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Comment by cbsmith | Hacker News Reader

TIL that untypical is a word that means the same as atypical.

It's funny. I think of anonymity as something that has been part of the Internet going back through at least the last three decades of my experience with it. Back in the day you had anonymous retailers, let alone people using pseudonyms. It was very much part of the fabric. If anything, it feels like anonymity on the Internet is harder to achieve these days.

Even if you know the identity of a contributor, you have to consider the possibility that they or their systems have been compromised. I agree it's stressful and difficult to be constantly vigilant about contributions, but it's kind of all there is.

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I think the internet always had anonymity. I do think it was easier to be anonymous on the surface but at the same time there were so many fewer people on the internet that it wasn't that hard to uncover the person behind the curtain.

I do however think that this is unrelated to the Open Source angle. You will still find this sentence on Eric S. Raymond's "How To Become A Hacker" guide which in some ways shows how much this attitude has changed in the years since:

> Concealing your identity behind a handle is a juvenile and silly behavior characteristic of crackers, warez d00dz, and other lower life forms. Hackers don't do this; they're proud of what they do and want it associated with their real names. So if you have a handle, drop it. In the hacker culture it will only mark you as a loser.

I don't think a lot of people will still subscribe to that idea today.

yea, nobody at the time bought it either.

I disagree on the “nobody”. A lot of people did function that way as evidenced by a long history of contributions to open source projects. Certainly the folks that brought me to Open Source had no quarrels with having their real identity associated and definitely neither did I.

absolutist statements rarely help, i agree.

specifically i was referring to the dropping of handles, not the association with real identities.

I agree

Part of that is getting older. A decade ago I contributed to Python under the name "Demur Rumed" & that's what they put in the 3.6 contributor list. Back then I worked at a company that didn't use GitHub so it was all personal stuff that I'd put under that name

Since then I started working in open source companies that are operating on GitHub. An early meeting someone asked "who's this Demur Rumed making random pull requests?" sheepishly I declared myself, "Please update your profile with your real name"

Growing up in the 00s, the advice for teenagers going online is that they should protect themselves by not sharing their identity. For years I avoided associating my real identity online (outside obvious things like banking, which wasn't associated with my online identity)

Hard to tell if this is a macroscopic trend, or just my experience. Personally I prefer pseudonymous identity. But I've never been anonymous, since there's 20 years of digital trash left around at this point

> the advice for teenagers going online is that they should protect themselves by not sharing their identity.

To me this is still the basic advice. This is not just for when sommething really bad happens, it's also all the smaller things. Like whether they need their employer to know they had a strong pro-union stance in the past. Or if they really like and promote some artist, that later happens to have an incredibly bad reputation dragging their fandom down with them, etc.

There's just no real upside IHMO...except many companies will expect kids to have some online presence and expose what they're doing to the world, and might give preference to people with a strong following online.

So they are still advised still keep a safe and positive "public facade" somewhere to deal with these kind of expectations, and have their "real" accounts anonymized.

It's still good advice for generic online conversations (not necessarily contributions, but that's not what the adults had in mind when they gave that advice), but became effectively impossible the moment Facebook started letting other people tag you even if you didn't have an account.

> Since then I started working in open source companies that are operating on GitHub. An early meeting someone asked "who's this Demur Rumed making random pull requests?" sheepishly I declared myself, "Please update your profile with your real name

I make a new GitHub account for any new job I start using my company email

I never use my personal accounts for anything work related

I once got a message from HR telling me to update my LinkedIn with a company approved Bio section and a company photo they provided, and I just ignored it. They badgered me a bit, complained to my boss and such, but ultimately it's my account so they could not compel me to change it

I hate that companies feel entitled to do so, though

For open- or closed-source work?

If I'm doing open source coding, whether professional or not, I'd always want that associated with my personal GH account.

If I'm being paid by an employer to do it, it doesn't go on my personal anything, period

I don't own that code so I don't associate it with personal accounts

But I've never done open source work for an employer either

I also only use a separate account for open source work for my employer. There are multiple benefits:

* My employer has no say in my private account. They can't force my to change my private bio or profile name, for example

* It's clear which code I authored as a part of my employment and which I did on my own after hours (extremely important for me).

* I work in IT security do I should give an example :). Some projects my company hosts on GH are not public (yes), or some projects I have access to because of my work. I shouldn't touch them after I leave my current company, or access them from private devices.

> I make a new GitHub account for any new job I start

Beware of GitHub's terms of service, then: "you may not have more than one free Account" <https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...>

Its still good advice and maybe the best advice.

Look at all of us on hn with our cute little handles, or our throwaways.

You know who doesn't like anonymity? People who want to control you. People who want to harm you for you think, and what you say.

This is internet and it started with a dream and then and bunch of people came on and didn't like that dream but they sure wanted that sweet sweet internet cash and ever since they've been fighting tooth and nail at that dream because its a threat to their very ethos. Fuck them I choose internet.

That's anonymous remailers. Jeez, autocorrect hates me.

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