10 ms·

Real Me and Fake Me

271 points by ColinWright 5y ago

danuker 5y ago
Sad state of affairs. I hope the actions of any of my possible fakes won't cause grave consequences, like some insurance going up.
- lazide 5y ago
  If that was the gravest of consequences, we could all be happy.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
mitchbob 5y ago
Archived: https://archive.ph/iHWMb https://archive.ph/iHWMb
maxverse 5y ago
Riveting and infuriating. I hate that the story just... ends when the hacker's had enough, hate that IG did nothing, and hate that people get away with crap like this.
- bluetwo 5y ago
  The acceptance of garbage customer support in this country drives me nuts. Other countries have laws that say a human must at least respond to your support request. We have nothing like that.
thisisonthetest 5y ago
Not really about the article but, I wonder if Dostoevsky inspired the Netflix show Living With Yourself. I thought it was a cool premise, but this sounded very similar. In either case it goes to show the value of being well read
- Charlie_26 5y ago
  Have you seen Enemy with Jake Gyllenhaal
zaney_zaners 5y ago
It’s somewhat surprising to me that Instagram allows people to change names and profile categories so often. Basically, enabling scams at that point.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  At its inception Instagram wasn’t on the facebook trajectory, so the core of the system is pretty different. When the main use case is posting pictures of cute cats and dogs, changing names and categories isn’t a big deal. I agree with you it sure changed a lot, but the current owners probably don’t mind.
- unnouinceput 5y ago
  Instagram was acquired by Facebook. Current Instagram has nothing to do with original one. Same goes for Whatsapp, also acquired by Facebook.
avg_dev 5y ago
That’s pretty fucked up in a variety of ways.
DoreenMichele 5y ago
I think what's especially aggravating is the degree to which privacy and security are under assault to supposedly protect against something like this. Good people lose privacy and what not. Bad people just keep on doing terrible things and seemingly just getting away with it.
- smorgusofborg 5y ago
  I guess, I kind of view this, and most modern developments, as the same tack-on that always happened with online games. You can no longer play according to the original/actual mechanics because even the avatars become treated as real by the socially invested, but you can't treat it as real because the game mechanics and lack of enforced security mean its "laws" are a social farce atop simple game mechanics.
duxup 5y ago
I once encountered a doppelgänger of my own when I was 19. Dude showed up at a youth group I spent a lot of time with. He dressed and looked very much like me, it was totally unnerving. I was surprised how unsettled by it I was. We never spoke. People asked us about it (well I assume they asked him too) and I would say indecisive stuff like “yeah it is weird” and change the subject. I think we both understood that it was just too weird and if we were even more alike, or one was better than the other… better to not know. Sometimes I wonder if he was me in the future, a time traveler.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  When I was 22, I encountered my 17 year old self in the basement bar of a youth hostel in Athens. He dressed like I did (when I was 17), he talked about the same things in the same way, he looked broadly the same. I considered an intervention, since he was clearly booring those he was talking to (another confirmation that it was truly my 17 year old self), but decided that the question about time travel could become awkward. What happened to that timeline, to that other just slightly younger me, I do not know. Perhaps things sped up and we joined together (I'd guess at about age 27 if I had to). Or perhaps the timelines have diverged, and there's another version of me somewhere both so close and so far, doing what I do and leaving me very glad that I cannot watch him do it.
  - microcentury 5y ago
    - bckr 5y ago
      Please don't bring Redditisms like this here, or at least add more to the conversation than this.
      - microcentury 5y ago
        My last comment was in 2013. I'll see you again in 2031. I hope you'll continue to defend the flame of HN.
wolverine876 5y ago
This is our industry now. Look at it in the face. We went from Steve Jobs, GNU, Linus Torvalds, Tim Berners-Lee, etc. to megalomaniacs, cults of personality, post-truth, frauds, and mass maniplation. Compare how the first iPhone was marketed to cryptocurrencies and Musk's products. That's what many people think IT and our industry and our work is about, including the scammers, the cult-of-personality members, and much of the public.
- nerdponx 5y ago
  Was Steve Jobs not a megalomaniac surrounded by a cult of personality?
  - odiroot 5y ago
    I guess the difference is, there was still a lot of substance behind Jobs. And delivering (mostly) good products. Now we're dealing with Elizabeth Holmes et al, who just cargo cult off Jobs' legend.
    - Broken_Hippo 5y ago
      Now we're dealing with Elizabeth Holmes et al, who just cargo cult off Jobs' legend Frauds have always been with us - charismatic frauds, even. That's generally how they defraud. How many times have people sold things like the Eiffel tower or various bridges around the world? How else did we get to Ponzi schemes and the MLMs that are the fallout (and technically totally not pyramid schemes)?
      - wolverine876 5y ago
        > Frauds have always been with us ... This is the excuse of frauds - to try to normalize it. The amount of fraud is something we can have a large impact on, just like other diseases, and the frauds are responsible for their behavior - there is no fate or destiny that makes them do it. They have free will and make choices to hurt others. Currently, we aren't doing enough about fraud, and it's Orwellian to see people making efforts to normalize it.
buffet_overflow 5y ago
This was a good read. It makes me wonder how much of the internet is still "legitimate". Things like a Reddit post, a tweet (or the screenshot of it that gets passed around), or even a blog, how much of that is authentic vs someone that shifts around like the antagonist in the article, but maybe just better at blending in.
texaslonghorn5 5y ago
I am reminded of the story of Brunelleschi and Il Grasso / Manetto
JetAlone 5y ago
"Facebook’s systems determined that you were going too fast when taking an action. You must significantly slow down. You are engaging in behaviour that may be considered annoying or abusive by other users." So, I, like the author, I have a problem with trying to assess whether to give service to a user based on profiling their use-cadence of the machine (not with limitations meant to manage the service's bandwidth like we have here on HN, mind you). Is there anything we can do to outlaw or at least discourage this practice?
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > Is there anything we can do to outlaw or at least discourage this practice? You want to outlaw rate-limiting? Rapid-fire actions on social platforms, past a certain threshold, is highly correlated with unwanted behaviors. This is especially true for new user accounts or those previously flagged for other abuse tactics. Even Hacker News does this. Rarely does anything good come from someone firing off as many actions as fast as they possibly can on a social platform. IMO, it's not a problem. I certainly don't want laws dictating that companies can't rate limit users or put limits on how frequently certain actions can be taken. That would be a huge overstep.
  - JetAlone 5y ago
    >You want to outlaw rate-limiting? Don't get it twisted. I specifically said I was okay with rate limiting for bandwidth when I said "(not with limitations meant to manage the service's bandwidth like we have here on HN, mind you)". What I do want to outlaw is: "Assess[ing] whether to give service to a user based on profiling their use-cadence of the machine" I want to outlaw investigating a user's input patterns on their hardware to predict their emotional state and use that prediction to curtail service, all minority-report like. Do you feel me?
    - lazide 5y ago
      How exactly does that refute the earlier comment about that being useful and probably necessary to prevent abuse?
thn-gap 5y ago
This could have been cut short if Instagram had acted on the author's request, since they went through the effort of giving the passport pictures, and i wonder if Instagram should be partially liable when they just let these scares go for so long. I wonder if the author could have sped up the process by issuing DMCA takedown request on the stolen posts and media.
- ahoka 5y ago
  Good luck if you are not living in the USA, there is no real legal entity you can contact. Everything is a shell, every response is automated. Facebook has zero liability.
- graphpercolator 5y ago
  I am not even sure how much I buy this story. Maybe Joe is doing some kind of gorilla marketing strategy for his novels and poems based off that Dostoevsky story. I just have a hard to believing someone is putting in that much effort to pretend being this guy when the only thing that looks to have much attention on his twitter is this story. The whole video chat and that interaction sounds like complete BS.
  - selestify 5y ago
    Why do you doubt it when there's plenty of these cases happening? E.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/syunqu/someone_is_impersonating_vitalik_on_instagram_its/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/syunqu/some...
theginger 5y ago
Instagram is rubbish at dealing with fake / stolen accounts and they are at the centre of a huge number of crypto scams. The way to get them down quickly seems to be with fake copyright take down notices, because they are also rubbish at validating those. In this case it could be a genuine take down notices since the poems like are subject to copyright.
unnouinceput 5y ago
Schneier advice is sound. If you're starting to become famous make accounts with all popular social media. Then post nothing or just say in that account description why you did it. Schneier had to do a LinkedIn account for this reason too: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/08/i_seem_to_have_.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/08/i_seem_to_hav... and follow up: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/08/more_on_my_link.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/08/more_on_my_li...
fleddr 5y ago
Tech is so depressing. Our physical world is open and based on good intent. There's bad actors but the cost of being a bad actor is high: it's risky and doesn't scale. Even if you live in a bad neighborhood, and make your walk to a grocery store, you wouldn't expect 50 people to try and rob you on the way there. When you then see a familiar face in the store, you don't expect this to be an impersonator. And when you pay for your groceries, you don't expect it to be a phishing attack or scam. When you then return home, your home isn't a fortress with military grade security. We live with the assumption that for the most part, we're safe and sound and most interactions are based on the social contract of good intent. This optimism is the basis for lots of tech, every single part turning to shit. Email was supposed to be this open, anonymous, non-authenticated and distributed way for anybody to communicate. Now 99.99% of volume is spam, scams, phishing attacks. DNS assumes genuine usage of whichever name you claim, how naïve we were. A web server is the ultimate self publication tool, setting us free from centralized media and giving everyone a voice. Now it's under attack in less than a minute after launching and almost impossible to keep secure unless you put it behind military grade protection. Self publication was supposed to produce the sum of human knowledge, which would then surface in search. Now search surfaces SEO gamers and commercial interests only. Social networks assume genuine usage of account names, not impersonation. Social networks were to give a voice to the non-tech savvy and connect the world. Now all attention is seized by the unreasonable ones, the extremists, the grifters. Crypto has interesting ideas, but is an unusable mine field of scams. We've sunk so low that now even information itself cannot be trusted anymore, not even from mainstream media. As somebody whom has experienced a non-tech world (80s) and the optimism and beauty of early tech (90s), it's been very sour to see everything turn into shit. Nothing of the original vision has materialized and rather than improve humanity, it's made it worse in so many ways. The cost of being a bad actor is just too low and it scales too well. Solving that may be worse than the actual problem.
- npteljes 5y ago
  >Our physical world is open and based on good intent Is that really so? What you describe is a good neighborhood. I don't think the majority of the world can reflect what you describe. >Email Same as physical mail. Email's spam percentage is definitely higher, but there's a good bunch of fliers, marketing mail, propaganda and other unwanted material stuffed into people's mailboxes everywhere in the world. >Now search surfaces SEO gamers and commercial interests only. This was a problem ever since I use the internet, which is for 20+ years. Hardly a modern problem. Google became a major player back then, because of the sort of good results it returned, but people always found a way to poison the results. Keyword stuffing worked for a long time and got ever more creative. Not to mention the myriad of popups, pop-unders and small iframes all designed to increase visitor metrics. I'd like to say two things: I think the bad intent was always there and you can do nothing about it. This has not improved and never was it better than it is currently. If it was better, it was a period that's unsustainable for some reason, and the reason I suspect is that human nature in itself. The second thing is that there are wonderful stuff that otherwise wasn't accessible. What you need to do is learn how to navigate among the bad stuff, to get to the good stuff. Wikipedia for one is a pinnacle of this. As much problems as it has, I think it's fantastic to have that resource.
evancoop 5y ago
In a world that contains non-fungible tokens, it is ironic that a human being itself is, well, fungible.

271 points by ColinWright 5y ago

Sad state of affairs. I hope the actions of any of my possible fakes won't cause grave consequences, like some insurance going up.

lazide 5y ago
If that was the gravest of consequences, we could all be happy.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

mitchbob 5y ago

Archived: https://archive.ph/iHWMb https://archive.ph/iHWMb

maxverse 5y ago

Riveting and infuriating. I hate that the story just... ends when the hacker's had enough, hate that IG did nothing, and hate that people get away with crap like this.

bluetwo 5y ago
The acceptance of garbage customer support in this country drives me nuts. Other countries have laws that say a human must at least respond to your support request. We have nothing like that.

thisisonthetest 5y ago

Not really about the article but, I wonder if Dostoevsky inspired the Netflix show Living With Yourself. I thought it was a cool premise, but this sounded very similar. In either case it goes to show the value of being well read

Charlie_26 5y ago
Have you seen Enemy with Jake Gyllenhaal

zaney_zaners 5y ago

It’s somewhat surprising to me that Instagram allows people to change names and profile categories so often. Basically, enabling scams at that point.

makeitdouble 5y ago
At its inception Instagram wasn’t on the facebook trajectory, so the core of the system is pretty different. When the main use case is posting pictures of cute cats and dogs, changing names and categories isn’t a big deal. I agree with you it sure changed a lot, but the current owners probably don’t mind.
unnouinceput 5y ago
Instagram was acquired by Facebook. Current Instagram has nothing to do with original one. Same goes for Whatsapp, also acquired by Facebook.

avg_dev 5y ago

That’s pretty fucked up in a variety of ways.

DoreenMichele 5y ago

I think what's especially aggravating is the degree to which privacy and security are under assault to supposedly protect against something like this. Good people lose privacy and what not. Bad people just keep on doing terrible things and seemingly just getting away with it.

smorgusofborg 5y ago
I guess, I kind of view this, and most modern developments, as the same tack-on that always happened with online games. You can no longer play according to the original/actual mechanics because even the avatars become treated as real by the socially invested, but you can't treat it as real because the game mechanics and lack of enforced security mean its "laws" are a social farce atop simple game mechanics.

duxup 5y ago

I once encountered a doppelgänger of my own when I was 19. Dude showed up at a youth group I spent a lot of time with. He dressed and looked very much like me, it was totally unnerving. I was surprised how unsettled by it I was. We never spoke. People asked us about it (well I assume they asked him too) and I would say indecisive stuff like “yeah it is weird” and change the subject. I think we both understood that it was just too weird and if we were even more alike, or one was better than the other… better to not know. Sometimes I wonder if he was me in the future, a time traveler.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
When I was 22, I encountered my 17 year old self in the basement bar of a youth hostel in Athens. He dressed like I did (when I was 17), he talked about the same things in the same way, he looked broadly the same. I considered an intervention, since he was clearly booring those he was talking to (another confirmation that it was truly my 17 year old self), but decided that the question about time travel could become awkward. What happened to that timeline, to that other just slightly younger me, I do not know. Perhaps things sped up and we joined together (I'd guess at about age 27 if I had to). Or perhaps the timelines have diverged, and there's another version of me somewhere both so close and so far, doing what I do and leaving me very glad that I cannot watch him do it.
- microcentury 5y ago
  - bckr 5y ago
    Please don't bring Redditisms like this here, or at least add more to the conversation than this.
    - microcentury 5y ago
      My last comment was in 2013. I'll see you again in 2031. I hope you'll continue to defend the flame of HN.

wolverine876 5y ago

This is our industry now. Look at it in the face. We went from Steve Jobs, GNU, Linus Torvalds, Tim Berners-Lee, etc. to megalomaniacs, cults of personality, post-truth, frauds, and mass maniplation. Compare how the first iPhone was marketed to cryptocurrencies and Musk's products. That's what many people think IT and our industry and our work is about, including the scammers, the cult-of-personality members, and much of the public.

nerdponx 5y ago
Was Steve Jobs not a megalomaniac surrounded by a cult of personality?
- odiroot 5y ago
  I guess the difference is, there was still a lot of substance behind Jobs. And delivering (mostly) good products. Now we're dealing with Elizabeth Holmes et al, who just cargo cult off Jobs' legend.
  - Broken_Hippo 5y ago
    Now we're dealing with Elizabeth Holmes et al, who just cargo cult off Jobs' legend Frauds have always been with us - charismatic frauds, even. That's generally how they defraud. How many times have people sold things like the Eiffel tower or various bridges around the world? How else did we get to Ponzi schemes and the MLMs that are the fallout (and technically totally not pyramid schemes)?
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      > Frauds have always been with us ... This is the excuse of frauds - to try to normalize it. The amount of fraud is something we can have a large impact on, just like other diseases, and the frauds are responsible for their behavior - there is no fate or destiny that makes them do it. They have free will and make choices to hurt others. Currently, we aren't doing enough about fraud, and it's Orwellian to see people making efforts to normalize it.

buffet_overflow 5y ago

This was a good read. It makes me wonder how much of the internet is still "legitimate". Things like a Reddit post, a tweet (or the screenshot of it that gets passed around), or even a blog, how much of that is authentic vs someone that shifts around like the antagonist in the article, but maybe just better at blending in.

texaslonghorn5 5y ago

I am reminded of the story of Brunelleschi and Il Grasso / Manetto

JetAlone 5y ago

"Facebook’s systems determined that you were going too fast when taking an action. You must significantly slow down. You are engaging in behaviour that may be considered annoying or abusive by other users." So, I, like the author, I have a problem with trying to assess whether to give service to a user based on profiling their use-cadence of the machine (not with limitations meant to manage the service's bandwidth like we have here on HN, mind you). Is there anything we can do to outlaw or at least discourage this practice?

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> Is there anything we can do to outlaw or at least discourage this practice? You want to outlaw rate-limiting? Rapid-fire actions on social platforms, past a certain threshold, is highly correlated with unwanted behaviors. This is especially true for new user accounts or those previously flagged for other abuse tactics. Even Hacker News does this. Rarely does anything good come from someone firing off as many actions as fast as they possibly can on a social platform. IMO, it's not a problem. I certainly don't want laws dictating that companies can't rate limit users or put limits on how frequently certain actions can be taken. That would be a huge overstep.
- JetAlone 5y ago
  >You want to outlaw rate-limiting? Don't get it twisted. I specifically said I was okay with rate limiting for bandwidth when I said "(not with limitations meant to manage the service's bandwidth like we have here on HN, mind you)". What I do want to outlaw is: "Assess[ing] whether to give service to a user based on profiling their use-cadence of the machine" I want to outlaw investigating a user's input patterns on their hardware to predict their emotional state and use that prediction to curtail service, all minority-report like. Do you feel me?
  - lazide 5y ago
    How exactly does that refute the earlier comment about that being useful and probably necessary to prevent abuse?

thn-gap 5y ago

This could have been cut short if Instagram had acted on the author's request, since they went through the effort of giving the passport pictures, and i wonder if Instagram should be partially liable when they just let these scares go for so long. I wonder if the author could have sped up the process by issuing DMCA takedown request on the stolen posts and media.

ahoka 5y ago
Good luck if you are not living in the USA, there is no real legal entity you can contact. Everything is a shell, every response is automated. Facebook has zero liability.
graphpercolator 5y ago
I am not even sure how much I buy this story. Maybe Joe is doing some kind of gorilla marketing strategy for his novels and poems based off that Dostoevsky story. I just have a hard to believing someone is putting in that much effort to pretend being this guy when the only thing that looks to have much attention on his twitter is this story. The whole video chat and that interaction sounds like complete BS.
- selestify 5y ago
  Why do you doubt it when there's plenty of these cases happening? E.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/syunqu/someone_is_impersonating_vitalik_on_instagram_its/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/syunqu/some...

theginger 5y ago

Instagram is rubbish at dealing with fake / stolen accounts and they are at the centre of a huge number of crypto scams. The way to get them down quickly seems to be with fake copyright take down notices, because they are also rubbish at validating those. In this case it could be a genuine take down notices since the poems like are subject to copyright.

unnouinceput 5y ago

Schneier advice is sound. If you're starting to become famous make accounts with all popular social media. Then post nothing or just say in that account description why you did it. Schneier had to do a LinkedIn account for this reason too: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/08/i_seem_to_have_.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/08/i_seem_to_hav... and follow up: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/08/more_on_my_link.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/08/more_on_my_li...

fleddr 5y ago

Tech is so depressing. Our physical world is open and based on good intent. There's bad actors but the cost of being a bad actor is high: it's risky and doesn't scale. Even if you live in a bad neighborhood, and make your walk to a grocery store, you wouldn't expect 50 people to try and rob you on the way there. When you then see a familiar face in the store, you don't expect this to be an impersonator. And when you pay for your groceries, you don't expect it to be a phishing attack or scam. When you then return home, your home isn't a fortress with military grade security. We live with the assumption that for the most part, we're safe and sound and most interactions are based on the social contract of good intent. This optimism is the basis for lots of tech, every single part turning to shit. Email was supposed to be this open, anonymous, non-authenticated and distributed way for anybody to communicate. Now 99.99% of volume is spam, scams, phishing attacks. DNS assumes genuine usage of whichever name you claim, how naïve we were. A web server is the ultimate self publication tool, setting us free from centralized media and giving everyone a voice. Now it's under attack in less than a minute after launching and almost impossible to keep secure unless you put it behind military grade protection. Self publication was supposed to produce the sum of human knowledge, which would then surface in search. Now search surfaces SEO gamers and commercial interests only. Social networks assume genuine usage of account names, not impersonation. Social networks were to give a voice to the non-tech savvy and connect the world. Now all attention is seized by the unreasonable ones, the extremists, the grifters. Crypto has interesting ideas, but is an unusable mine field of scams. We've sunk so low that now even information itself cannot be trusted anymore, not even from mainstream media. As somebody whom has experienced a non-tech world (80s) and the optimism and beauty of early tech (90s), it's been very sour to see everything turn into shit. Nothing of the original vision has materialized and rather than improve humanity, it's made it worse in so many ways. The cost of being a bad actor is just too low and it scales too well. Solving that may be worse than the actual problem.

npteljes 5y ago
>Our physical world is open and based on good intent Is that really so? What you describe is a good neighborhood. I don't think the majority of the world can reflect what you describe. >Email Same as physical mail. Email's spam percentage is definitely higher, but there's a good bunch of fliers, marketing mail, propaganda and other unwanted material stuffed into people's mailboxes everywhere in the world. >Now search surfaces SEO gamers and commercial interests only. This was a problem ever since I use the internet, which is for 20+ years. Hardly a modern problem. Google became a major player back then, because of the sort of good results it returned, but people always found a way to poison the results. Keyword stuffing worked for a long time and got ever more creative. Not to mention the myriad of popups, pop-unders and small iframes all designed to increase visitor metrics. I'd like to say two things: I think the bad intent was always there and you can do nothing about it. This has not improved and never was it better than it is currently. If it was better, it was a period that's unsustainable for some reason, and the reason I suspect is that human nature in itself. The second thing is that there are wonderful stuff that otherwise wasn't accessible. What you need to do is learn how to navigate among the bad stuff, to get to the good stuff. Wikipedia for one is a pinnacle of this. As much problems as it has, I think it's fantastic to have that resource.

evancoop 5y ago

In a world that contains non-fungible tokens, it is ironic that a human being itself is, well, fungible.