This story over on Slashdot about how the Washington Post’s online executive editor Jim Brady is arguing against anonymity sparked quite a lively little debate.
The problem isn’t really anonymity - it’s identity.
They don’t want to know who a particular person is, they just want to somehow stop that one person from coming back. They don’t care who you are, they just want to make sure that “you” don’t come back.
This is not a new problem.
Basically, what you need is a trusted, secure, centralized system that you identify yourself to. This centralized system then anonymizes your identity to allow you to participate in anonymous discussions. If you mis-behave (or if the owner of the discussion group just doesn’t like you), you can be banned - and the system takes care of the actual “banning.” The owner of the discussion group just says “ban anonymous user #xxx” and the system connects it back to “you.”
It’s sort of like encryption - where only the central server has the decryption key.
As an interesting aside, Arthur C. Clarke made an interesting use of this concept in his novel “The Songs of Distant Earth“, in the form of “ship’s council.” If you can, pick up that book and read it to see an example of this problem “solved” (in a manner of speaking).
Unfortunately, because of the centralized requirement of this form of anonymity, it will never really be possible on the Internet. After all, there is no “central” anonymizing server. And you can’t just make your own for various reasons - your government might seize it, you yourself might not be trustworthy, etc.
I sort of hope that one day we can solve this problem - because it is a problem. Just look up “sock puppets” sometime and see what I mean. But for now, I think we all just have to learn to deal with it - because it’s better to have broken anonymity than no anonymity at all.
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If you like this then please subscribe to the Earlier this week, on Monday, I had some Internet trouble.
My ISP, Patriot Media, was recently bought out by that cable company everyone loves to hate, Comcast. On Monday, my Internet stopped working, and so I set about trying to figure out what went wrong.
I saw right away that it seemed as though my local (as in neighborhood) network had finally been switched over to Comcast’s network - the IP had changed to a totally different class A network, and as a further clue, the host name now said “comcast” instead of “patriotmedia.” OK - so why can’t I connect to anything?
I was getting the new IP address via DHCP, so I knew I was at least connected to Comcast - but I could not ping the DHCP, DNS, or Gateway IP addresses I was given. Very strange! So the problem must’ve been on their end.
Ugh. That means I have to call Comcast tech support and probably go through all my troubleshooting all over again.
Sure enough, that is exactly what happened. Even though I’d already done the whole “connect your computer directly to the cable modem” thing, they made me do it again. And again. I mean, I know why they make you do this, and I know that they’re probably told to ignore callers who say “I’m a tech person, I know what I’m doing” (which I did say, in not so few words), but still…
Anyway, they eventually said they’d have to escalate it (duh!) and would it be OK for a tech to call me back on this number? I said sure, made sure they had the phone number right (they did), and hung up.
Several hours later, with no Internet, I was going through withdrawal. Remember, I live on the Internet!
So I called back to get a status report - and they started making me go through the troubleshooting steps again! So I firmly asked for a status report, and they said, basically, “they’re working on it.”
To keep myself amused, I was periodically checking my ‘net connection, resetting my router and cable modem to see if I had connectivity. Finally, after 6 hours, the Internet came back to life and I was able to get back online.
Fast forward to today, and I get a call out of the blue. It was Comcast… calling to see if my Internet was working now.
For those who can’t count, that’s 3 days later they finally called to check in on me.
I guess you could say that this is what “Comcastic” really means - leave your customers hanging for 3 days before following up on something that you fixed 3 days earlier. If they keep using that word in their advertising, well… to quote a great movie, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
