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The author comments below the entry: "more about personally doing something to combat the lunacy of forced-registration" After setup, it takes me one click to
by timf 17y ago
The author comments below the entry: "more about personally doing something to combat the lunacy of forced-registration"
After setup, it takes me one click to bypass the problem, too: using my stored username and password.
I fear I am turning into a crabby old man, but seriously, does the NYtimes owe you something? Considering the value that it provides at no monetary cost, having an anonymous handle to contact me at or track what I read (or rather, what an anonymous representation of me reads) seems like a more than fair trade to me.
- derwiki 17y agoI think this -particular- author would content that there is no such thing as an anonymous representation (see http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/abstracts.html#netflix http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/abstracts.html#netflix)
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- timf 17y agoQuoting... "Q: You are not really de-anonymizing anyone, because your algorithm cannot link identities to anonymous Netflix records. Here is how our algorithm works. If you already know someone's identity and a few of the movies this person liked or disliked, you can use the Netflix dataset to find their entire movie viewing history prior to 2005 (provided, of course, they were a Netflix subscriber and their record was one of those released as part of the dataset)." I don't see how this is the same situation. The NYtimes already possesses my reading history (if I'm logged in), what I am hiding from them is my identity and the work in this paper does not help them find that out. The only thing that will help them with this task is to coerce my ISP to identify an IP address (if I don't happen to be using Tor).