CDR: Re: A helpful ruling on "anonymity"

[David Honig]

At 01:22 PM 10/17/00 -0400, Ray Dillinger wrote:
>Likewise, people who only understand speech and business mediated 
>by absolute identities are going to have trouble with the "subtle" 
>difference between anonymity and pseudonymity.  It's a model 
>where you are dealing with someone but don't know who they are,
>and as far as the sheeple are concerned, one not-knowing is as 
>good as another.  It violates the same assumption, therefore in 
>popular view, it must be the same thing.
>
>*sigh.*
>
>			Bear

I used to think so too, but there are a lot of hausfrau who
use polynymy.  They're not clued in to the subtleties
of recognizing prose by style, because my informant has told
me that they are recognizable.  I doubt many cpunkly anonymous posters
put their prose through a few cycles of 'the fish'.  Perhaps 
short prose is their solution; what is *your* unicity distance? 

In a different but related thread, the whole point of 'human factors'
studies and gui design is to use whatever the user brings with him
--including metaphors from meatspace.  Postcards = IP.  Envelopes = crypto.
 Phone books = PKI directories.  Multinyms = "doing business as".
Reputation = reputation.

dh