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posted by mrpg on Saturday July 07 2018, @12:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the until-you-start-barking dept.

[...] The cartoon symbolizes an understanding of Internet privacy that stresses the ability of users to send and receive messages in general anonymity. Lawrence Lessig suggests "no one knows" because Internet protocols do not force users to identify themselves; although local access points such as a user's university may, this information is privately held by the local access point and is not an intrinsic part of the Internet transaction.

It also shows how Internet communication is liberated from familiar constraints. Sociologist Sherry Turkle elaborates: "You can be whoever you want to be. You can completely redefine yourself if you want. You don't have to worry about the slots other people put you in as much. They don't look at your body and make assumptions. They don't hear your accent and make assumptions. All they see are your words."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you're_a_dog


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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 07 2018, @01:31PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 07 2018, @01:31PM (#703796)

    Really, I swear, I am not a dog.

    Squirrel!

  • (Score: 2) by coolgopher on Saturday July 07 2018, @01:36PM (6 children)

    by coolgopher (1157) on Saturday July 07 2018, @01:36PM (#703797)

    ...until your behavior leaves no doubt, which in many cases takes all of a few seconds.

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Saturday July 07 2018, @01:49PM (3 children)

      by Rosco P. Coltrane (4757) on Saturday July 07 2018, @01:49PM (#703798)

      You's be surprised: many an internet abuse-spewing nazi-lover sumbitch is a mild-manner accountant with zero personality and a lot of pent-up frustrations in real life. Which is precisely why the free, anonymous internet we know today should stay exactly the way it is: when anonimity goes, frustrated people will feel truly trapped in their real lives, with no place to become someone else and vent. That's when nasty shit happens.

      • (Score: 3, Disagree) by coolgopher on Saturday July 07 2018, @02:08PM (2 children)

        by coolgopher (1157) on Saturday July 07 2018, @02:08PM (#703800)

        Nah, people managed before the internet.

        • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 07 2018, @05:34PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 07 2018, @05:34PM (#703860)

          Sure, poorly. I'd rather people be able to express their true thoughts. The general public is far too censorious to allow for that, so anonymity is needed.

        • (Score: 2) by bitstream on Thursday July 12 2018, @07:16PM

          by bitstream (6144) on Thursday July 12 2018, @07:16PM (#706315) Journal

          Yes they managed to get pissed at those Bank of England mercenaries doing the taxation thing and kick them out ;-)

    • (Score: 2) by BsAtHome on Saturday July 07 2018, @02:07PM (1 child)

      by BsAtHome (889) on Saturday July 07 2018, @02:07PM (#703799)

      So you guessed that I am a banana? Then I must do a better job at hiding.

      searching for related fruit...

      • (Score: 2, Offtopic) by realDonaldTrump on Saturday July 07 2018, @05:42PM

        by realDonaldTrump (6614) on Saturday July 07 2018, @05:42PM (#703863) Homepage Journal

        I used to own Miss Universe. And Miss USA. And I had some amazingly wonderful times together with the girls. Playing "hide the banana."

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by stormwyrm on Saturday July 07 2018, @02:10PM (2 children)

    by stormwyrm (717) on Saturday July 07 2018, @02:10PM (#703801) Journal

    These days, companies like Google and Facebook are doing their damnedest to figure out who you actually are. So now, not only do they know you’re a dog, they know everything else about you too.

    This update of the famous cartoon [gnu.org] rather sums it up.

    --
    Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday July 07 2018, @07:33PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday July 07 2018, @07:33PM (#703888)

      I'll never get over Target ratting out the pregnant mom to her dad before she told him....

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Sunday July 08 2018, @03:21AM

      by krishnoid (1156) on Sunday July 08 2018, @03:21AM (#704083)

      Meanwhile, at Google:

      "Hey, c'mere, I know this is is impossible, but our Adsense AI is telling us ..."
      "Yeah, what's the ... no way, that ... that can't be!"
      "Yup. I think that's an actual dog browsing the internet. Or a *very* convincing furry."

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 07 2018, @02:33PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 07 2018, @02:33PM (#703803)

    This is no longer true in practice. Where the protocols haven't changed that much, the surveillance infrastructure has improved by orders of magnitude. The backend processing is able to make up the difference in terms of the entropic difference between user sessions.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 07 2018, @03:07PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 07 2018, @03:07PM (#703808)

    Ah the good old days. Which is coming to an end. "for the children"

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 07 2018, @03:13PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 07 2018, @03:13PM (#703810)

    You can be whoever you want to be. You can completely redefine yourself if you want. You don't have to worry about the slots other people put you in as much. They don't look at your body and make assumptions. They don't hear your accent and make assumptions. All they see are your words.

    The identity politics crowd tells us that we are members of castes that are assigned at birth. Intersectionality tells us that we are assigned multiple, overlapping castes. One may be in the white caste, a distinct male caste with its own intersectional dangers if one is in the black caste (at least, whenever it is convenient to those in power--one's own convenience is irrelevant), and perhaps several other orthogonal castes. Each caste can be assigned some ordinal value along an axis, such as the skin color axis and the gender axis. From that ranking emerges the oppression Olympics.

    They tell me that there is an economic class axis there somewhere, as a minor intersectionality, but it gets no airtime, so we must take its existence on faith. That intersectionality must always be buried. Too many people in the working class might be united by it instead of divided by the menagerie of all the other intersectionalities. And besides, the invisible hand fairy is supposed to make it such that one can change one's economic class if one "works hard."

    Indeed, this sets economic class apart from other intersectionalities in that it is the only one, they tell us, that is not a caste. In fact, there is even an intersectional caste for people assigned one gender at birth who transition to live as the (some?) other gender, so that we have no need of questioning whether gender is a caste assigned at birth in the face of the medical necessity of gender transition for some people. Yet, in the real world, it seems that economic class is the one thing that is most like a caste and most directly dictates the quality of life we will have.

    I call them castes because I would like to focus on the socially constructed nature of those intersectionalities. I would hope that to anybody born in a modern nation where all people are created equal might look at the caste system in India and immediately comprehend that it is a social construction (with legal backing, but that is likely only a consequence of a social construction becoming sufficiently pervasive).

    Identity politics changes the realities of various states of being--of being a black woman or white man in flyover country working a shit-per-hour, abusive job that makes capital acquisition merely a fantasy for example--into simulacra and simulations thereof. Once changed into a simulacrum or simulation (i.e. a caste), deep divisions can be sown. Differences can be exaggerated. The working class can be set against itself, completely distracted from the common reality and experiences that unite them.

    The danger of the internet is that it might expose those commonalities. If one is not certain one agrees with a conclusion that the propaganda in the media has given her, she could go online, even learn how to cover her tracks if she does not already know how, and she could pretend to be any other set of intersectionalities (castes) she desires. Do people treat her differently if her avatar has black skin? Do people treat her differently if she claims to be trans? Do people treat her differently if she claims to be a woman?

    She might find out some very dangerous things that would lead her to questioning the construction of the ranking axes of the oppression Olympics. Of course, it could still be a mixed bag requiring much reflection. Eventually, she might even question whether any intersectionality other than economic class is even real, outside of a few identity politics fan groups like the KKK, Christian Identity, reactionary feminism, etc. If she is not careful, she might find herself unplugging from the moon matrix.

    If she were a teacher, she might start organizing protests in defiance of the authority of the union that claims to represent her. That's when the ruling class starts getting antsy.

    The internet is a danger to the ruling class, and it must be controlled and censored.

    (Further reading: The Lost Library of MOO [hayseed.net], under the "MOO Research Papers" heading.)

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 07 2018, @04:48PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 07 2018, @04:48PM (#703840)

      In addition to "works hard", you also need financial literacy. This is not difficult, but does require some amount of discipline and minor self sacrifice, but the resources are there and free. Literally tens of thousands of them.

      I read a recent study that showed that 94% of Americans have the neither the training nor capacity to manage their own lives and exist on the basis that it is so easy to do, that is, it's hard to simply die in modern society. It's an analogous situation to living 1,000 years ago and being totally ignorant of farming, hunting, animal husbandry, cooking, craft making or any of the other dozen or so skills it would take to keep yourself alive but luckily enough, you live in an area with enough fruit trees to barely stay alive.

      • (Score: 2) by shortscreen on Saturday July 07 2018, @08:38PM (1 child)

        by shortscreen (2252) on Saturday July 07 2018, @08:38PM (#703923) Journal

        It's true that people can be their own worst enemies. I'm not going to defend the System, since I know it is shitty. But I saw some brief interviews of Poor Peoples' Campaign protesters, and there was something that struck me. Most of them were saying "we have no jobs" and "we have no healthcare." Did they ever consider that providing healthcare IS a job? There are barriers to entering the profession, but couldn't any of them see an opportunity to spend their time providing a needed service and succeed at it?

        • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday July 08 2018, @09:20AM

          by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday July 08 2018, @09:20AM (#704158) Journal

          When people say "we have no health care", they usually mean "we can't afford health care".

          --
          The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday July 07 2018, @07:36PM

      by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Saturday July 07 2018, @07:36PM (#703891) Journal

      Funny, Kurenai, you've come to a sort of similar conclusion I have: most of these categories are proxies for class warfare. I've been trying not to sound too much like an unreconstructed Marxist, but let's face it, pretty much every category of discrimination boils down to "$THOSE_PEOPLE can't access $THIS_RESOURCE because we say so."

      As someone who's worked with survivors of trafficking and child prostitution, I've seen things that bear this out. And you are correct that free exchange of information and anonymity might lead to people thinking outside the boxes they're put it; this, indeed, is what we would hope. I've been saying for years to poor white people (like me!) "if you are poor and white you have more in common with someone who is poor and black than someone who is rich and white." Some listen. Some don't.

      --
      I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by fyngyrz on Saturday July 07 2018, @04:21PM (3 children)

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Saturday July 07 2018, @04:21PM (#703834) Journal

    They don't hear your accent and make assumptions. All they see are your words.

    When your words are salted with "colour" and "boffin" and the like, some assumptions can (and are) made.

    So it's not like the Intertubes are all that homogenous a medium.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 07 2018, @04:52PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 07 2018, @04:52PM (#703841)

      Or when people continually misuse words or phrases

      https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/the-58-most-commonly-misused-words-and-phrases-a6754551.html [independent.co.uk]

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday July 07 2018, @07:36PM (1 child)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday July 07 2018, @07:36PM (#703890)

      Sod off, wanker. You're the kind of bloke who will stand in the cycle track in front of the tube station staring into his handy while people are trying to ride.

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 09 2018, @10:05AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 09 2018, @10:05AM (#704478)

        Sod off, wanker. You're the kind of bloke who will stand in the cycle track in front of the tube station staring into his handy while people are trying to ride.

        Damn it, old chap! You spotted that I'm a German who speaks British English almost fluently, but not quite.

  • (Score: 2) by Hartree on Saturday July 07 2018, @06:26PM

    by Hartree (195) on Saturday July 07 2018, @06:26PM (#703876)

    On the internet, no one knows you're a dog. But I post on Soylent News so they may be suspicious that I might be a fat 50 something computer/electonics geek.

    "Woof" *wags tail*

    I mean, "I am 1337! I can get SLIP working on a 9600 baud modem. Linux rules, Wintel drools!"

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 08 2018, @01:08AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 08 2018, @01:08AM (#704020)

    Proxy Error

    The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
    The proxy server could not handle the request GET /article.pl.

    Reason: Error reading from remote server

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