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Comment by mpbm | Hacker News Reader

What I'm getting from this is that if you use Tor and never reveal personal information you get 90% of the benefits.

The encryption was just a way to prevent non-members from obtaining the benefits of membership. The relocation and rekeying was just a way to punish non-compliant members by excluding them, turning them back into non-members.

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Never revealing personal information is harder than it seems though, as we often give away deanonymizing information unconsciously e.g. in the quirks of our writing style. The study of deanonymizing an author based on these tendencies is called stylometry, and was used for instance in another case about a child abuse ring that was posted to HN last week. One of the group's members consistently used the atypical greeting "hiyas", which was sufficient to give investigators a lead on his IRL identity. Stylometric tendencies can be much more subtle though, like putting two spaces or one after a period, capitalizing proper nouns, using an oxford comma, persistent misspellings, idiosyncratic phrases revealed by n-gram analysis, etc.

> The relocation and rekeying was just a way to punish non-compliant members by excluding them, turning them back into non-members.

It's also a necessary way to provide forward secrecy, which is how you make sure that even if a message could be decoded, it wouldn't help the decoder to get to the other message's content.

> The encryption was just a way to prevent non-members from obtaining the benefits of membership.

I suppose it also prevents automated detection by bots crawling newsgroups.

Excellent summarization!

I'm going to use this explanation when I have discussions with less technically minded people on this issue.

Thanks. That's one of the best compliments I can get.

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