and your family's address.
  - vog 10y ago
    I also never had such problems, but others did have these problems, and that's what counts. (Everything else would be victim blaming.)
    - icebraining 10y ago
      It also matters if it's likely. I mean, it wasn't João Maria de Souza's fault that a cow fell on top of him, but I'm not going to live my life in fear of falling cows.
bad_user 10y ago
The problem was that back then you didn't have service providers with lock-in on a market, like today's Facebook and the Internet was only a thing for techies, whereas nowadays more than half of the world's population has access to the Internet. Can you just not use Facebook? There are obviously only 3 choices: (1) not use it, but then you won't have an account where all of your friends are; (2) use it with your real name and lose your privacy, with obvious risks, like your employer or relatives being able to find you on Facebook or (3) use Facebook with a fake name and risk being banned for breach of contract, with all of your investments in it lost. Lets not pretend that today's Internet is the same as the Internet from the eighties and nineties. Your father and grandma weren't on Usenet.
- mirimir 10y ago
  There's a fourth option: use Facebook with your real name, and separately with fake name(s). For the real-name account, carefully manage "friends" to avoid problems with family, friends, coworkers, etc. Make sure that there's no leakage between your real-name account and fake-name accounts, or among fake-name accounts. Practice good compartmentalization OpSec.
  - durzagott 10y ago
    But wouldn't your fake profile start showing up in 'People you may know' section? I've heard Facebook uses IP adresses to link accounts. So suddenly you have to explain to your real friends/family/coworkers why you have a fake account.
    - mirimir 10y ago
      If your compartmentalization OpSec is adequate, there will be not more linkage between your real-name and fake-name accounts than there is between them and my accounts.
  - syshum 10y ago
    That is becoming harder and harder to do as Facebook increases their level of knowledge Just the Facial Recognition alone has caused problems for people attempting to do this. Further OpSec is not just on you, I know a couple of people that have tried this only to have OTHER people expose thier data or information by posting things on facebook and other sites about them.
stupidcar 10y ago
Yes. People using real names on Usenet did not usually face a serious risk of being harassed and endangered in real life by an army of trolls: E.g. having their address, phone number and other private details stolen and publicly disseminated. Having armed police raid their house because someone has made a bogus 911 call. Having their utilities and back accounts cancelled because someone rang up using their details. Having the same harassment happen to their friends, relatives and colleagues. Etc. And this is without considering people living in countries with oppressive governments, where using their real name could see them arrested, beaten and imprisoned. Basically, the stakes are a lot higher for a lot of people. For many, preserving anonymity isn't a matter of "politeness" — it's a matter of personal security. It can literally be a matter of life and death.
- vog 10y ago
  > Yes. I see the issues you are stating, but not so much a qualitative change. > serious risk of being harassed and endangered in real life by an army of trolls This type of trolls (aka "stalkers") have already existed decades ago. Back then I had no trouble finding such cases documented in the Usenet archives. Of course, these happened to fewer people, but then, the net was a lot smaller, too. > For many, preserving anonymity isn't a matter of "politeness" — it's a matter of personal security How does this differ from what I wrote? "... is considered impolite, if not aggressive ..." > And this is without considering people living in countries with oppressive governments, where using their real name could see them arrested, beaten and imprisoned. This may really have changed, considering that those countries joined the internet relatively lately. Yet, it still seems that this is covered by point 3) "... is considered impolite, if not aggressive ..."
  - stupidcar 10y ago
    You asked whether something had substantially changed, not qualitatively. A change in degree can still be a substantial change. It's the difference between living in a city with one murder a year, and one hundred murders a day. To the individual killed, the distinction is irrelevant, but in terms of the effect on others, and on the measures taken by the society as a whole, it's everything. But I would also argue there has been a qualitative change, from harassment conducted by isolated individuals, to large scale, organised harassment, as well as an escalation in the tactics used. A malicious Usenet user could not call on an army of globally distributed 4chan trolls to endlessly pursue a particular vendetta. And the much greater integration of technology into institutions means the available methods to harass someone and remotely disrupt their life is far greater.
owly 10y ago
One thing that has really changed is the ability to search for someone by their real name in public records online. There were public before but they were WAY more difficult to search, as anyone who's scoured a city hall or county records archive 20 years ago can attest.
- vog 10y ago
  That was before Usenet, wasn't it? In the time of Usenet it was already possible to either search within your local Usenet archive, or, slightly later, to type in someone's name into a search engine.
  - DanBC 10y ago
    > In the time of Usenet it was already possible to either search within your local Usenet archive The reactions to Kibo suggest that was unusual at first. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Parry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Parry
mjevans 10y ago
I'm forgetting something that /has/ changed since then. How apt to use critical thinking the average / many users of the Internet are. "Real names" on Facebook profiles are also problematic since they are not actually authenticated in any meaningful way. If users had to use a credit card to buy some type of service and the name on that card became their public identity name then at least in that respect it would be ///a/// Firstname Lastname that was an owner of the account. There would still be namespace collision issues (there are billions on this planet).

by vog 10y ago

Swizec 10y ago

Same rules apply as always: don't share your real name and address online outside very very small and personable communities. People often ask me why i still haven't changed my name to Swizec legally. This is why. You never know who out of the thousands of people you interact with online could get crazy ideas. With a pseudonym they can still identify you and know who you are, but they can't call your bank and do something silly.

dirkt 10y ago
I've shared by real name on Usenet for decades, nobody got crazy ideas (though I've encountered quite a few crazy people). "Calling my bank and doing something silly" doesn't work in the country in live in. There's not a lot people can do with just my name.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  I wonder about treating home address as such a secret. If someone wants to kill/kidnap me, they could always find me at my workplace or on a conference or sth. So what else are people going to do with my home address? Send me a postcard? In the good ol' days, we had this thing called "a phonebook", which was basically a big printed book of alphabetically sorted mappings of surname to phone number and home address...
  - vog 10y ago
    And as the internet and the possibilities grew, many people started to feel uneasy about it and requested their deletion (or did not register again after changing address and/or ISP). Nowadays, nobody uses the phonebook anymore, the demand vanished and so the supply.
  - brainfire 10y ago
    > So what else are people going to do with my home address? Send the police to save your (non-existent) hostages: http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/03/the-world-has-no-room-for-cowards/ http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/03/the-world-has-no-room-for... Or to arrest you for the drugs you ordered (or were sent to you): http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/07/mail-from-the-velvet-cybercrime-underground/ http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/07/mail-from-the-velvet-cybe...
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    > I wonder about treating home address as such a secret. One of the searches for my name results in my parents' current address. If I'm a sufficiently flagrant asshole online, there could be reprecussions, anything from a glitterbomb[1] to being swatted[2]. (And what worries me that I don't even have to be a sufficiently flagrant asshole, I just have to run into one.) [1] https://www.ruindays.com/collections/all/products/glitter-everywhere-envelope https://www.ruindays.com/collections/all/products/glitter-ev... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting_(hoaxing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting_(hoaxing)
  - squeaky-clean 10y ago
    > So what else are people going to do with my home address? Send me a postcard? I had a friend who got brigaded by 4chan in high school (I think she posted nudes and got doxxed, don't entirely remember, and I didn't ask for too many details). Long story short: hundreds of letters over about a year addressed to her house, her parents' workplaces, our school, all with really fucked up messages. Telling her to kill herself and other terrible things about her or her family. Letters listing everyone in her family or including pictures of her family from myspace (this was just before everyone was on Facebook) with names, phone numbers, and other details. Phone calls to her parents insulting their daughter. No "real harm" ever came from it aside from the threats, and her parents handled it very well, but still... It's not so much one person knowing "your" address. It's an unknown number of people knowing you and your family's address.
- vog 10y ago
  I also never had such problems, but others did have these problems, and that's what counts. (Everything else would be victim blaming.)
  - icebraining 10y ago
    It also matters if it's likely. I mean, it wasn't João Maria de Souza's fault that a cow fell on top of him, but I'm not going to live my life in fear of falling cows.

bad_user 10y ago

The problem was that back then you didn't have service providers with lock-in on a market, like today's Facebook and the Internet was only a thing for techies, whereas nowadays more than half of the world's population has access to the Internet. Can you just not use Facebook? There are obviously only 3 choices: (1) not use it, but then you won't have an account where all of your friends are; (2) use it with your real name and lose your privacy, with obvious risks, like your employer or relatives being able to find you on Facebook or (3) use Facebook with a fake name and risk being banned for breach of contract, with all of your investments in it lost. Lets not pretend that today's Internet is the same as the Internet from the eighties and nineties. Your father and grandma weren't on Usenet.

mirimir 10y ago
There's a fourth option: use Facebook with your real name, and separately with fake name(s). For the real-name account, carefully manage "friends" to avoid problems with family, friends, coworkers, etc. Make sure that there's no leakage between your real-name account and fake-name accounts, or among fake-name accounts. Practice good compartmentalization OpSec.
- durzagott 10y ago
  But wouldn't your fake profile start showing up in 'People you may know' section? I've heard Facebook uses IP adresses to link accounts. So suddenly you have to explain to your real friends/family/coworkers why you have a fake account.
  - mirimir 10y ago
    If your compartmentalization OpSec is adequate, there will be not more linkage between your real-name and fake-name accounts than there is between them and my accounts.
- syshum 10y ago
  That is becoming harder and harder to do as Facebook increases their level of knowledge Just the Facial Recognition alone has caused problems for people attempting to do this. Further OpSec is not just on you, I know a couple of people that have tried this only to have OTHER people expose thier data or information by posting things on facebook and other sites about them.

stupidcar 10y ago

Yes. People using real names on Usenet did not usually face a serious risk of being harassed and endangered in real life by an army of trolls: E.g. having their address, phone number and other private details stolen and publicly disseminated. Having armed police raid their house because someone has made a bogus 911 call. Having their utilities and back accounts cancelled because someone rang up using their details. Having the same harassment happen to their friends, relatives and colleagues. Etc. And this is without considering people living in countries with oppressive governments, where using their real name could see them arrested, beaten and imprisoned. Basically, the stakes are a lot higher for a lot of people. For many, preserving anonymity isn't a matter of "politeness" — it's a matter of personal security. It can literally be a matter of life and death.

vog 10y ago
> Yes. I see the issues you are stating, but not so much a qualitative change. > serious risk of being harassed and endangered in real life by an army of trolls This type of trolls (aka "stalkers") have already existed decades ago. Back then I had no trouble finding such cases documented in the Usenet archives. Of course, these happened to fewer people, but then, the net was a lot smaller, too. > For many, preserving anonymity isn't a matter of "politeness" — it's a matter of personal security How does this differ from what I wrote? "... is considered impolite, if not aggressive ..." > And this is without considering people living in countries with oppressive governments, where using their real name could see them arrested, beaten and imprisoned. This may really have changed, considering that those countries joined the internet relatively lately. Yet, it still seems that this is covered by point 3) "... is considered impolite, if not aggressive ..."
- stupidcar 10y ago
  You asked whether something had substantially changed, not qualitatively. A change in degree can still be a substantial change. It's the difference between living in a city with one murder a year, and one hundred murders a day. To the individual killed, the distinction is irrelevant, but in terms of the effect on others, and on the measures taken by the society as a whole, it's everything. But I would also argue there has been a qualitative change, from harassment conducted by isolated individuals, to large scale, organised harassment, as well as an escalation in the tactics used. A malicious Usenet user could not call on an army of globally distributed 4chan trolls to endlessly pursue a particular vendetta. And the much greater integration of technology into institutions means the available methods to harass someone and remotely disrupt their life is far greater.

owly 10y ago

One thing that has really changed is the ability to search for someone by their real name in public records online. There were public before but they were WAY more difficult to search, as anyone who's scoured a city hall or county records archive 20 years ago can attest.

vog 10y ago
That was before Usenet, wasn't it? In the time of Usenet it was already possible to either search within your local Usenet archive, or, slightly later, to type in someone's name into a search engine.
- DanBC 10y ago
  > In the time of Usenet it was already possible to either search within your local Usenet archive The reactions to Kibo suggest that was unusual at first. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Parry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Parry

mjevans 10y ago

I'm forgetting something that /has/ changed since then. How apt to use critical thinking the average / many users of the Internet are. "Real names" on Facebook profiles are also problematic since they are not actually authenticated in any meaningful way. If users had to use a credit card to buy some type of service and the name on that card became their public identity name then at least in that respect it would be ///a/// Firstname Lastname that was an owner of the account. There would still be namespace collision issues (there are billions on this planet).