confessions and revelations
 

someone created this dummy account a while back, and i have an idea (stolen from the Howard Stern Show)for it.

login with the password "password" to this account.

post a revelation or confession about yourself, being careful not to reveal your identity.

wait until I (lj) say it's time and then post that you are participating and one of the revelations is you.

then we guess who did what.

rules:
1. NO LYING.

2. you must cop to your revelation/confession when the time comes

3. NO LYING

4.

I lied in the "confessions and revelations" thread even though Jim said not to.

oops....forgot rule # 4

4. no smart ass remarks from bruce.

This is a great idea (among many that LJ, who clearly has a lot of time to himself on that long commute, has had) - except for the rule that you've got to fess up sometime in the future. This is going to seriously limit the number and quality of confessions.

I think it would be a lot more intriguing if people posted their anonymous confessions, and then later said that they had participated...but not to which specific item.

would this be more fun if we never revealed who went with what? might get better dirt that way. unless people lie.

wow. you beat me to it

Ok there was this one time when I got dressed up as a lady of affluence and

wait how come its says footfootfoot?

it wasn't me.

:lol:

Could UT tell by computer magic who the anonymous person was when they logged on based on their computer's address ? (I am very ignorant of proper terminology, forgive me)

good question

Yes. Don't want to, but yes.

could you only tell who was logged in WHILE they were logged in, or could you see who was logged into that acct at the time of a certain post?

In general it's very easy to see what address the person is using assuming they don't have a proxy. Once you have this information it's also very easy to find out who owns the network they came from. That often isn't that useful for determining a person's exact identity. After all, how many Dwellars use AOL? Verizon? Comcast? You'd have to get the company running that network to tell you who had access to that address at a particular time (a process that often requires a court order), unless you can infer something from the pattern of access or you have other knowledge to match things up with.

For example, if you know that a particular poster works at Company X, and you see a connection from companyx.com's network, you can suspect (though not be 100% certain) that that poster did the deed. (The poster who is aware of this and feels like doing something else can use tor, which several people have mentioned before, or several other different proxying methods.)

If a poster logs out, logs back in as "anonymous", and then logs back in under his or her "real" account it will be fairly obvious from the log who this was, assuming that all this is done in short order, just because it happened from the same address in a very short period of time. If you post from your house, log out, go to Starbucks, and then log on as a different username, it's not so obvious.

EDIT: I say this not to bust on UT, but because it's true of any site you visit, and I think it's good for people to be aware of these things.

Also, more and more employers are checking outbound traffic to guard against the release of confidential customer info and/or trade secrets. If you're going to whistleblow against your employer don't do it from your work computer. :headshake

Damn... does this mean UT knows I read the "girl talk"" thread?

login: anonymous
password: password

People!