Comment by Homunculiheaded | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Homunculiheaded | Hacker News Reader

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Homunculiheaded

I'm starting to think people should begin to create "crypto-selves". I've seen a lot of talk saying essentially "get off facebook! get off gmail!" But that's a lot of persistent effort even for fairly technical people. Plus even in secure, anonymous environment interacting with your real life friends, purchasing your favorite books on amazon etc will reveal who you are anyway.

In non-web life we have private and public spaces and there's plenty of study on how these two play together and how important they are. Most people have erroneously thought that because your computer is in your private physical space that it's also 'private', but that's clearly not the case.

What people need is the education to create the technological equivalent of locking yourself in your bedroom for the afternoon to clear your head.

Gmail is like sending a postcard, facebook like chatting with friends at the mall or park. Tor/truecrypte/pgp etc for parts of your life you want private. Separate usernames, interests, tones of voice, etc in this private space.

Trying to hide your real (ie public) self is silly as should you become a target of the nsa & co. they'll find a way to dig up something even if you've been completely hidden from july 2013 on. What people need is a reasonably benign public self and a hidden crypto-self.

Also I'm all for fighting the surveillance state, but I'm extremely cynical of it's success. I see no feasible way to reduce the power and authority of the militarized aspects of our government(s). I can't think of a single example of where public knowledge and outcry has changed anything other than getting a few puppets punished anywhere except the non-militarized parts of government.

>I see no feasible way to reduce the power and authority of the militarized aspects of our government(s).

I partly think it's because people are asking for the wrong things. People say things like "stop NSA surveillance" which is vague and impractical. What needs to happen is to hit them where it hurts: Reduce total defense spending to 50% of what it is now. That should be the demand from everyone. Money is power. If you want them to have less power, stop giving them so damn much money. And besides, who can't get behind massively lower taxes?

If you want them to have less power, you need other powerful entities to tell them to stop abusing their powers. Boycott the tech giants and you'll see it happen. it's way more effective than any protest or online petition.

Isn't that another way of saying, "rule of the strong" instead of "rule of law"?

The problem is that the selves bleed into each-other. For instance, making up a completely different city to claim you live in while still talking to other people from your own city is hard.

If the NSA spots half a dozen people on Crypto-Reddit's /r/boston who claim to be from San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Chicago, rural Tennessee, and Miami respectively, then it knows it has probably found six actual Bostonians.

Individuals are in many ways an expression of our context. To remove all information leakage that would tell what our context is or, more simply, who we are, you basically have to remove the person entirely. Even 4chan-grade anonymity won't cut it, since writing style and narrative threading can be used to extract some sense of pseudonymity from even a /b/ thread.

I thought about this problem, but it was more to do with soliciting anonymous feedback from a group of close nit friends. It's a hard problem to fix, but I think maybe running the text through something that reduces it to all lower case and all txtspk, with some sort of grammer-fucker-upper might remove some of the personality attached to the original text input.

Do you think that's NLP-complete, or something we can actually do?

The root problem isn't the surveillance state. As long as we keep fighting and have conflict over resources and past wrongs, we're locked into this feedback loop of an arms race. Information and intelligence are a key advantages in conflicts.

We want our conveniences, we want our privacy, yet we don't want terrorists. We want our iPhones, our cars, and our comforts, and we don't want to see the price exacted from the rest of the world.

Surveillance seems like a very big problem, but only because it is so personal. It's distracting us from the real problems of the world, and that is pretty much every one of us are selfish, adding fuel to conflicts. We're crazy.

> Separate usernames, interests, tones of voice, etc in this private space.

I'm a big fan of this approach, as it allows people to explore different facets of their personality. Unfortunately, for the past year the big players, led by google, have been waging a war on it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nymwars

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