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Comment by AnOscelot | Hacker News Reader

People really should learn to not reuse usernames. Unique password per site, and unique name as well. This won't protect anyone from government agents, but it will make it harder for an Internet mob to determine your identity.

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>People really should learn to not reuse usernames.

another person who asked questions on stackoverflow was Ross Ulbricht; it didn't quite help him.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/02/silk_road...

I was initially confused as to how the FBI were able to track that StackOverflow post in which Ulbricht changed the appearance of his account name...that wouldn't show up in the public edit log for a question, right?

Then reading through the complaint, it seems like Ulbricht was undone by registering on Stack Overflow using his GMail account, which the FBI had tracked his Comcast IP to (didn't hurt that the gmail address was his real name), and then asked StackOverflow for the records relating to that GMail address: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/801103-172770276-ulb...

sidenote: The Slate article links to the complaint on Scribd, and now it's deleted from Scribd for some reason.

I use 'redblacktree' everywhere, but I'm very aware that it's public and traceable to my real-life identity. (though, there are unfortunately a few sites where someone else took the name... Notably Twitter)

Same boat here. I've been using "mindcrime" (and variations of that) regularly since about 1998 or so, and that's my username on many popular services (here, Twitter, GitHub, etc.) And it's trivially easy to link it to my real identify. shrug It's not something I consider a big deal. If I ever decide to do something nefarious, I'll create a new username.

You don't need to do something nefarious to regret the easy link, just offend the wrong person or group of people.

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