On April 7, 2019 3:02:36 AM UTC, Steve Kinney wrote:

On 4/6/19 5:32 AM, grarpamp wrote:

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https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/25-years-later-interview-linus-torvalds

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"Social Media... Add in anonymity, and it's just disgusting. When you don't even put your real name on your garbage (or the garbage you share or like), it really doesn't help. I'm actually one of those people who thinks that anonymity is overrated. Some people confuse privacy and anonymity and think they go hand in hand, and that protecting privacy means that you need to protect anonymity. I think that's wrong. Anonymity is important if you're a whistle-blower, but if you cannot prove your identity, your crazy rant on some social-media platform shouldn't be visible, and you shouldn't be able to share it or like it."

The above sounds like a comparison between The Facebook (makes a token effort to tie accounts to users' True Names), and 4chan (makes a token effort to disconnect users from their True Names). That strikes me as a forced context creating forced either/or alternatives. We need a middle ground between True Names Only and Anonymous FTW. We already have a working example of that middle ground: The i2p network.

i2p users host various resources including websites, torrent trackers, and community forums on their own hardware, and access the resources etc. of their choice either anonymously, or pseudonymously via user-chosen screen names. i2p users may disclose their True Names at will, but by default the identity and location of i2p users can not be determined without State level infrastructure access and surveillance resources. An i2p user's actual True Name is his or her i2p router ID, which by design has no connection with any geographic location or birth certificate.

Result? A more intelligent, better behaved version of the Internet, with prevailing attitudes reminiscent of the public Internet shortly before AOL popped up and saturation bombed us with weaponized morons, followed by MegaCorporations looking to manipulate, control and extract capital from the said morons. (Younger folks: Look up "Eternal September" for the sad true story.)

I can not completely attribute the modest i2p success story to the prevalence of users known by pseudonyms only. To access i2p one has to install and configure software that will not work unless one cam read and apply howto docs and such; this screens out the less-bright 80% of potential users right up front. Size also matters: The smaller the network, the more good or bad behavior stands out, and the larger the benefits of presenting as a good (in the sense of useful) person. At present, i2p has about 60k users according to stats.i2p.

But I do not discount the prevalence of stable pseudo-identities as the primary factor affecting the quality of content and discourse in i2p space; without this factor, concerns for reputation would have no impact. Compared to the great unwashed publick visible on the open Internet under their own names, i2p participants seem remarkably polite, intelligent and responsible. Go figure.

A user's i2p persona can take any form, and may include the content of websites that live on their creators' own hardware, accessible only via the i2p router network. It takes about a day for anyone who knows HTML to build a website in i2p space; just turn on the server included in the router package and populate the relevant local directories with content.

Pseudonyms that become visible in i2p space through participation over time become "persons" in a community, defined by their in-network behavior, building relationships and reputations based on their contributions. The folks who wear those masks mostly take good care of them, because the trust and cooperation of other users in the community has value: When a well respected i2p user asks for something, other users who have benefited from that user's contributions, advice, example etc. make a real effort to come through, because that's what humans do. Smart ones, anyway.

:o)

Postscript: Above I mentioned True Names, from the Vernor Vinge novella of that name. Published in 1981, True Names introduced the term 'cyberspace' and several key concepts relevant to Cypherpunk interests. If you ain't seen it, here's a copy somebody else hosted so I don't have to: http://www.scotswolf.com/TRUENAMES.pdf

Not to be too much of a pedant, but I always thought William Gibson coined the term cyberspace, first in (I think) the short story Burning Chrome and then in the novel Neuromancer (1982 and 1984, respectively). I need to read True Names (thanks!) - although a cursory search didn't find the phrase.

On Sun, 7 Apr 2019 00:04:22 -0400 Steve Kinney wrote:

On 4/6/19 11:28 PM, John Newman wrote:

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I need to read True Names (thanks!) - although a cursory search didn't find the phrase.

See also The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner, 1975: The first tale of a "hacker" (not so named) who wages war against State actors. A cursory search did not turn up a link to the text; my copy arrived in hard cover via the Science Fiction Book Club. Interlibrary loan if all else fails...

try https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/7780471/Brunner__John

I would nominate our Mr. Brunner as the "most under appreciated" SF author of his generation: Uniformly brilliant work IMO; as another example, people who appreciate CPunk concepts would likely find The Stone That Never Came Down very inspirational.

:o)

On April 8, 2019 7:19:12 PM UTC, Steve Kinney wrote:

On 4/7/19 4:36 PM, Punk wrote:

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On Sun, 7 Apr 2019 00:04:22 -0400 Steve Kinney wrote:

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A cursory search did not turn up a link to the text; my copy arrived in hard cover via the Science Fiction Book Club. Interlibrary loan if all else fails...

try

https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/7780471/Brunner__John

Heh. Should have checked there first.

:o)

I still have a (very) badly worn paperwork that I picked up as a kid in the 90s at a used book store ;) Nick Haflinger was (to my mind) never quite as "cool" as Case or Bobby Quine, but it's a damn good book, way ahead of it's time... it predates the Gibson stuff by nearly a decade. I've been re-reading Borges recently. His ruminations on infinity are an interesting prelude to cyberpunk and modern sci-fi in general. Gibson rather shamelessly stole "the aleph" (name and all!) from Borges' short story written in the 30s (or 40s?) for Mona Lisa Overdrive :)