Neil Harris wrote: > John at Darkstar wrote: > >> The interesting thing is "who has interest in which users identity". >> Lets make an example, some organization sets up a site with a honeypot >> and logs all visitors. Then they correlates that with RC-logs from >> Wikipedia and then checks out who adds external links back to >> themselves. They do not need direct access to Wikipedia logs or the raw >> traffic. >> >> There is only one valid reason as I see it to avoid certain stat >> engines, and that is to block advertising companies from getting >> information about the readers. The writers does not have any real >> anonymity at all. >> >> John >> >> > > Indeed they could. But even so, they would still have great difficulty > in getting more than a small fraction of Wikipedia's readers to both > visit the honeypot and make an edit that links to it, and the vast > majority of unaffected users will still avoid being bitten by this > attack. And even then, they will still only have obtained a mapping > between the user's current IP and their Wikipedia account, and will > still have to correlate this back to a personal identity, which is often > harder than it might seem to be in theory. > > The world is a dangerous place, but just because privacy and security > can never be absolute is not a reason to make good faith efforts to > preserve it as much of both as reasonably possible within the limits of > time and resources available. > > Just because a door can be knocked down with a sledgehammer (or a wall > demolished with a pneumatic hammer) is not a reason not to have a lock > on it, or a door there in the first place. > > -- Neil > > >
The Finnish folk saying has it that locks are there against honest folk, not against thieves. That is any lock can be compromised by determined enough pursuivants, but are a significant signal and sense that what is on the other side is not a matter for all passersby. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
