Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnklos | Hacker News Reader

The title doesn't even make sense. First, does "Every economist" mean literally every one? What does it even mean to be "on Mastodon", considering that Mastodon is software, not a platform?

Is the author really saying that every Mastodon instance on the planet has been compromised and scanned, and all instances of economists found, and their data downloaded? Or do we just not care about silly things like facts and correctness?

The article starts with a complete lack of context and without any explanations at all. It's as though we walked in to the middle of a conversation, and nobody bothered to recap.

View on HN

The title is unclear because the author confuses Mastodon as a software with Mastodon servers. The majority of economists are on a Mastodon server called econtwitter.net.

It's worth noting that the author (Christopher Brunet) is an intentionally inflammatory right-wing commentator, not an economist. Do not take this blog seriously.

The short story: EJMR is an anonymous forum used by economists that occasionally has job market rumors, but is more often filled with sexism/racism/etc. They anonymized using a hash of IP + thread ID with no salt. Three economists realized you could identify the location of many posts and wrote a paper showing how much of the toxic language came from top university IP addresses. Naturally people on the forum (and sympathizers like this writer) are collectively losing their minds, realizing that they may not be as anonymous as they had assumed. So they are threatening legal action, claiming "doxxing", and writing stupid blog posts.

So in other words they did get doxxed, you're just happy about it. You say not to take the blog seriously but then affirm his claims

It's very short-sighted to gloat about someone else's anonymity being lifted just because you don't like them. You may not think you have something to hide today, but that doesn't mean you'll have nothing to fear tomorrow

The claim that this is "Every economist on Mastodon" is of course a stupid exaggeration, but it's still a significant enough event to warrant reporting

Thank you! Your summary makes for an interesting read and makes much more sense than the article.

I knew nothing about him but very, very quickly got a “right of center troll” kind of vibe.

Saying they "realized you could identify the location of many posts and wrote a paper" is downplaying the situation. The authors essentially ran a lookup table attack, computing over 3 quadrillion hashes to crack the IPs. The website owner incorrectly thought and claimed this would protect IPs, which are PII.

For more context, see here: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/07/th...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com