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> Does someone high up in Google have an embarrassing usenet history? I don't know if that's true (it probably is), but personally I am glad that almost all of

• ghaff 8y ago
  Or don't post things that you'd be embarrassed to be associated with? Easy for me to say of course. My digitized articles from an undergrad newspaper at least went through editors. And anything from my BBS days is almost assuredly lost to the ages. But I've always used my True Name and don't have any problem with that.
  • sverige 8y ago
    Well, sure, but I was still pretty immature 25 years ago. And for younger people, the norms are shifting so rapidly that it's not certain that something posted in jest today won't be considered career-ending heresy in five years. This is the real reason the internet isn't nearly as interesting as it once was. The concept of 'thinking out loud' that I grew up with is nearly dead.
    • ghaff 8y ago
      That's certainly fair. TBH I'm glad there isn't a public record of everything I might have written on a chat board or other public forum as a teenager or college student. At a minimum, there would be things that would require explanations along the lines of "Times were different." That said, I'm generally pro-True Name unless there's some strong reason for anonymity.
      • gowld 8y ago
        You wrote a whole paragraph explaining exactly what is wrong with True Name.
    • raxxorrax 8y ago
      True to a degree. There are still some places left. I think it fascinating that people often wish for more content moderation... I don't know why they don't just go to work or something like that. Anything that provides a rigid cage for anything that could be deemed controversial. But why force it on places that are optional to visit?
      • JohnBooty 8y ago
        I think it fascinating that people often wish for more content moderation... It's very easy for overmoderation to prevent useful/enjoyable discussion. It's equally easy for a lack of moderation to prevent useful/enjoyable discussion. Restaurants are optional places to visit, too, but I'd find it hard to enjoy my meal if people were shouting threats at me or showing me images of child porn.
        • raxxorrax 8y ago
          Yes, the point was that not everything needs to be a restaurant.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • icedchai 8y ago
    That's your choice. I prefer to use a different username on each site to make it more complicated to connect the dots.
  • drngdds 8y ago
    >Or don't post things that you'd be embarrassed to be associated with? I can't predict what will be embarrassing or harmful for me to be associated with in ten years. The only way to be (sort of) sure would be to censor everything I say on the internet to be as inoffensive as possible to everyone, which would suck.
  • erik_seaberg 8y ago
    From pg's excellent <http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html >: > Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers? If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think what you're told[....] > The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want. And if you feel you have to say everything you think, it may inhibit you from thinking improper thoughts.
• smudgymcscmudge 8y ago
  Google allowed you to request your posts be deindexed. I helped somebody get some particularly embarrassing messages deindexed. It’s been more than a few years, so I forget the process, but I do remember that verifying their authorship was somewhat cumbersome.
  • sverige 8y ago
    I actually convinced the guy who founded Deja News to delete most of my early posts in 1996. They still lived on in some quotes, though.
  • scarface74 8y ago
    Which doesn’t help if anyone replied to them.
• dboreham 8y ago
  I take the opposite approach: I always use my name on the basis I never need to be worried about being deanonymized. Also keeps me from posting something I might regret.
  • steve_musk 8y ago
    Unfortunately we often don’t know that we’ll regret something when we do it.
  • scarface74 8y ago
    I posted a lot of crap on Usenet. While nothing that could be held against me, there were definitely a number of nerd wars I engaged in back in 1992.
    • pmarreck 8y ago
      mac vs. windows: FIGHT! iOS has joined the room
      • scarface74 8y ago
        Nahh back then it was Mac vs Amiga. Windows was so bad back then it wasn’t even a contender.
        • sverige 8y ago
          Ahem. You're all missing the point. But that's probably because you're all reading this using Emacs.
          • scarface74 8y ago
            Nope nn over telnet.
  • pmarreck 8y ago
    I take an entirely different approach: My name is basically a globally-unique identifier to me, and most of my aliases are probably easily traced back to me, so I am forced to conduct all of my online business with the threat of being "found out"
• johnchristopher 8y ago
  I have been thinking about that these past few months and asking myself when and why I started using my real name online even though I was raised in the pseudonym era of the 90's. I think it's around when Skype was introduced and it made sense to use real name for discoverability.
  • Namrog84 8y ago
    I split the difference. My name namrog84 Looks like a pseudonym and number from previous era. However it's my last name backwards. Gorman. And I was born in 84 so it's not just a random throw away. Also namrog without number is often taken. So i still use it professionally because it's still closely related to my identity. Yet majority of people would never know if they didn't know my name.
• Red_Tarsius 8y ago
  > I don't know if that's true (it probably is), but personally I am glad that almost all of my old Usenet posts have vanished. Same. If I could go back I wouldn't share any details about my life. Best case scenario, nothing happens. But everything can (and will) be used against you by the court of public opinion. The last few years shredded any '90s idealism I had about the internet. > The internet is forever That must be scary for upcoming generations. Now many of our early screw ups and thoughts are recorded in some form or another and there's little way to move on. There's no time/distance element that allows you to grow out of whatever you – or others – uploaded. In the worst cases (revenge porn, false accusations, lolcows) you can't put your old life behind at all.
  • alcover 8y ago
    > That must be scary for upcoming generations. Not on long time scale, I think. Services will disappear, disks will be reformatted, bit-rot will erode archives.
  • gowld 8y ago
    It's a lot better now. In the past we had usenet, public forever. Now our wall gardens give ability to share semi privately and hide most info that hasn't been leaked yet.
• paulie_a 8y ago
  If the Longshot ever occurred that some decade old posts surface, the simple solution is to lie. Repeat after me: "no I did not make those posts"
• bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y ago
  This is the problem. I've mentioned on multiple occasions that the current post-Snowden security and privacy movement is creating a serious threat to the Internet history preservation, and to some extents, threat the understanding/insights of the human civilization in the digital age. My personal interest is Internet culture and communities. And I'm not amused by this comment, let me talk about the problem briefly. Online communication from 1970 to 1995 was almost completely public, archived indefinitely. You can still read every single comment by every hacker from the late 80s in Usenet archives, sometimes even back to the ARPAnet era. There are a million posts to read and no spam and low-effort posting at all (by modern standards, even many flame wars seem to be high-quality). You can easily lost days, months or even years in the Usenet archive. Records like these are often the only remaining records of the online communities, a snapshot of great historical and cultural value. To me, even the controversial political flamewars are interesting as they reveal parts of the history I would not know otherwise (I guess if someone rereads Reddit threads about Donald Trump today in 2055, he/she may have a similar feeling). On the other hand, you also have names, addresses, and even phone numbers of almost everyone posted on Usenet. It was not a big problem when the access to Usenet/Internet was exclusive to members of the academia, and at a time when there was almost no systematic, organized abuses of the personal information. But today's different, we have big and little brothers who have "Collect Them All" as their slogan, and they are actively trying to exploit the information available to the maximum extents. What is the response then? People (at least many in the hacking community) start to prefer private, semi-private, or in-group communities over public communication, often protected by cryptography. Some people also actively erases/purges their footprints, for example, some would delete every single post when they left a community, no matter how insightful they are, others may even deliberately insert misleading or false information. And we have something roughly similar to Vernor Vinge's True Name (describes an underground hacking community in the cyberspace). Good, now personal privacy and security is more or less protected by using the cryptographic barrier. But what is it doing then? We are now creating a unprecedented, HUGE GAP of information in history, within our life time, we are now entering a new digital Dark Age where no one has seen before. Centralized and/or proprietary services often delete information when they go out-of-service, too, so we need to archive them, desperately. You can't imagine how many resources/memories that are extremely valuable to members of some communities exist solely on a single web server/service provider. I remember reading a post from Schneier's blog that says a website contains numerous posts of wine culture were gone forever when the hard drive failed, and one commenter said that he uses w3m/lynx CLI browsers, and records everything he reads to his hard drive so he would never lost a single piece of information he has seen. Is it an act of little brother surveillance? Arguably, it can be seen as one. But is it justified? I would say yes, and even say we need more people doing this, systematically. Naturally, archive.org was born in this way. But then it faces the same issue. On one hand, many archived information can be abused, on the other hand, the more archive-refusing people we have, the more damage to historical records is made. I don't know how to solve this problem. The only way I can think of, is (1) Cypherpunks were correct. Anonymity is crucial in the information age, and we should have more of it: never use True Name and reveal personal information unless absolutely necessary, use an anonymous network (e.g Tor) if possible, discard identities periodically (but if you delete posts, it still reverts to the original problem...), (2) Encourages further developments and applications of anonymity, and (3) Training people to assume every piece of information published publicly cannot be removed, may be abused, and they should be able to withstand all possible consequences of it. But now, "life" and "information" simply become inseparable, if you are active in a community you have to post something... I don't know the solution. --- Appendix 1: what you can see in an Usenet archive. You can see people's reactions to the rumors that Apple would release new 68000-based machines, how Larry Wall was releasing patch-2.0, the debates about the audio fidelity of vacuum tube/transistor amplifier, how /bin/sh on System V was having a problem with "CFLAGS=-g make", the first hand perspective on the impact of Great Renaming, Richard Stallman announcing the GNU project and Linus's flamewar on microkernel with Tanenbaum, early Sci-Fi fandom culture posted from a 4.3-BSD machine (beta version!) and how it influenced the hacker culture, how the anti-spam movement gained momentum due to its intellectual challenges, raw discussions of fringe political movements (some interesting ones related to tech include the Cypherpunk movement, and Exopian, an early sect of transhumanism), FAQs on almost every subjects written by the active participants of the community who have probably spent hundreds of hours, some weird "emergent" memes/phenomena created out-of-nothing from the collective community, and also have a laugh on thousands of forgotten Internet memes, like alt.religion.kibology, Usenet Oracle. The only downsize is: no external resources is accessible, and nobody is going to reply you. It feels like Otomo Katsuhiro's animation Memories, the protagonists in trapping inside a 3D Hologram simulation of the past, created by the supercomputer in the abandoned space station.