Copyright Trolls Order Wordpress To Hand Over Critics’ IP Addresses

It's not really "solved" as long as the technologies are too complicated to use for the regular user.

It's good that the legal framework allowing anonymity is already in place in some countries (like Germany and... Even the EU seems to be going in this direction) but technically it's complicated.

I don't expect regular people to know how to connect to free public WiFi hotspots and then to use Tor and browser(s) able to dodge Panopticlick-like detection anytime soon.

This may come at one point but we're not there yet and we probably won't be there anywhere soon seen that there are big governments out there determined to crush for fun and profit the very notion of anonimity.

This is absolutely false. There is no good way to cheaply host a high-traffic site anonymously right now.

That's like saying that drunk driving is a solved problem because we have breathalyzers, seat belts and airbags.

I take it you have been fortunate enough to never have to deal with online stalking/harassment that made the jump to meatspace.

Perhaps it is that experience that has rendered the status quo unable to satiate. "The needs of society" can kindly go stuff itself, I need anonymity.

Anonymity has always been easier than it is now. Before sophisticated record keeping, you were anonymous to any stranger or new acquaintance. Moving to a new town was an opportunity to become a new person. Anything you published could be pseudonymous or anonymous. Letters and phone calls were essentially anonymous, unless you specifically announced your identity.

With modern technology, all that is slipping away, or already gone.

You fail to see the importance of anonymity because you're set on proving that anonymity is of little use or harmful.

A historical comparison is irrelevant and fallacious - we didn't have modern surgery hundreds of years ago and despite people dying society ticked on. If all you see is the forest you can pretend the pain of the trees doesn't matter.

And the internet is just a playground for the technological elite too (you need a computing device after all) so I suppose you see no need for it either.

>Being able to communicate to large numbers of people while remaining anonymous was something that was just not that practical before the internet.

Come on now. That's only because for the average person being able to communicate to large numbers of people at all was something that was just not that practical before the internet. And to the extent you could communicate, it wasn't that hard to do it anonymously: Sit down in a public phone booth to make your phone calls. Write a letter to the editor under a pseudonym or write letters to as many people as you like and drop them into a public mailbox. Post a message on a bulletin board at the local library while nobody is watching. Provide a recording for broadcast to a journalist with a reputation for protecting sources.

The novelty is being able to trace the source of a communication through the corporate intermediary that carries it and back to the actual speaker. And even that is a lot of hand wavy hocus pocus that makes poor assumptions about the relationship between paying for an internet connection and being the one responsible for what gets sent through it.

Because for the first time in history, every action you take in fundamental aspects of your life--your communications with others (email), what you read (everything online), what you watch (Hulu, etc.), what you listen to (Pandora, etc.), and so on--can and will be traced and recorded, perhaps indefinitely. (See Room 641A, the NSA's Utah data center, etc.) People could go back and see exactly what you did online for years and possibly judge/punish you for it should laws or social mores change in a decade or two, which is not entirely out of the question--just look how things changed in a decade after 9/11. Things like Guantanamo Bay or open extra-judicial assassination of US citizens would have been unimaginable to us before that event, and yet here we are today.

Worse, it could be done on a massive automated scale. Before if an agency wanted to find a potential criminal, they'd have to expend time and manpower looking things up. In the coming years a computer could data-mine your online activity going back a decade, including email, to decide if you were a threat or not. Perhaps it's not possible today, but someday, it will be--and this stuff is being recorded now.

Laws and societies change. The hard information on your history kept in easily-processable racks in vast data centers doesn't. That's the big worry for me.

<rant>

Just the other day, I was googling for something in the library. I can't see so well, so I crank up the text size. It's quite readable to others sitting a few feet behind me.

On a whim, a stranger walks up behind me, addresses me by name, and tries to strike up a conversation. He wanted to know where the bathroom was or whatever, but he addressed me by name. I never saw him before.

"Wait wait wait. How'd you know my name?" I ask. "Who are you?"

"Oh, don't you see? It's right there in the corner of your browser window."

I looked, and sure enough, if you're signed in to Google Plus, Google will grace all of its web pages -- all of them, including gmail, search results, etc -- with your first and last name, as decided by your profile's display name. It's right there in the corner.

Since then, I learned my lesson: stay signed out of Google + when I'm browsing in pulbic places unless I want strangers to walk up to me and know who I am.

Sometimes I prefer to remain anonymous. Sometimes I feel like the increasing pressure to always use real names for services isn't a good thing, especially when those companies turn around and expose that valuable information in odd ways like Google is doing.

The option to exercise anonymity is one of the best defenses I have against these kinds of events.

That or I can simply stay signed out all the time...which is equivalent to not using the service.

This was a great article, summed it all up really nicely.

Judge Wright's moves in this big game of chess are especially good. He really wants to get to the truth.

I like what you did there - I clicked on the link to read the doc and then slowly realised that my IP now falls within the scope of the requested information.

I'm surprised the subpoena doesn't have anything on it that makes it seems like a judge read it. I understand that most subpoenas are just approved by the judge and issued without review, and that the opposition is expected to file a motion-to-quash if they don't like it, but this doesn't even seem to have a signature or anything from a judge.

>> "Defendants have published copious volumes of such false statements to many third parties, theoretically extending to every person on Earth through the Internet

...really swinging for the fences with this one.

What?