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Between threats from Anonymous and a new crackdown from Twitter, ISIS is having a tough time reaching out and recruiting new psychopaths online.

To circumvent the censorship, the Islamic militant group has reportedly created its own social network called “Khelafabook.”

The Facebook clone claims it is independent and not actually sponsored by ISIS (even though it has ISIS logos all over its homepage). It says its goal is to show the world that they don’t only “live in caves” and “carry guns,” and they vow to “will rule the world by Allah’s permission.”

Khelafabook was set up by a man in Mosul, Iraq, according to The Independent, and is hosted in Egypt. There’s also an associated Twitter account which is linked to from the site.

The site first popped up last week, but has already been taken offline “to protect the info and details of its members,” according to a message on the page.

After it was taken down, Twitter accounts associated with Anonymous appeared to claim responsibility, as Vocativ points out.

For the the time being they’ll have to look elsewhere to share their terrorist pancake recipes.

Fr Joseph, struggling toward humility in the first week of the Fast, tells of his first visit to Fasters Anonymous... and their curious theme song.

Further to yesterday's post, this is a list of thoughts prompted by a request from Linkmachinego on the topic of being an anonymous writer and blogger. Maybe not exactly a how-to (since the outcome is not guaranteed) as a post on things I did, things I should have done, and things I learned.

It's not up to me to decide if you "deserve" to be anonymous. My feeling is, if you're starting out as a writer and do not yet feel comfortable writing under your own name, that is your business and not mine. I also think sex workers should consider starting from a position of anonymity and decide later if they want to be out, please don't be naive. Statistics I made up right now show 99 out of 100 people who claim 'if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear' are talking out of their arses.

The items in the list fall into three general categories: internet-based, legal and real-world tips, and interpersonal. Many straddle more than one of these categories. All three are important.

This is written for a general audience because most people who blog now do not have extensive technical knowledge, they just want to write and be read. That's a good thing by the way. If you already know all of this, then great, but many people won't. Don't be sneery about their lack of prior knowledge. Bringing everyone up to speed on the technology is not the goal: clear steps you can use to help protect your identity from being discovered are.

Disclaimer: I'm no longer anonymous so these steps are clearly not airtight. Also there are other sources of information on the Web, some of which are more comprehensive and more current than my advice. I accept no responsibility for any outcome of following this advice. Please don't use it to do illegal or highly sensitive things. Also please don't use pseudonyms to be a dick.

This is also a work in progress. As I remember things or particular details, I'll amend this post. If you have suggestions of things that should be added, let me know.

1. Don't use Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail et al. for your mail.

You will need an email address to do things like register for blog accounts, Facebook, Twitter, and more. This email will have to be something entirely separate from your "real" email addresses. There are a lot of free options out there, but be aware that sending an email from many of them also sends information in the headers that could help identify you.

When I started blogging, I set up an email address for the blog with Hotmail. Don't do this. Someone quickly pointed out the headers revealed where I worked (a very large place with lots of people and even more computers, but still more information than I was comfortable with). They suggested I use Hushmail instead, which I still use. Hushmail has a free option (though the inbox allocation is modest), strips out headers, and worked for me.

A caveat with this: if you are, say, a sex worker working in a place where that is not legal and using Hushmail, you could be vulnerable to them handing over your details to a third party investigating crimes. If you're handling information some governments might consider embarrassing or sensitive, same. Google some alternatives: you're looking for something secure and encrypted.

There are a few common-sense tips you can follow to make it even safer. If you have to bring people you know in real life in on the secret, don't use this email address for communicating with them even if only about matters related to your secret (and don't use your existing addresses for that either). Example: I have one address for press and general interactions, one for things related to my accountant and money, and one for communicating with my agent, publisher, and solicitor. I've also closed and opened new accounts over the years when it seems "too many" people are getting hold of a particular address. Use different passwords for each, don't make these passwords related to your personal information, and so on.

I unwisely left the Hotmail address going, and while I did not use it to send mail, I continued to read things that arrived there. That led to this failed attempt by the Sunday Times to out me. It was an easily dodged attempt but something I would have preferred to avoid.

People can and do register internet domains while staying anonymous but I never did. Some people registered domains for me (people I didn't know in person). This led to a couple of instances of them receiving harassment when the press suspected they were me. In particular Ian Shircore got a bit of unwanted attention this way.

Because all I was ever doing was a straight-up blog, not having a registered domain that I had control over was fine. Your needs may be different. I am not a good source for advice on how to do that. But just in case you might be thinking "who would bother looking there?" read about how faux escort Alexa DiCarlo was unmasked. This is what happens when you don't cover your tracks.

2. Don't use a home internet connection, work internet connection, etc.

Email won't be the only way you might want to communicate with people. You may also want to leave comments on other blogs and so forth. Doing this and other ways of using the Web potentially exposes your IP address, which could be unique and be used to locate you.

Even if you don't leave comments just visiting a site can leave traces behind. Tim Ireland recently used a simple method to confirm his suspicion of who the "Tabloid Troll" twitter account belonged to. By comparing the IP address of someone who clicked on to a link going to the Bloggerheads site with the IP address of an email Dennis Rice sent, a link was made. If you go to the trouble of not using your own connection, also make sure you're not using the same connection for different identities just minutes apart. Don't mix the streams.

The timing of everything as it happened was key to why the papers did not immediately find out who I was. The old blog started in 2003, when most press still had to explain to their audience what a blog actually was. It took a while for people to notice the writing, so the mistakes I made early on (blogging from home and work, using Hotmail) had long been corrected by the time the press became interested.

Today, no writer who aims to stay anonymous should ever assume a grace period like that. It also helped that once the press did become interested, they were so convinced not only that Belle was not really a hooker but also that she was one of their own - a previously published author or even journalist - that they never looked in the right place. If they'd just gone to a London blogmeet and asked a few questions about who had pissed off a lot of people and was fairly promiscuous, they'd have had a plausible shortlist in minutes.

After I moved from Kilburn to Putney, I was no longer using a home internet connection - something I should have done right from the beginning. I started to use internet cafes for posting and other activities as Belle. This offers some security... but be wary of using these places too often if there is a reason to think someone is actively looking for you. It's not perfect.

Also be wary if you are using a laptop or other machine provided by your workplace, or use your own laptop to log in to work servers ("work remotely"). I've not been in that situation and am not in any way an expert on VPNs, but you may want to start reading about it here and do some googling for starters. As a general principle, it's probably wise not to do anything on a work laptop that could get you fired, and don't do anything that could get you fired while also connected to work remotely on your own machine.

3. There is software available that can mask your IP address. There are helpful add-ons that can block tracking software.

I didn't use this when I was anonymous, but if I was starting as an anonymous blogger now, I would download Tor and browse the Web and check email through their tools.

If you do use Tor or other software to mask your IP address, don't then go on tweeting about where your IP address is coming from today! I've seen people do this. Discretion fail.

I also use Ghostery now to block certain tracking scripts from web pages. You will want to look into something similar. Also useful are Adblocker, pop-up blockers, things like that. They are simple to download and use and you might like to use them anyway even if you're not an anonymous blogger. A lot of sites track your movements and you clearly don't want that.

4. Take the usual at-home precautions.

Is your computer password-protected with a password only you know? Do you clear your browser history regularly? Use different passwords for different accounts? Threats to anonymity can come from people close to you. Log out of your blog and email accounts when you're finished using them, every time. Have a secure and remote backup of your writing. Buy a shredder and use it. Standard stuff.

Another thing I would do is install a keystroke logger on your own machine. By doing this I found out in 2004 that someone close to me was spying on me when they were left alone with my computer. In retrospect what I did about it was not the right approach. See also item 7.

5. Be careful what you post.

Are you posting photos? Exif data can tell people, among other things, where and when a picture was taken, what it was taken with, and more. I never had call to use it because I never posted photos or sound, but am told there are loads of tools that can wipe this Exif data from your pictures (here's one).

The content of what you post can be a giveaway as well. Are you linking to people you know in real life? Are you making in-jokes or references to things only a small group of people will know about? Don't do that.

If possible, cover your tracks. Do you have a previous blog under a known name? Are you a contributor to forums where your preferred content and writing style are well-known? Can you edit or delete these things? Good, do that.

Personally, I did not delete everything. Partly this was because the world of British weblogging was so small at the time - a few hundred popular users, maybe a couple thousand people blogging tops? - that I thought the sudden disappearance of my old blog coinciding with the appearance of an unrelated new one might be too much of a coincidence. But I did let the old site go quiet for a bit before deleting it, and edited archived entries.

Keep in mind however that The Wayback Machine means everything you have written on the web that has been indexed still exists. And it's searchable. Someone who already has half an idea where to start looking for you won't have too much trouble finding your writing history. (UPDATE: someone alerted me that it's possible to get your own sites off Wayback by altering the robots.txt file - and even prevent them appearing there in the first place - and to make a formal request for removal using reasons listed here. This does not seem to apply to sites you personally have no control over unless copyright issues are involved.) If you can put one more step between them and you... do it.

6. Resist temptation to let too many people in.

If your writing goes well, people may want to meet you. They could want to buy you drinks, give you free tickets to an opening. Don't say yes. While most people are honest in their intentions, some are not. And even the ones who are may not have taken the security you have to keep your details safe. Remember, no one is as interested in protecting your anonymity as you will be.

Friends and family were almost all unaware of my secret - both the sex work and the writing. Even my best friend (A4 from the books) didn't know. 

I met very few people "as" Belle. There were some who had to meet me: agent, accountant, editor. I never went to the Orion offices until after my identity became known. I met Billie Piper, Lucy Prebble, and a couple of writers during the pre-production of Secret Diary at someone's house, but met almost no one else involved with the show. Paul Duane and Avril MacRory met me and were absolutely discreet. I went to the agent's office a few times but never made an appointment as Belle or in my real name. Most of the staff there had no idea who I was. Of these people who did meet me almost none knew my real name, where I lived, where I was from, my occupation. Only one (the accountant) knew all of that - explained below under point 9. And if I could have gotten away with him never seeing a copy of my passport, I damn well would have done.

The idea was that if people don't know anything they can't inadvertently give it away. I know that all of the people listed above were absolutely trustworthy. I still didn't tell them anything a journalist would have considered useful.

When I started blogging someone once commented that my blog was a "missed opportunity" because it didn't link to an agency website or any way of booking my services. Well, duh. I didn't want clients to meet me through the blog! If you are a sex worker who wants to preserve a level of pseudonymity and link your public profile to your work, Amanda Brooks has the advice you need. Not me.

Other sources like JJ Luna write about how to do things like get and use credit cards not tied to your name and address. I've heard Entropay offer 'virtual' credit cards that are not tied to your credit history, although they can't be used with any system that requires address verification. This could be useful even for people who are not involved in sex work.

Resisting temptation sometimes means turning down something you'd really like to do. The short-term gain of giving up details for a writing prize or some immediate work may not be worth the long-term loss of privacy. I heard about one formerly anonymous blogger who was outed after giving their full name and address to a journalist who asked for it when they entered a competition. File under: how not to stay anonymous.

7. Trust your intuition.

I have to be careful what I say here. In short, my identity became known to a tabloid paper and someone whom I had good reason not to trust (see item 4) gave them a lot of information about me.

When your intuition tells you not to trust someone, LISTEN TO IT. The best security in the world fails if someone props open a door, leaves a letter on the table, or mentally overrides the concern that someone who betrayed you before could do so again. People you don't trust should be ejected from your life firmly and without compromise. A "let them down easy" approach only prolongs any revenge they might carry out and probably makes it worse. The irony is that as a call girl I relied on intuition and having strong personal boundaries all the time... but failed to carry that ability over into my private life. If there is one thing in my life I regret, the failure to act on my intuition is it.

As an aside if you have not read The Gift of Fear already, get it and read it.

See also point 9: if and when you need people to help you keep the secret don't make it people already involved in your private life. Relationships can cloud good judgement in business decisions.

There is a very droll saying "Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead." It's not wrong. I know, I know. Paranoid. Hard not to be when journos a few years later are digging through the rubbish of folks who met you exactly once when you were sixteen. Them's the breaks.

8. Consider the consequences of success.

If you find yourself being offered book deals or similar, think it through. Simply by publishing anonymously you will become a target. Some people assume all anonymous writers "want" to be found, and the media in particular will jump through some very interesting hurdles to "prove" anything they write about you is in the public interest.

In particular, if you are a sex worker, and especially if you are a sex worker who is visible/bookable through your site, please give careful consideration to moving out of that sphere. Even where sex for money is legal it is still a very stigmatised activity. There are a number of people who do not seem to have realised this, and the loss of a career when they left the "sex-pos" bubble was probably something of a shock. I'm not saying don't do it - but please think long and hard about the potential this has to change your life and whether you are fully prepared to be identified this way forever. For every Diablo Cody there are probably dozens of Melissa Petros. For every Melissa Petro there are probably hundreds more people with a sex industry past who get quietly fired and we don't ever hear from them.

If I knew going in to the first book deal what would happen, I probably would have said no. I'm glad I didn't by the way - but realistically, my life was stressful enough at that point and I did not fully understand what publishing would add to that. Not many bloggers had mainstream books at that point (arguably none in the UK) so I didn't have anyone else's experience to rely on. I really had no idea about what was going to happen. The things people wrote about me then were mainly untrue and usually horrendous. Not a lot has changed even now. I'd be lying if I said that didn't have an emotional effect.

Writing anonymously and being outed has happened often enough that people going into it should consider the consequences. I'm not saying don't do it if you risk something, but be honest with yourself about the worst possible outcome and whether you would be okay with that.

9.  Enlist professional help to get paid and sign contracts.

Having decided to write a book, I needed an agent. The irony of being anonymous was that while I let as few people in on it as possible, at some point I was going to have to take a leap of faith and let in more. Mil Millington emailed me to recommend Patrick Walsh, saying he was one of the few people in London who can be trusted. Mil was right.

Patrick put me on to my accountant (who had experience of clients with, shall we say, unusual sources of income). From there we cooked up a plan so that contracts could be signed without my name ever gracing a piece of paper. Asking someone to keep a secret when there's a paper trail sounds like it should be possible but rarely is. Don't kid yourself, there is no such thing as a unbreakable confidentiality agreement. Asking journalists and reviewers to sign one about your book is like waving a red rag to a bull. What we needed was a few buffers between me and the press.

With Patrick and Michael acting as directors, a company was set up - Bizrealm. I was not on the paperwork as a director so my name never went on file with Companies House. Rather, with the others acting as directors, signing necessary paperwork, etc., Patrick held a share in trust for me off of which dividends were drawn and this is how I got paid. I may have got some of these details wrong, by the way - keep in mind, I don't deal with Bizrealm's day-to-day at all.

There are drawbacks to doing things this way: you pay for someone's time, in this case the accountant, to create and administer the company. You can not avoid tax and lots of it. (Granted, drawing dividends is more tax-efficient, but still.) You have to trust a couple of people ABSOLUTELY. I'd underline this a thousand times if I could. Michael for instance is the one person who always knew, and continues to know, everything about my financial and personal affairs. Even Patrick doesn't know everything.

There are benefits though, as well. Because the money stays mainly in the company and is not paid to me, it gets eked out over time, making tax bills manageable, investment more constant, and keeping me from the temptation to go mad and spend it.

I can't stress enough that you might trust your friends and family to the ends of the earth, but they should not be the people who do this for you. Firstly, because they can be traced to you (they know you in a non-professional way). Secondly, because this is a very stressful setup and you need the people handling it to be on the ball. As great as friends and family are that is probably not the kind of stress you want to add to your relationship. I have heard far too many stories of sex workers and others being betrayed by ex-partners who knew the details of their business dealings to ever think that's a good idea.

So how do you know you can trust these people? We've all heard stories of musicians and other artists getting ripped off by management, right? All I can say is instinct. It would not have been in Patrick's interest to grass me, since as my agent he took a portion of my earnings anyway, and therefore had financial as well as personal interest in protecting that. If he betrayed me he would also have suffered a loss of reputation that potentially outweighed any gain. Also, as most people who know him will agree, he's a really nice and sane human being. Same with Michael.

If this setup sounds weirdly paranoid, let me assure you that journalists absolutely did go to Michael's office and ask to see the Bizrealm paperwork, and Patrick absolutely did have people going through his bins, trying to infiltrate his office as interns, and so on. Without the protection of being a silent partner in the company those attempts to uncover me might have worked.

I communicate with some writers and would-be writers who do not seem to have agents. If you are serious about writing, and if you are serious about staying anonymous, get an agent. Shop around, follow your instinct, and make sure it's someone you can trust. Don't be afraid to dump an agent, lawyer, or anyone else if you don't trust them utterly. They're professionals and shouldn't take it personally.

10. Don't break the (tax) law.

Journalists being interested in your identity is one thing. What you really don't want is the police or worse, the tax man, after you. Pay your taxes and try not to break the law if it can be helped. If you're a sex worker blogging about it, get an accountant who has worked with sex workers before - this is applicable even if you live somewhere sex work is not strictly legal. Remember, Al Capone went down for tax evasion. Don't be like Al. If you are a non-sex-work blogger who is earning money from clickthroughs and affiliates on your site, declare this income.

In summer 2010 the HMRC started a serious fraud investigation of me. It has been almost two years and is only just wrapping up, with the Revenue finally satisfied that not only did I declare (and possibly overdeclare) my income as a call girl, but that there were no other sources of income hidden from them. They have turned my life and financial history upside down to discover next to nothing new about me. This has been an expensive and tedious process. I can't even imagine what it would have been like had I not filed the relevant forms, paid the appropriate taxes, and most of all had an accountant to deal with them!

Bottom line, you may be smart - I'm pretty good with numbers myself - but people whose job it is to know about tax law, negotiating contracts, and so on will be better at that than you are. Let them do it. They are worth every penny.

11. Do interviews with care.

Early interviews were all conducted one of two ways: over email (encrypted) or over an IRC chatroom from an anonymising server (I used xs4all). This was not ideal from their point of view, and I had to coach a lot of people in IRC which most of them had never heard of. But again, it's worth it, since no one in the press will be as interested in protecting your identity as you are. I hope it goes without saying, don't give out your phone number.

12. Know when les jeux sont faits.

In November 2009 - 6 years after I first started blogging anonymously - my identity was revealed.

As has been documented elsewhere, I had a few heads-ups that something was coming, that it was not going to be nice, and that it was not going to go away. We did what we could to put off the inevitable but it became clear I only had one of two choices: let the Mail on Sunday have first crack at running their sordid little tales, or pre-empt them.

While going to the Sunday Times - the same paper that had forcibly outed Zoe Margolis a few years earlier, tried to get my details through that old Hotmail address, and incorrectly fingered Sarah Champion as me - was perhaps not the most sensitive choice, it was for me the right move. Patrick recommended that we contact an interviewer who had not been a Belle-believer: if things were going to be hard, best get that out of the way up front.



So that is that. It's a bit odd how quickly things have changed. When I started blogging I little imagined I would be writing books, much less something like this. Being a kind of elder statesman of blogging (or cantankerous old grump if you prefer) is not an entirely comfortable position and one that is still new to me. But it is also interesting to note how little has changed: things that worked in the early 2000s have value today. The field expanded rapidly but the technology has not yet changed all that much.

As before, these ideas do not constitute a foolproof way to protect your identity. All writers - whether writing under their own names or not - should be aware of the risks they may incur by hitting 'publish'. I hope this post at least goes some way to making people think about how they might be identified, and starts them on a path of taking necessary (and in many cases straightforward) precautions, should they choose to be anonymous.

Privacy: Our parents were taking liberties for granted in their analog world, liberties that are not passed down to our children in the transition to digital — such as the simple right to send an anonymous letter.

Sometimes when speaking, I ask the audience how many would be okay with sites like The Pirate Bay, even if it means that artists are losing money from their operation. (Do note that this assertion is disputed: I’m asking the question on the basis of what-if the assertion is true.) Some people raise their hands, the proportion varying with audience and venue.

The copyright industry asserts that the offline laws don’t apply on the Internet when they want to sue and prosecute people sharing knowledge and culture. They’re right, but not in the way they think. They’re right that copyright law does apply online as well. But privacy laws don’t, and they should.

In the offline world, an analog letter was given a certain level of protection. This was not intended to cover just the physical letter as such, but correspondence in general; it was just that the letter was the only form of such correspondence when these liberties were drafted.

First, the letter was anonymous. It was your prerogative entirely whether you identified yourself as sender of the letter on the outside of the envelope, on the inside of the letter (so not even the postal service knew who sent it, only the recipient), or not at all.

Further, the letter was untracked in transit. The only governments tracking people’s correspondence were those we looked down on with enormous contempt.

Third, the letter was secret. The envelope would never we broken in transit.

Fourth, the carrier was never responsible for the contents, of nothing else for the simple reason they were not allowed to examine the content in the first place. But even if they could, like with a envelopeless postcard, they were never liable for executing their courier duties — this principle, the courier immunity or messenger immunity, is a principle that dates as far back as the Roman Empire.

These principles, the liberties of correspondence, should apply to offline correspondence (the letter) just as it should to online correspondence. But it doesn’t. You don’t have the right to send anything you like to anybody you like online, because it might be a copyright infringement — even though our parents had exactly this right in their offline world.

So the copyright industry is right – sending a copied drawing in a letter is a copyright infringement, and sending a copied piece of music over the net is the same kind of copyright infringement. But offline, there are checks and balances to these laws – even though it’s a copyright infringement, nobody is allowed to open the letter in transit just to see if it violates the law, because the secrecy of private correspondence is considered more important than discovering copyright infringements. This is key. This set of checks and balances has not been carried over into the digital environment.

The only time a letter is opened and prevented is when somebody is under individual and prior suspicion of a serious crime. The words “individual” and “prior” are important here — opening letters just to see if they contain a non-serious crime in progress, like copyright infringement, is simply not permitted in the slightest.

There is no reason for the offline liberties of our parents to not be carried over into the same online liberties for our children, regardless of whether that means somebody doesn’t know how to run a business anymore.

After highlighting these points, I repeat the question whether the audience would be okay with sites like The Pirate Bay, even if it means an artist is losing income. And after making these points, basically everybody raises their hand to say they would be fine with it; they would be fine with our children having the same liberty as our parents, and the checks and balances of the offline world to also apply online.

Next in the series, we’re going to look at a related topic – public anonymous announcements and the important role the city square soapbox filled in shaping liberty.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.

Privacy: The liberties of our parents are not being inherited by our children – they are being lost wholesale in the transition to digital. Today, we’ll look at the importance of posting anonymous public messages.

When I was in my teens, before the Internet (yes, really), there was something called BBSes – Bulletin Board Systems. They were digital equivalents of an analog Bulletin Board, which in turn was a glorified sheet of wood intended for posting messages to the public. In a sense, they were an anonymous equivalent of today’s webforum software, but you connected from your home computer directly to the BBS over a phone line, without connecting to the Internet first.

The analog Bulletin Boards are still in existence, of course, but mostly used for concert promotions and the occasional fringe political or religious announcement.

In the early 1990s, weird laws were coming into effect worldwide as a result of lobbying from the copyright industry: the owners of bulletin board systems could be held liable for what other people posted on them. The only way to avoid liability was to take down the post within seven days. Such liability had no analog equivalent at all; it was an outright ridiculous idea that the owner of a piece of land should be held responsible for a poster put up on a tree on that land, or even that the owner of a public piece of cardboard could be sued for the posters other people had glued up on that board.

Let’s take that again: it is extremely weird from a legal standpoint that an electronic hosting provider is in any way, shape, or form liable for the contents hosted on their platform. It has no analog equivalent whatsoever.

Sure, people could put up illegal analog posters on an analog bulletin board. That would be an illegal act. When that happened, it was the problem of law enforcement, and never of the bulletin board owner. The thought is ridiculous and has no place in the digital landscape either.

The proper digital equivalent isn’t to require logging to hand over upload IPs to law enforcement, either. An analog bulletin board owner is under no obligation whatsoever to somehow identify the people using the bulletin board, or even monitor whether it’s being used at all.

The Analog Equivalent Privacy Right for an electronic post hosting provider is for an uploader to be responsible for everything they upload for the public to see, with no liability at all for the hosting provider under any circumstance, including no requirement to log upload data to help law enforcement find an uploader. Such monitoring is not a requirement in the analog world of our parents, nor is there an analog liability for anything posted, and there is no reason to have it otherwise in the digital world of our children just because somebody doesn’t know how to run a business otherwise.

As a side note, the United States would not exist had today’s hosting liability laws in place when it formed. A lot of writing was being circulated at the time arguing for breaking with the British Crown and forming an Independent Republic; from a criminal standpoint, this was inciting and abetting high treason. This writing was commonly nailed to trees and public posts, for the public to read and make up their own minds. Imagine for a moment if the landowners where such trees happened to stand had been charged with high treason for “hosting content” — the thought is as ridiculous in the analog would, as it really is in the digital too. We just need to pull the illusion aside, that the current laws on digital hosting make any kind of sense. These laws really are as ridiculous in the digital world of our children, as they would have been in the analog world of our parents.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.

Privacy: The anonymous cash of our analog parents is fast disappearing, and in its wake comes trackable and permissioned debit cards to our children. While convenient, it’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

In the last article, we looked at how our analog parents could anonymously buy a newspaper on the street corner with some coins, and read their news of choice without anybody knowing about it. This observation extends to far more than just newspapers, of course.

This ability of our parents – the ability to conduct decentralized, secure transactions anonymously – has been all but lost in a landscape that keeps pushing card payments for convenience. The convenience of not paying upfront, with credit cards; the convenience of always paying an exact amount, with debit cards; the convenience of not needing to carry and find exact amounts with every purchase. Some could even argue that having every transaction listed on a bank statement is a convenience of accounting.

But with accounting comes tracking. With tracking comes predictability and unwanted accountability.

It’s been said that a VISA executive can predict a divorce one year ahead of the parties involved, based on changes in purchase patterns. Infamously, a Target store was targeting a high school-aged woman with maternity advertising, which at first made her father furious: but as things turned out, the young woman was indeed pregnant. Target knew, and her own father didn’t.

This is because when we’re no longer using anonymous cash, every single purchase is tracked and recorded with the express intent on using it against us — whether for influencing us to make a choice to deplete our resources (“buy more”) or for punishing us for buying something we shouldn’t have, in a wide variety of conceivable ways.

China is taking the concept one step further, as has been written here before, and in what must have been the inspiration for a Black Mirror episode, is weighting its citizens’ Obedience Scores based on whether they buy useful or lavish items — useful in the views of the regime, of course.

It’s not just the fact that transactions of our digital children are logged for later use against them, in ways our analog parents could never conceive of.

It’s also that the transactions of our digital children are permissioned. When our digital children buy a bottle of water with a debit card, a transaction clears somewhere in the background. But that also means that somebody can decide to have the transaction not clear; somebody has the right to arbitrarily decide what people get to buy and not buy, if this trend continues for our digital children. That is a horrifying thought.

Our parents were using decentralized, censorship resistant, anonymous transactions in using plain cash. There is no reason our digital children should have anything less. It’s a matter of liberty and self-determination.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.

Heart of England Community Foundation has now received more than £7m from the unnamed person

Nordic Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, Ahead of Print. Aim: The aim of this study was to identify and elucidate the differences between highly affiliated and low/non-affiliated participants in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings. Methods: A qualitative study of 24 participants was conducted in Romania between March and June 2021. Data were collected by means of […]

The post Affiliation to the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) community: A qualitative study on differences between highly affiliated and low/non-affiliated individuals was curated by information for practice.

A recent study shows how the public's use of parks and other green spaces in metropolitan areas can be tracked using anonymized GPS data from people's smartphones, which could help guide their management.

Update: 

Final prices

DRONE:NODRONE- £1,800

WARSONG - £3,974

ALL I EVER AM - £2,551

A FRAGILE THING - £3,600

I CAN NEVER SAY GOODBYE -£15,500

The @heartresearchuk auction is up.

DRONE: NODRONE - https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/267030793797

WARSONG - https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/267030793091

ALL I EVER AM - https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/267030794980

 A FRAGILE THING - https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/267030793378

I CAN NEVER SAY GOODBYE - https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/267030794239

Steve Lazarides' personal collection of prints, original works, handwritten press releases and burner phones sold at auction for around $1.4 million

In FY21, national parties and regional parties received ₹427 crore and ₹264 crore worth of funds, respectively, from unknown sources

MobileCoin, the startup known for building Signal’s crypto payments feature, has appointed a new CEO as it works on expanding its encrypted money transfer service to global users in need of a more modern remittance solution. Sara Drakeley is taking the helm as MobileCoin’s new chief executive officer. Replacing her previous role as the firm’s […]

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In a Model block, if the instance-specific value of a model argument has an anonymous structure type, an update diagram reports an error when there are multiple bus types that match that anonymous structure type.This bug exists in the following release(s):
R2020a

This bug has a workaround

Interested in Upgrading?

New features "Tik" and 'TikTalk" have recently debuted all designed to deliver even more value to the teens.

Alcoholics Anonymous, 0845 769 7555.

Director Roland Emmerich and writer John Orloff dip a quill in poison and stab Shakespeare in the back in this well made piece of revisionist history.

Anonymous is wonderful fun and a terrific movie, just don't mistake it for a coherent argument!

AA meetings around Australia are moving from the traditional in-person meetings to online, filling the need for people with alcoholism to find help from others.

Oscar voting is ending and a few motion picture academy members are ready to share their picks.

Terrorists' propaganda appears to be shifting to the Dark Web so that it will be harder to shut down.

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<span class="topsy_trackback_comment"><span class="topsy_twitter_username"><span class="topsy_trackback_content">Whistleblower-Alternativen, Anonymous-Portrait, Jugendmedienschutz ...: Diese Woche wollen wir pr... http://bit.ly/fed0Um #Whistleblower</span></span>