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Comment by ynno | Hacker News Reader

I think Alexandra Elbakyan actually did not want to be revealed as the librarian behind Sci-Hub, it was her poor opsec that led to her being identified.

Basically her servers were set up to emit detailed error messages from PHP, including full path of faulting source file, which was under directory /home/ringo-ring, which could be traced to a username she had online on an unrelated site, attached to her real name. Before this revelation, she was anonymous.

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> which was under directory /home/ringo-ring, which could be traced to a username

Ha, my home dir is always called "me" or "and". Try google that.

People might be able to, now!

Don't worry, I'm a "me" too.

I’ve narrowed it down to the east coast of the US.

Electron star - seems oddly specific, though maybe not spelling it same way you do.

yeah that's a regrettable mistake. It was registered in early days, OPSEC wasn't considered then. The Internet was supposed to connect people not hunting people.

All good, OpSec is hard, which was point I was trying to make, great you take it seriously, just be little more humble. Everyone slips, only matter of time, either in past or future.

This is deep infosec. Instead of security through obscurity, it's security through ubiquity.

IIRC, on new installations of NeXTSTEP (based on 4.3BSD Unix), the username of the single installed desktop user was "me".

i like how people are trying to correlate your HN account with - ostensibly - wild /home/ directories. This is why i've recently moved off of this username, going forward. 20 years as genewitch has attached a lot of bad "OPSEC" to this username, and coupled with the fact that i have federal licenses means that people can just google my entire life story.

my last name, without any other information, has one tenth of the bits of information that "genewitch" does.

Smart. Here's how to rename on OSX (might break a lot of tooling, but whatever).

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201548

Did not know that detail. Will add to the post, thank you.

And from your addendum:

So, use random usernames on the computers you use for this stuff, in case you misconfigure something.

...or a username that is so common as to be meaningless, like "user", "Administrator", or even "root".

The next step is to change your legal name to Zhang Wei or at least a John Smith.

差不多 (chabuduo / chàbuduō)

You get a little obscurity with random though

"ec2-user"

You're actually supposed to use a specific username for each process. That's what permissions are for.

I was able to find an archived page of hers using ringo-ring back in 2010, which I believe predates Sci-Hub’s launch in 2011; not able to find reference to “home/ringo-ring” anywhere else, but given prior information, very least seems plausible.

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