[PREV - INFOCURE]    [TOP]

ANON_SALVAGE

                                                   March 25, 2018

Many people are reluctant to completely
give up on internet anonymity.

Cases are often raised like this:

  o  the employee fears the boss will retaliate
     against contrary political opinons

  o  the woman who fears attacting stalkers,
     possibly an abusive ex


Really, there isn't any reason anonymous voices can't
be given *some* outlet-- but they really do have to be    It could be I
banned or downplayed in anything like the "critical       overplay things when
infrastructure"... and unfortunately what we've been      I spin it as "Shall
seeing is any communication system (even Twitter!)        the internet be just
can get used that way.                                    a toy or will it be
                                                          seriously useful?"
  Nevertheless, you can easily imagine a site
  set-up for dicussing personal circumstances                Obviously it
  where anonymous contributions are allowed,                 can be both.
  but political speech is downplayed.  It
  would suck if, say, government regulation
  intended to chase away the Russians
  inadvertantly shut down such places.


Nicholas Gruen objected

  "... though surely you want to have pathways
  whereby people can build up pseudonymous IDs
  that gain respect and currency."

That was the old idea, back in the usenet days--
in retrospect it was based on the sense that email
addresses that were difficult to get and roughly
tied to a single individual.

You could try to hack something similar,
e.g. using public-key encryption tricks
to do digital signatures.
   
The trouble is that a far-sighted agency    
that wants to game the system can hire     
people to play "sleeper spys", doing          There's also a funny phenomena
relatively benign, positive things with       that arose with slashdot: low ID
their IDs until they're needed for a          accounts are accorded a certain
propaganda campaign.                          amount of respect-- with a low
                                              number you're not some newbie
I'm afraid we're stuck with                   little kid-- so some people
anonymity of the "editorial                   auctioned theirs off on ebay.
from Mister X" sort: if you             
need an anonymous outlet, you              
need to convince some other           
human being to front for you   
and conceal your identity while     
vouching for your credentials. 
            
                    Which actually is much like
                    "wikipedia", where if you don't
                    *want* to break the rules and edit
                    a page about yourself you might ask
                    someone else to do it and provide
                    them with the information.



--------
[NEXT - INFO_VERITAS]