Anonymous

Grok Headline matches for Anonymous

Anonymous file sharing network not so
anonymous after all?

Anonymous file sharing network not so
anonymous after all? 12/02/2003 12:12 PM
An anonymous file-sharing network, "Winny," has proven to be not so anonymous for 2 Japanese men who were arrested for trading games and films.

Anonymous bosh

Anonymous bosh 06/17/2005 04:50 PM
In comments below, Scott Butki asked, "Does it seem odd - or hypocritical to you - that the mantra at news organizations in recent weeks has switched from 'anonymous sources are bad to use' to 'Deep Throat was good for doing what he did and Woodstein good to use him,' ignoring the contradiction between the two?"

Good question, and I'm sure one that many people are scratching their heads over. What's going on here? Are anonymous sources really the big problem they seem to be in the wake of the Dan Rather and Newsweek/Koran controversies? On the other hand, if news organizations get too gun-shy about anonymous sources, how will anyone ever be able to keep reporting on the buttoned-tight Bush White House?

It's funny to watch people try to get their heads around the apparent contradictions between "anonymous sources -- good!" and "anonymous sources -- bad!" Really, they're only contradictions if you treat the issue as a matter of journalistic technique (the use of unnamed sources) rather than one about the end to which the technique is employed. The distinction that really matters isn't between "anonymous source" and "named source"; it's between "good source" and "bad source." Good sources can be anonymous; bad sources can be on-the-record. What experienced journalists and editors do is assess, assess, assess. Make sure you're not being used. Double-check your info. Use your sense of smell. The theory is that an on-the-record statement is more reliable than an anonymous statement, since the person quoted has to defend his words in public. That's a good theory, and it often applies. But it doesn't seem to stop most public officials from mouthing the most absurd lies, damned lies and statistics on the record. And despite the rule-of-thumb that on-the-record is more reliable, there are some circumstances where unnamed sourcing is the only way to get the truth out.

One reason people are getting confused is that Woodward and Bernstein's use of Deep Throat was a fundamentally different kind of anonymous sourcing than we typically see in today's Beltway. Mark Felt/Deep Throat fed information to Bob Woodward because (a) there were profound dangers to the nation in play -- we had a president who was, among many other outrages, ordering his political opponents burglarized -- and (b) going to the press was the only option, because the idea of "going to the authorities" is laughable when the authorities are the wrongdoers and they've corrupted the system from the top.

I'm not belittling the complexity of Felt's choice; and obviously the man was conflicted for the rest of his life. It's never easy to be a whistleblower, and if you're an unconventional whistleblower stuck in a duel with All the President's Men, you've got to be careful as well as right. Felt is certainly no pure hero, but the derision he's received from the surviving coterie of Nixon loyalists is beneath contempt. This old guard of die-hard Nixonians still haven't gotten it through their heads that their former boss actually stole an election (if it weren't for all the dirty tricks employed against Democrats in 1972, who knows where the vote would have gone?) and, left unchecked, might well have destroyed the American system of government. Their complaints against Felt today only demonstrate how lucky we were that there was at least one "disloyal" Deep Throat willing to say, this nonsense stops here.

Today's anonymous sources are, for the most part, different. They're not risking anything by speaking up. Generally, they are choosing to be anonymous to avoid taking a risk. They want to float a trial balloon but don't want their name attached. They want to undermine a political rival. They want to state something a little politically inconvenient without leaving it on the record.

Anonymous sourcing evolved in the years since Watergate from an extraordinary tactic for an extraordinary time into a depressingly routine way of doing business for the political elite. The Bush administration itself has been extravagantly dependent on the opaque cloak of anonymity -- the "highly placed White House official" who assures us that the war is going better, or the economy's on the mend. This is the sort of anonymous sourcing that ombudsmen and editorial editors and journalism pundits are right to say should be banned. There's no need for it.

As for the Watergate tradition of anonymous sourcing: every time there's a president who's illegally abusing power, let's hope there's a Deep Throat ready to talk, a Woodward ready to take notes, and a Ben Bradlee ready to run the stories. Oh, yeah -- it also helps if the opposition party controls at least one house of Congress. Otherwise, you could catch the President himself robbing a hotel room -- or starting a war under false pretenses -- and it wouldn't matter.

Not So Anonymous Reviews

Not So Anonymous Reviews 02/14/2004 11:51 PM

Amazon Glitch Unmasks War of Reviewers: Amazon accidentally posted the real names of anonymous book reviewers on their site, and in the process, revealed that the whole user-submitted review process is garbage.

But even with reviewer privacy restored, many people say Amazon's pages have turned into what one writer called "a rhetorical war," where friends and family members are regularly corralled to write glowing reviews and each negative one is scrutinized for the digital fingerprints of known enemies.

One well-known writer admitted privately — and gleefully — to anonymously criticizing a more prominent novelist who he felt had unfairly reaped critical praise for years. She regularly posts responses, or at least he thinks it is her, but the elegant rebuttals of his reviews are also written from behind a pseudonym.

Click here to comment on this entry

Wikis Anonymous

Wikis Anonymous 09/07/2004 04:43 AM
Brian Lamb has a great article on wikis in academia in EDUCAUSE Review. I didn't interview for the piece (otherwise would have shared how academic communities are using Socialtext), but Brian more than did his homework and sources from some...

a sad look at anonymous bl0gging

a sad look at anonymous bl0gging 06/29/2004 12:58 AM
i've always been slightly saddened by reading mike's project, and now i realize why

"Anonymous Lawyer"

"Anonymous Lawyer" 12/28/2004 10:49 AM

Some advice to anonymous bl0ggers

Some advice to anonymous bl0ggers 04/09/2004 04:09 PM
Don Park has a good warning post on potential XSS hacks. A typical example of these is Haloscan, who does provide commenting and trackback capabilities also to a number of Finnish bloggers.

However, sometimes no clever hacking is required. Haloscan actually provides RSS feeds of all the comments, making it really easy to subscribe to the comments of a blog. This is cool and clever, and I wholly applaud this. The Feed can be found at:

http://haloscan.com/members/rss.php?user=<username>

You can figure out the username by looking at the HTML source, or just by guessing (most people use their blog names).

Up until last weekend, Haloscan also provided IP addresses in the feeds. This meant that IF an anonymous blogger was commenting in his own blog, it was possible to find his IP address. If the said person would then comment on other blogs under his real name (or visit your own blog, where you have some sort of site tracking), it was possible to either figure out his real identity, or at least the Pinseri account name (a known Finnish aggregator). Haloscan has now removed this feature, so it's safe again to use it. I have not checked other comment services whether they also have this issue.

Note that figuring out the IP address does not reveal your identity. But if combined with other information, it may be possible to figure out who you are. Or at least make a very educated guess.

Another issue you have to be careful with if you are an anonymous blogger is that if someone sends you email with a link, don't click it. If you do, something like this might appear on the recipient's log files (let's assume the anonymous blogger has an yahoo.com mail account, and I've sent him an email to ask to come to my weblog.)

cs65129.pp.htv.fi - - [31/Mar/2004:16:52:08 +0300] 
"GET /ButtUgly/ HTTP/1.1"
 200 35547 
"http://us.f413.mail.yahoo.com/ym/ShowLetter?MsgId=4207_26017
7_12756_
 
1095_187_0_87_-1_0&YY=51786&inc=25&order=down&
amp;amp;sort=date&
  pos=0&view=a&head=b&box=Inbox" 
"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us)
AppleWebKit/124 
(KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/125.1"

Due to the referrer (mail.yahoo.com) it's rather easy to figure out which of the hits came from your mysterious web friend. Now we know that he lives in Helsinki and has a cable modem, and that he uses a Mac OS X 10.3 computer. If you embed suitable Javascript on your weblog, it is possible to figure out even some more things. If he, however, had cut and paste the address from the mail to the address, you get something like this:

cs65129.pp.htv.fi - - [31/Mar/2004:16:59:34 +0300] 
"GET /ButtUgly/ HTTP/1.1" 
200 35558 
"-" 
"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us)
AppleWebKit/124 
(KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/125.1"

There's now a lot less evidence to tie the mysterious Yahoo user to a specific IP address because of the missing referrer field. Yet, it is still possible, but it will require a bit more data and logic. Of course, if he'd wanted to be absolutely safe, he would've used a service like Anonymizer, in which case the line would look like this:

outgoing.anonymizer.com - - [31/Mar/2004:17:02:12 +0300] 
"GET /ButtUgly/ HTTP/1.1" 
200 34933 "-" "Mozilla/4.78 (TuringOS;
Turing Machine; 0.0)"

Not a lot to pinpoint you, yes?

So, a couple of practical tips, if you want to protect your online anonymity:

• Don't click on links from web mail, cut-n-paste them to your address bar.
• Check out all the services that you are using that none of them is leaking information about you
• If possible, use a web proxy (like anonymizer), or only assume your anonymous identity

...

Amazon Says No More To Anonymous Reviews

Amazon Says No More To Anonymous Reviews 07/30/2004 03:51 PM
This was mentioned earlier this week in the Wall Street Journal, but without a non-paid source to point to, we skipped over it. However, Amazon has apparently had enough of authors reviewing their own books on the site and has put in a new system that will require a credit card as proof of identification before you can add a new review to the site. Might be interesting to see what kind of impact this has on reviews... and sales.

Complete Anonymous Web Surfing v1.2

Complete Anonymous Web Surfing v1.2 01/26/2004 06:29 PM
Complete Anonymous Web Surfing is an Internet utility to hide your IP address while you are browsing the web.IP address is your internet identification number which is detectable by any web site that you visit.Complete Anonymous Web Surfing is fully automatic. You don't need to have any knowledge of setting up proxy connections. Just click "Autopilot" and watch. [Shareware $39.00 4 Days 1012 KB]

Anonymous Comments: Some Rules

Anonymous Comments: Some Rules 02/10/2004 02:41 AM
We allow anonymous postings on this blog. If you don't want to give your true e-mail address you are free to make one up. I would prefer that people post under their real names, though I understand a reluctance to give an e-mail address that shows up in a way the spammers can easily use. We're working on a fix for that. But we can't let people post comments and use e-mail addresses referring to real domains to which they have no connection. That seems to have happened here in the past several days, and other folks have accused the anonymous commenter of being someone else -- and that person insists he's not the one.

Airport scanners keep it anonymous

Airport scanners keep it anonymous 03/14/2005 06:23 PM
ZDNet Mar 14 2005 10:06PM GMT

Anonymous CVS issues resolved

Anonymous CVS issues resolved 03/13/2003 10:15 AM
UPDATE: We are pleased to announce that SourceForge have resolved the issues with anonymous CVS access, and the selfupdate-cvs command should work again. Further details on the downtime can be found on the SourceForge.net site status page.

Introduction to C# Anonymous Methods

Introduction to C# Anonymous Methods 12/29/2004 06:06 AM
Microsoft MVP Patrick Smacchia shows how the new C# version 2 anonymous method functionality works and how it can be used. This language enhancement is implemented solely via the compiler and doesn't require changes in the IL. Of particular importance is the ability to use local variables within anonymous methods.

Closures for anonymous storage

Closures for anonymous storage 09/22/2004 08:44 AM
Via The 80/20 Solution I saw a piece of Python code by John Lam, which he calls elegant. Now he is right to call it elegant ? he is comparing it with his experience to implement the same in C++. But he uses a technique which you see a lot in scripting, but which I find rather unelegant: creation of propertynames (or attributenames) with string manipulations. ?

AOL filter prevents anonymous email

AOL filter prevents anonymous email 01/22/2004 08:41 AM
ZDNet UK Jan 22 2004 12:58PM GMT

Anonymous Software Rumor Grab-Bag

Anonymous Software Rumor Grab-Bag 03/13/2003 10:15 AM
We're often sent tips anonymously that never make it the front page. Here are three unverified software rumors that arrived at our doorstep in an unmarked package this week. Adobe is said to be finishing up an OS X version of Acrobat Distiller 6. The pricey conversion utility can be seen here and here, though no word on its release date was available. *** A purported Safari tester says that the next public release of Apple's beta browser is targeted for the second week of March,...

Can File Sharing Really Be Made
Anonymous?

Can File Sharing Really Be Made
Anonymous? 05/07/2004 12:11 PM
It's no surprise that the creators of the latest file sharing networks are all claiming that it makes users anonymous. Everyone expected that to happen. The bigger question, however, is whether or not these systems really are anonymous. The RIAA (and plenty of others) say that it's not really possible for anyone to be totally anonymous while file sharing - and these claims of anonymity are a little bit suspect. The main one discussed in the article doesn't really sound anonymous. All it does is try to confuse the RIAA by mixing the real IP address with the IP addresses of others on the network. What that means, though, is now the RIAA will just accuse more innocent people because their IP address was shown associated with someone who was sharing illegally. Of course, this whole debate on anonymity misses the most basic point about online anonymity: the user can be perfectly anonymous if there's no way to associate him or her with the particular IP address they're using.

Topic: identity. Author: anonymous.

Topic: identity. Author: anonymous. 07/08/2004 02:22 PM
The current issue of Digital ID World just arrived. While reading an article about CoreStreet, a company whose identity technologies have intrigued ¹ me< /a> for a while, I noticed something strangely missing from the article: a byline. ...

"interviewed that anonymous intelligence
official"

"interviewed that anonymous intelligence
official" 06/20/2004 03:52 AM

Bluejacking: anonymous Bluetooth
messaging

Bluejacking: anonymous Bluetooth
messaging 11/01/2003 12:57 PM
Bluejacking is the art of sending a message to a nearby stranger's Bluetooth phone, having first encoded the message as the "Name" field of an address-book entry, i.e., "Name: I have bluejacked you, I 0wn l0l0l0l0l." BluejackQ is a new community site for posting bluejacking experiences.

Ellie and I were just outside a shopping centre in town and she was searching for a victim near where we were sitting. She came up with a contact; some Nokia, I'm not sure which one. We found out a few minutes later that our victim (who showed an un-canny resemblance to Alan Ford) was sitting in Starbucks with his wife.

After they'd left Starbucks, we followed the couple all over town for about 30mins. He couldn't understand what was happening to him and was looking around all over the place for his bluejacker! We went up and down, around in circles, dodging his stare; quite literally, up in lifts, down on escalators!

Link (via Smartmobs)

Yahoo sued over anonymous abuse

Yahoo sued over anonymous abuse 08/06/2004 02:24 AM
BBC Aug 6 2004 6:48AM GMT

"Tor anonymous Internet communication
system"

"Tor anonymous Internet communication
system" 12/26/2004 04:29 AM

So Mr. Anonymous-cablenet-provider guy,
I respect the 10

So Mr. Anonymous-cablenet-provider guy,
I respect the 10 09/19/2004 03:49 PM
TechTree Sep 19 2004 5:45PM GMT

Up north, anonymous reviewers revealed

Up north, anonymous reviewers revealed 02/14/2004 01:29 PM
globetechnology.com Feb 14 2004 4:06PM GMT

The Furious Rise of the Anonymous Writer

The Furious Rise of the Anonymous Writer 02/10/2004 02:35 AM
Christopher Farah, Salon: I know you are but who am I? The furious rise of the anonyblogger. Parody: You don?t?

Tor anonymous Internet communication
system

Tor anonymous Internet communication
system 12/22/2004 01:04 AM
The Tor anonymous Internet communication system has an oniony, user-friendly new Web site to go along with their EFF funding. Besides hiding from government and big business snoops, Tor is also great when using open wireless networks.

Send (Free) Anonymous and Masked SMS
Messages

Send (Free) Anonymous and Masked SMS
Messages 02/01/2005 08:48 PM
thrillEX (Sydney) is set to launch theSMSzone.com, a service that allows people to send free anonymous and masked SMS messages, using the internet on the 2nd of January, 2005. [PRWEB Feb 1, 2005]

News & Features | The secret history of
Anonymous

News & Features | The secret history of
Anonymous 07/01/2004 08:50 PM

Supposedly Anonymous File Sharers
Arrested

Supposedly Anonymous File Sharers
Arrested 12/02/2003 03:09 AM
Ever since the recording industry started cracking down on file sharers by going after them with lawyers, new services have been popping up promising "anonymity" for anyone who uses them. Of course, most don't give much proof for that claim, and you might want to think twice before believing it. Two file sharers in Japan have apparently been arrested, despite using a supposedly anonymous service. They don't say how they tracked these folks down, but it's making people wonder just how anonymous these anonymous systems really are.

"anonymous ex-Delta force officers
notwithstanding"

"anonymous ex-Delta force officers
notwithstanding" 11/02/2003 03:13 PM

Handling anonymous file uploads in
ColdFusion.

Handling anonymous file uploads in
ColdFusion. 08/17/2002 02:03 AM
Sometimes it is necessary to allow absolute strangers to upload files to your server through a form. When that happens you can find yourself giving away the keys to the server. This article intends to show you where to start with limiting the files submitted by unauthenticated users.

Proposed legislation to jail anonymous
webmasters

Proposed legislation to jail anonymous
webmasters 02/12/2004 04:59 PM
Cnet News reports that Congressman Lamar Smith of Texas - the chairman of the Internet and Intellectual Property Subcommittee - recently proposed the Fraudulent Online Identity Sanctions Act which would make giving false contact information for domain name registration a criminal offence punishable by up to seven years in prison. The justification according to Congressman Smith: "To make it easier to track down miscreants. 'The government must play a greater role in punishing those who conceal their identities online, particularly when they do so in furtherance of a serious federal criminal offense or in violation of a federally protected intellectual property right.' (Wired News also has published an article on the issue.)

anonymous instant photo-phone mobl0gging

anonymous instant photo-phone mobl0gging 12/31/2003 02:24 PM
MOBOG

mobog.com
track this site | 5 links

invisibl0g.com (beta) - Anonymous Webl0g
Publishing

invisibl0g.com (beta) - Anonymous Webl0g
Publishing 02/15/2004 07:43 AM
invisiblog.com (beta) - Anonymous Weblog Publishing
http://invisiblog.com/

invisiblog.com lets you publish a weblog using GPG and the Mixmaster anonymous remailer network. You don't ever have to reveal your identity - not even to them. You don't have to trust them, because they will never know who you are. This has been added to my Subject Tracer™ Information Blog Privacy Resources.

Internet offers fans anonymous forum

Internet offers fans anonymous forum 07/05/2004 06:09 AM
Azcentral.com - Mon Jul 5, 09:09 am GMT

JBoss Caught in Anonymous Posting Scheme

JBoss Caught in Anonymous Posting Scheme 05/18/2004 05:58 PM

H&R Block sues anonymous online critic

H&R Block sues anonymous online critic 11/14/2003 02:55 PM
SiliconValley.com Nov 14 2003 1:43PM ET

LiveWire: in Search of Truly Anonymous
File-Sharing

LiveWire: in Search of Truly Anonymous
File-Sharing 05/08/2004 09:12 AM
Boston Globe May 8 2004 1:11PM GMT

Anonymous Former Netscape Executive
Donates $4,200 to AmiZilla Project

Anonymous Former Netscape Executive
Donates $4,200 to AmiZilla Project 01/07/2004 03:07 PM

Grok Description matches for Anonymous
GrokA matches for Anonymous

Anonymous

The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry: