I come from a family where my parents and most other realtives think that blogging is a stupid airing of one laundry to an unknown public. Well they are correct in many ways.
I do not publish my posts if I am afraid someone will read them and realize that I am saying something negative about them personally – especially if I know the person(s). I censor myself a lot.
I have posts started related to the latest discussion concerning wheter bloggers should have to identify themselves in order to have their blog articles published in the Sacramento Bee that started on the ipsoSacto Blog Watch Blog. The main contension is that letters to the editor author’s must provide a verifiable name but bloggers were not asked to. Then the whole idea that no one is really anonymous on the internet is another article I have been working on. I was thinking of linking the two together.
I do not wave my name out in the wind here in cyber space but any savvy 8 year old could figure it out real fast. I just do not post it so it does come up in any google search my family or neighboors might do. Woop – just a bit of caution. I have considered moving this site to my other provider where my DNS info is not public. All the time my logic in not doing much about the anonymous thing I have been telling myself that I am paranoid.
Well, after thinking about this I am only going to say this:
The net is not a safe and free speech neighboorhood anymore – I suspect that it has not been so for a long time. If the government is not snooping on us – our fellow net users are – and some of them apparently have gone to the darkside.
It is not ok to threaten people with death in person or in cyberspace – it is not ok to allow the type of crap the majority of us have to continue. I am with Scobel on this one – why? because I have heard the kids in our neighboorhood talking about pulling some activity off to get mentioned on the news. They want the attention. So, the wise and wonderfull A list pontificators that took part in all this – this is the only mention of your sorry butts that you might read coming from this low Y listed blog. You have shown your true ignorant selves to all.
For a more timely and thoughful opinion a defer to Drums’ article at odd time signatures.
Anyone up for snail mail? Remember? I wrote a letter to you and then you replied to me – and we could tell if someone else snooped cause the envelope had been steamed open.
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Privacy, at least the idealized pre-computer type, is pretty much a thing of the past. But where there is a problem, there’s someone there to offer a solution — for a fee.
The easy answer is to use a blog service such as blogger.com instead of your own domain. But that’s not as much fun, which brings us to the entrepreneurs.
I own shughe.org, which I built for my teenage son. (Obviously, he’s lost interest, but that’s a different comment.) If you look at the
whois info, you won’t see my name. I pay something like $12 a year for the service.
Of course, no one actually checks the info you use when buying a domain, so you can always lie, but that has risks too. If caught, the name can be confiscated.
I didn’t use the privacy service for ipsosacto.com, so anyone who wants can call me up and ask if they can come over to use my pool. I suppose I should worry about that. If my wife realized that was true, she would worry.
We get to pick what we worry about.
We get to pick what we worry about.
Sometimes. Sometimes we think we’ve paid for private WhoIs listings only to discover later that someone dropped the ball and listed information publicly, which was then used to force one “out”.
Even systems we think we can rely upon fail. In my case they did. It’s not a disaster, but it could have been.
I have given up on the worry about the DNS for the time being. If I moved this site to one where I pay for the privacy there is (as Karoli knows to well) no reason to believe the information will remain private anyway.
If I decide to go over to my pay to be private site I would have to start all over again anyway. If it gets that bad it probably is not any fun any more either – so I will quit when that time comes.
Maybe I should start really getting serious over on the other site? Ummm … LOL