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I would strongly advise anyone who really wants to be anonymous on the internet such as a freedom activist in a totalitarian country, not to follow the advice l

I would strongly advise anyone who really wants to be anonymous on the internet such as a freedom activist in a totalitarian country, not to follow the advice listed at the end of the article. Or rather: these are very basic and very naive recommendations, certainly good first steps, but absolutely nowhere near enough to guarantee strong anonymity on the internet. Remaining truly anonymous on the net is extremely hard, especially in these days where ML can be used to statistically narrow down and pinpoint who wrote a specific piece of text only based on things like use of punctuation, vocabulary, sentence structure and style.

Swenrekcah 5y ago
Would the solution be a digital version of the old newspaper cutout ransom letter? Generate via GPT-3 a text giving roughly the impression you want to make and then copy/paste sentences from online news media if you need the names of particular persons or events. Would be rather crude though, but less tedious than literally cutting and pasting letters was.
- kgeist 5y ago
  I had a similar idea in a sibling post. But this only works if you basically have a secret alter ego which has nothing to do with your work/public persona, because otherwise they can match your favorite topics in those GPT-3 generated texts to your interests in real life, by factoring in also other little facts, like when you usually appear online, etc. It's probably enough to protect the average Joe but imho not enough to protect a targeted freedom activist, unless their activism is their alter ago and publicly they aren't known to be activists. Otherwise their every step is monitored in a typical dictatorship and it's not that hard for them to connect the dots who was the author of a certain message.
kgeist 5y ago
>especially in these days where ML can be used to statistically narrow down and pinpoint who wrote a specific piece of text only based on things like use of punctuation, vocabulary, sentence structure and style. I think you can fight ML with ML - for example, use GPT-like algorithms generate text for you. But then you must also be careful about when you post - I remember some of the Russian trolls were exposed because their bursts of activity coincided with 9am-6pm Moscow time. So you have to use a random number generator decide when to appear online if you want to hide your location. There's always something which can narrow down their search. One small mistake and you are busted. They don't even need to pinpoint you exactly, if it's narrowed down to 1000-10000 people who meet the criteria, they already win because they have the capacity to go through the list one by one and eventually find you.

Swenrekcah 5y ago

Would the solution be a digital version of the old newspaper cutout ransom letter? Generate via GPT-3 a text giving roughly the impression you want to make and then copy/paste sentences from online news media if you need the names of particular persons or events. Would be rather crude though, but less tedious than literally cutting and pasting letters was.

kgeist 5y ago
I had a similar idea in a sibling post. But this only works if you basically have a secret alter ego which has nothing to do with your work/public persona, because otherwise they can match your favorite topics in those GPT-3 generated texts to your interests in real life, by factoring in also other little facts, like when you usually appear online, etc. It's probably enough to protect the average Joe but imho not enough to protect a targeted freedom activist, unless their activism is their alter ago and publicly they aren't known to be activists. Otherwise their every step is monitored in a typical dictatorship and it's not that hard for them to connect the dots who was the author of a certain message.

kgeist 5y ago

>especially in these days where ML can be used to statistically narrow down and pinpoint who wrote a specific piece of text only based on things like use of punctuation, vocabulary, sentence structure and style. I think you can fight ML with ML - for example, use GPT-like algorithms generate text for you. But then you must also be careful about when you post - I remember some of the Russian trolls were exposed because their bursts of activity coincided with 9am-6pm Moscow time. So you have to use a random number generator decide when to appear online if you want to hide your location. There's always something which can narrow down their search. One small mistake and you are busted. They don't even need to pinpoint you exactly, if it's narrowed down to 1000-10000 people who meet the criteria, they already win because they have the capacity to go through the list one by one and eventually find you.