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I and a number of people I know are grateful to Henry Spencer for not saving certain groups from the early days. On groups like soc.singles, we were young, lon
by not2b 6y ago
I and a number of people I know are grateful to Henry Spencer for not saving certain groups from the early days. On groups like soc.singles, we were young, lonely, indiscreet and posted using our real names, because it was a private club then (mid-80s).
- not2b 6y ago... or at least, many acted like it was.
- ravi-delia 6y agoOh boy, thank God people my age don't have to worry about the incredibly embarrassing things we did, or embarrassing fanfiction we wrote, preserved publicly forever. Gen Z, woooooo. Woo. I'm doomed.
- Polylactic_acid 6y agoI'm Gen Z too and for my whole life the advice has been "Don't put your real info on the internet". The only thing that comes up when you search my name is my gitlab profile and a technical blog. All of my cringy forum posts still exist but they are all under random usernames and would be very difficult to link back to me.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry
- Polylactic_acid 6y agoYes I'm quite aware that if governments were after me they could probably dig up this stuff but thats not my concern. I'm focused on random internet users being able to dig up 10 year old posts which would be insanely difficult given how much crap there is on the internet and how much I have changed since then.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y agoI remember reading corporations crawling the so called "deep web" and even the "dark nets", advertising their capabilities as superior for gathering new insights/intelligence a few years ago. Was just a short blip on my radar, because I haven't seen it mentioned afterwards. Anyways, what can be done probabably will be done, for whichever reason because it's getting cheaper and cheaper. And then the next leak happens. And somewhere on some site like Have I been owned?, or in a torrent there is a comma separated list with many, or even all of your former pseudonyms connected with your current address, social security, drivers license, younameit. Gotcha!
- Godel_unicode 6y agoWho does this kind of wild speculation help?
- nitrogen 6y agoIt's not speculation, it's basically an open source intelligence tool. I can't recall the name of the company I somehow stumbled upon, but they exist. Palantir, as an example, might be someone who you'd expect to develop commercial tools for intelligence gathering. High frequency traders or other investors also.
- Godel_unicode 6y agoIt is speculation. They do not exist. You're thinking of Maltego, and it's very far from what is being described. Palantir makes software, not a panopticon for their own use. High frequency trading is entirely unrelated to scrounging the deep dark web for crumbs to stitch together forum accounts. This is a fantasy spurred on by too many dark mirror episodes, nobody does stuff like that for the hell of it. Storing the amount of data we're talking about is expensive. Collecting it is expensive. Processing it is expensive. There's little money to be made with it, but it sounds really good if you don't think too hard about it. It's illuminati conspiracy mumbo jumbo for nerds.
- dumpsterdiver 6y agoFor any who are interested in witnessing a fictionalized example of applied Stylometry, I highly suggest the Star Wars Thrawn series by Timothy Zahn. Thrawn's specialty is making tactical inferences based on the physical art pieces created by a culture. It's a really interesting read, but don't take my word for it!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kibwen 6y agoMy internet coming-of-age was between 2000 and 2008, and I was happy to learn that all the forums I used to frequent are now kaput, with no public archives. It's always a bit of a shame to lose historical documents, but who knows what embarrassing comments I'm now free of forever. (And don't worry, my mortifying preteen Super Mario RPG fanfiction yet survives in personal backups.)
- mjayhn 6y agoWell there's a decent chance you're going to be working for millennial and gen-X'ers nowadays. We're the ones who were hiding all our online lives (still) from our parents. I'm glad my Myspace was deleted to my teenage angst. Point being a lot of us I think are really respective of privacy and the fact that people (even teachers and nurses!) have lives that don't revolve around work.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoNice to see Gen X mentioned. In the several years, the media has mentioned only Boomers, Millennials, and Gen Z. It’s like Gen X is the lost generation.
- boulos 6y agoThe Lost Generation were the people who came of age during WW1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Generation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Generation
- Izkata 6y agoApparently before the name "Generation X" stuck, one of the proposed names was "New Lost Generation".
- ddingus 6y agoGen X here. Apt
- Jaruzel 6y agoThis is something that I've been aware of for a while now. Us (Gen-Xrs) have had a rough time of it; The boomers rode the financial booms and mostly did well, and the millennials are pandered to everywhere you look, whereas we had to suffer more than one financial crash, and the media and retail pretend like we don't exist, so nothing is aligned to our values or desires. Even worse, there's a large chunk of millenials who don't even believe that Gen-X exists, and think that the generation above them are all boomers.
- smoe 6y agoI’m glad not being a teenager these days where everything is constantly photographed and filmed then shared everywhere without consent. At least with my old embarrassing forum posts and such it was me actively sharing it :)
- baby 6y agoI mean if everybody has something to be embarrassed about then nobody really is. But yeah if youtube existed when I was young I would probably be internet famous in a bad way.
- embit 6y agoOh yes. Same here. Long after realizing Internet never forgets.
- peter303 6y agoBefore the web it was pretty common to have a school/work account with your real identity. I have my regrets too. Since then I post under just my middle name.