Jokes apart, how would you prevent trolls and shills from trolling and shilling?
We already have a problem where real accounts get stolen because they have a history so it’s harder to be flagged as bots. And one person can open multiple accounts in multiple networks. Hell, Facebook forces people to have phone numbers and there’s still so many bots and shills there.
I don’t want this to sound like a straw man, I think there’s so many ways for bots to happen that it’s like playing wack a mole.
You don’t prevent trolls and shills, you block them - whitelist style. Communicate with people who have established a good reputation with you, or one or two or three degrees removed from you. Spend time with anonymous when you feel like it, maybe turn some of those identities into trusted friends, but always communicate with some kind of secure ID- even if that ID only lasts for a 10 minute back and forth exchange.
A major not completely solved problem with cryptographically secure anything is: key management. Ultimately you might carry some kind of switchable RFID key with you, switched off until you’re ready to authenticate for some reason.
one person can open multiple accounts in multiple networks.
No problem with that, unless you’re expecting to count heads accurately. If one person is creating the content of ten using ten accounts, is that a problem?
Facebook forces people to have phone numbers and there’s still so many bots and shills there.
I don’t remember giving FB my phone number… with burner phones that seems to be an intentionally lame approach.
I think there’s so many ways for bots to happen that it’s like playing wack a mole.
I don’t think you ever stop them, you just ignore them like junk mail in your physical mail box, except with secure IDs you can automatically filter them without even a glance.
This is the one thing I hoped for out of crypto/blockchain.
You, commenter, don’t need to know that I’m “Brian Brianson, a citizen living at 123 Abenue Avenue”. But, it’s good to know that the person commenting is a real person who has been seen and verified by someone, as a simple true/false flag. If there were good ways of verifying basic conditions of people you interact with online, without exposing personal details, then it could curb botnet opinionation as well as be useful for a lot of things.
If there were good ways of verifying basic conditions of people you interact with online, without exposing personal details
The problem there is: seen and verified by who? What’s your “chain of trust” behind that blue checkmark or whatever signifies a “verified person”?
Even an “anonymous identity” if it runs long enough eventually gives away the person doing the writing under the pseudonym. They may refer to experiences indirectly, unconsciously even, and those narrow down the subset of who they could be, until eventually there can be only one person on the whole planet who fits all the available clues.
To an extent, the world needs to grow up and realize that anyone determined enough can hunt you down through your online footprint unless you’re being super careful with your identity creation, what you say, and how long you use that identity. They also need to realize that among the 8 billion+ of us, they just aren’t very interesting unless they seem gullible enough to authorize a transfer of funds…
I’m imagining something like being able to go to a lawyer, or journalist’s office - somewhere they’d have established notaries, and show them a driver’s license or other notable documentation. They wouldn’t be granted rights to record that information permanently, but would grant a cryptographic signature sourced from their office to express that their office has seen them.
This would rely on professional trust - that the people you show your info to will not record it; and, that if they for some reason have to, they won’t turn it over to warrants. By the same token, they’d be trusted that they’re not inventing people from thin air.
You’re right that someone engaging online long enough could be exposed. That would then rely on any effective “Right to be forgotten” laws to erase unnecessary data.
That would then rely on any effective “Right to be forgotten” laws to erase unnecessary data.
Laws != effective, in my experience.
If you are attempting to deal anonymously, you need to go “burner phone” on a regular basis - throw the identity away and get a new one, or three. How often you do that depends on how valuable your anonymity is to you.
I think the main thing we need to teach the youth of today is: how to maintain a long term undeniable identity that they can live with their whole lives. Meaning: silly pictures with school friends -> anonymous. Master’s Thesis -> certified identity. In-between? That’s where the judgement calls come in.
People doing serious stuff are going to need to start depending on certified identity sources, and openly disclosing when they don’t really know the credibility or even identity of their sources.
As for “credible fake names” - like shell corporations? I think those are a bad idea altogether.
We had some land on a river. Somebody bought the neighboring piece of land through a shell corporation, county public records didn’t give any real names in connection with the sale and transfer of the deed. In 5 minutes on the internet I looked up the owner of that corporation in Nevada and found that it was beneficially owned by a has-been rock star. 5 more minutes and I found a newspaper article from the nearby town with has-been rock star quoted as saying “we bought 11 acres out on the river…” It’s really that easy, and for the people who “do it better” there are forensic accountants who “untangle it better” and the whole game is mostly a waste of time for everybody except the lawyers and accountants charging billable hours, unless you’re covering up something that most people probably don’t want hidden anyway - like money laundering or worse.
they’d be trusted that they’re not inventing people from thin air.
And that trust would be verified how?
a lawyer, or journalist’s office - somewhere they’d have established notaries, and show them a driver’s license or other notable documentation … would grant a cryptographic signature sourced from their office to express that their office has seen them.
So, Russian Troll goes on vacation in Amerika, visit 1000 notaries and obtain 1000 different cryptographic signatures sourced from their offices expressing that they have seen Russian Troll who borrowed U.S. identity card and swapped photo. Very nice.
A “cryptographic identity” is only as valuable as the material signed by it, and then only as long as the secret portion of the identity (you know, those bitcoin keys that guy is buying a landfill to try to find…) is known only to the person(s) controlling the identity.
They can work very well in blockchain form which makes it impossible to alter past records, again only so long as long as the true owner of the identity has control of the secret that signed the last block in the chain. “Right to be Forgotten” is actually somewhat compatible with blockchain, you don’t have to show all the photographs that were placed in the chain throughout history in order to validate the chain, only the cryptographic hashes of those photos. But… if anyone ever finds the bit for bit exact photograph that was in the chain, it becomes irrefutable that the photograph was signed by the chain owner as part of the chain…
This kind of logic should be being made interesting to fourth graders, implemented in practice by 8th graders, and practiced as easily as phone numbers and e-mail addresses by 12th graders. Maybe after kids educated with that kind of knowledge and awareness grow up, they can get a handle on this mess where: “people just trust me, dumb fucks.”
Maybe I’m crazy, but I don’t think we should kill large amounts of people just because they follow a different political ideology than us. 🙄 We have to be better than these extremists to truly show them a better way…
Not to back up any specific beliefs/statements from OP, but the Paradox of Tolerance does exist. The woefully intollerant should not be tolerated. It just depends on how you “don’t tolerate” them that determines how upsetting of a response someone has.
For example, just literally disenfranchising them might be enough … or at least could have been. Though after the intolerant gain enough power, there remains very, very few functional options. It’s literally all of the lessons that came out of WW2…
XXX. incorrect. this is the kind of thinking that has allowed our civilization to fester. we tolerate the people who actively bring suffering into the world. we resist progress to appease an ignorant faction of the population. we sacrifice our collective future on an altar of liberty, all the while deluding ourselves into thinking that allowing this continued suffering is somehow ‘taking the high road’. BULLSHIT. taking the high road is nipping our problems in the bud.
the damage we would do now to eradicate the illogical mental contagion that is religion pales in comparison to the gains of untold future generations living in a near utopia (which is completely possible when you remove idiots from control and let informed science guide humanity).
educate and build a compassionate society is obviously the correct answer, but we can’t do that because there is a portion of society that will never let that happen. remove the roadblocks. anything less is being complicit in prolonged suffering.
“We can build our utopia, we just have to kill everyone who doesn’t agree with us” doesn’t sound very right in my ears. It sounds like something where one should ask “are we the baddies?”
History proves that naive view … very naive. Should the US never joined in the war? Should the Poles and French simply rolled over to the Nazis? You seem to be saying yes, which is simply pathetic beyond ignorance.
one of these days, maybe, you’ll come to realize that there is no objective morality. there is only the winners that decide how everyone else will live. we all get a choice in who those people are.
i choose to live in a world where rational thought dedicated to furthering humanity and ending suffering reigns supreme. the benefits of that world far outweigh the losses that one generation would have to suffer to achieve it. it’s just a simple trolley problem. if you can’t see that, then you are blinded by emotions.
Objectively false. People in completely different societies (indigenous, uncontacted, etc) have shown that they don’t kill people consequence-free or separated from morality.
even if we all agreed on one thing (which we don’t), it’s still nothing more than a human idea. morality is a concept. it does not exist. THERE IS NO OBJECTIVE MORALITY.
Oh yes, I am sure that the Nazis back then said the same about cleansing the german nation, the benefits for the Volkskörper outweigh the losses that one generation would have to suffer.
no, WE THE PEOPLE should have global networks that simply remove that kind of brain rot and delete the people that perpetuate it.
The first step in trustable networks is securely validated identity.
On the internet nobody knows if you’re a dog, a Russian Troll, or a corporate shill.
You can be all three at the same time!
Jokes apart, how would you prevent trolls and shills from trolling and shilling?
We already have a problem where real accounts get stolen because they have a history so it’s harder to be flagged as bots. And one person can open multiple accounts in multiple networks. Hell, Facebook forces people to have phone numbers and there’s still so many bots and shills there.
I don’t want this to sound like a straw man, I think there’s so many ways for bots to happen that it’s like playing wack a mole.
You don’t prevent trolls and shills, you block them - whitelist style. Communicate with people who have established a good reputation with you, or one or two or three degrees removed from you. Spend time with anonymous when you feel like it, maybe turn some of those identities into trusted friends, but always communicate with some kind of secure ID- even if that ID only lasts for a 10 minute back and forth exchange.
A major not completely solved problem with cryptographically secure anything is: key management. Ultimately you might carry some kind of switchable RFID key with you, switched off until you’re ready to authenticate for some reason.
No problem with that, unless you’re expecting to count heads accurately. If one person is creating the content of ten using ten accounts, is that a problem?
I don’t remember giving FB my phone number… with burner phones that seems to be an intentionally lame approach.
I don’t think you ever stop them, you just ignore them like junk mail in your physical mail box, except with secure IDs you can automatically filter them without even a glance.
This is the one thing I hoped for out of crypto/blockchain.
You, commenter, don’t need to know that I’m “Brian Brianson, a citizen living at 123 Abenue Avenue”. But, it’s good to know that the person commenting is a real person who has been seen and verified by someone, as a simple true/false flag. If there were good ways of verifying basic conditions of people you interact with online, without exposing personal details, then it could curb botnet opinionation as well as be useful for a lot of things.
The problem there is: seen and verified by who? What’s your “chain of trust” behind that blue checkmark or whatever signifies a “verified person”?
Even an “anonymous identity” if it runs long enough eventually gives away the person doing the writing under the pseudonym. They may refer to experiences indirectly, unconsciously even, and those narrow down the subset of who they could be, until eventually there can be only one person on the whole planet who fits all the available clues.
To an extent, the world needs to grow up and realize that anyone determined enough can hunt you down through your online footprint unless you’re being super careful with your identity creation, what you say, and how long you use that identity. They also need to realize that among the 8 billion+ of us, they just aren’t very interesting unless they seem gullible enough to authorize a transfer of funds…
I’m imagining something like being able to go to a lawyer, or journalist’s office - somewhere they’d have established notaries, and show them a driver’s license or other notable documentation. They wouldn’t be granted rights to record that information permanently, but would grant a cryptographic signature sourced from their office to express that their office has seen them.
This would rely on professional trust - that the people you show your info to will not record it; and, that if they for some reason have to, they won’t turn it over to warrants. By the same token, they’d be trusted that they’re not inventing people from thin air.
You’re right that someone engaging online long enough could be exposed. That would then rely on any effective “Right to be forgotten” laws to erase unnecessary data.
Laws != effective, in my experience.
If you are attempting to deal anonymously, you need to go “burner phone” on a regular basis - throw the identity away and get a new one, or three. How often you do that depends on how valuable your anonymity is to you.
I think the main thing we need to teach the youth of today is: how to maintain a long term undeniable identity that they can live with their whole lives. Meaning: silly pictures with school friends -> anonymous. Master’s Thesis -> certified identity. In-between? That’s where the judgement calls come in.
People doing serious stuff are going to need to start depending on certified identity sources, and openly disclosing when they don’t really know the credibility or even identity of their sources.
As for “credible fake names” - like shell corporations? I think those are a bad idea altogether.
We had some land on a river. Somebody bought the neighboring piece of land through a shell corporation, county public records didn’t give any real names in connection with the sale and transfer of the deed. In 5 minutes on the internet I looked up the owner of that corporation in Nevada and found that it was beneficially owned by a has-been rock star. 5 more minutes and I found a newspaper article from the nearby town with has-been rock star quoted as saying “we bought 11 acres out on the river…” It’s really that easy, and for the people who “do it better” there are forensic accountants who “untangle it better” and the whole game is mostly a waste of time for everybody except the lawyers and accountants charging billable hours, unless you’re covering up something that most people probably don’t want hidden anyway - like money laundering or worse.
And that trust would be verified how?
So, Russian Troll goes on vacation in Amerika, visit 1000 notaries and obtain 1000 different cryptographic signatures sourced from their offices expressing that they have seen Russian Troll who borrowed U.S. identity card and swapped photo. Very nice.
A “cryptographic identity” is only as valuable as the material signed by it, and then only as long as the secret portion of the identity (you know, those bitcoin keys that guy is buying a landfill to try to find…) is known only to the person(s) controlling the identity.
They can work very well in blockchain form which makes it impossible to alter past records, again only so long as long as the true owner of the identity has control of the secret that signed the last block in the chain. “Right to be Forgotten” is actually somewhat compatible with blockchain, you don’t have to show all the photographs that were placed in the chain throughout history in order to validate the chain, only the cryptographic hashes of those photos. But… if anyone ever finds the bit for bit exact photograph that was in the chain, it becomes irrefutable that the photograph was signed by the chain owner as part of the chain…
This kind of logic should be being made interesting to fourth graders, implemented in practice by 8th graders, and practiced as easily as phone numbers and e-mail addresses by 12th graders. Maybe after kids educated with that kind of knowledge and awareness grow up, they can get a handle on this mess where: “people just trust me, dumb fucks.”
The squad has taken care of the hacker
Maybe I’m crazy, but I don’t think we should kill large amounts of people just because they follow a different political ideology than us. 🙄 We have to be better than these extremists to truly show them a better way…
… I think he meant delete accounts, not delete actual people, but I could be wrong lol
Edit: nope, dude’s just an asshole lol
Not to back up any specific beliefs/statements from OP, but the Paradox of Tolerance does exist. The woefully intollerant should not be tolerated. It just depends on how you “don’t tolerate” them that determines how upsetting of a response someone has.
For example, just literally disenfranchising them might be enough … or at least could have been. Though after the intolerant gain enough power, there remains very, very few functional options. It’s literally all of the lessons that came out of WW2…
“first they came for the socialists…”
If so, I don’t think they would have 2 different verbs: “remove that kind of brain rot and delete the people that perpetuate it.”
EDIT: Not to worry, they clarified by doubling-down on their holocaust argument.
there’s only one way to fix idiots and sociopaths.
Give them a lollipop so they shut up?
I’ll shut up. Can I have a lollipop, please?
Good thing the actual reason is the being Nazi thing, not just having a different opinion then!
Fuck Nazis and anyone who thinks they don’t deserve a slow and agonizing death
XXX. incorrect. this is the kind of thinking that has allowed our civilization to fester. we tolerate the people who actively bring suffering into the world. we resist progress to appease an ignorant faction of the population. we sacrifice our collective future on an altar of liberty, all the while deluding ourselves into thinking that allowing this continued suffering is somehow ‘taking the high road’. BULLSHIT. taking the high road is nipping our problems in the bud.
the damage we would do now to eradicate the illogical mental contagion that is religion pales in comparison to the gains of untold future generations living in a near utopia (which is completely possible when you remove idiots from control and let informed science guide humanity).
Tolerate and slaughter aren’t the only options.
educate and build a compassionate society is obviously the correct answer, but we can’t do that because there is a portion of society that will never let that happen. remove the roadblocks. anything less is being complicit in prolonged suffering.
“We can build our utopia, we just have to kill everyone who doesn’t agree with us” doesn’t sound very right in my ears. It sounds like something where one should ask “are we the baddies?”
Learn nuance. They’re speaking to the Paradox of Tolerance, not calling for a blind genocide…
Murder is never a valid solution to the Paradox of Tolerance.
History proves that naive view … very naive. Should the US never joined in the war? Should the Poles and French simply rolled over to the Nazis? You seem to be saying yes, which is simply pathetic beyond ignorance.
says the limp-wristed pacifist. when your head is under their boot, i will not pity you.
one of these days, maybe, you’ll come to realize that there is no objective morality. there is only the winners that decide how everyone else will live. we all get a choice in who those people are.
i choose to live in a world where rational thought dedicated to furthering humanity and ending suffering reigns supreme. the benefits of that world far outweigh the losses that one generation would have to suffer to achieve it. it’s just a simple trolley problem. if you can’t see that, then you are blinded by emotions.
Objectively false. People in completely different societies (indigenous, uncontacted, etc) have shown that they don’t kill people consequence-free or separated from morality.
even if we all agreed on one thing (which we don’t), it’s still nothing more than a human idea. morality is a concept. it does not exist. THERE IS NO OBJECTIVE MORALITY.
Wrong. Completely wrong. Look up “honor killings”. Then learn that it is legal and condoned in some places.
Oh yes, I am sure that the Nazis back then said the same about cleansing the german nation, the benefits for the Volkskörper outweigh the losses that one generation would have to suffer.
and had i been alive back then, i would have been calling for the extermination of those nazis before they could do the damage they did.
we’re all humans and it’s always been a war. one day you might realize that you have to pick a side.