Submitted by Bezotcovschina in meta (edited )

/u/Marco the admin registered 4 years ago, first post today. Who are they? Person of mystery.

Is it appropiative to want to know more information about administrators? By "more information", of course, I mean anything not reviling. Like, how long they are admin? Who made them admin?

Is it healthy curiosity?

Forget I ever asked, my bad.

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Tequilx_Wolf wrote (edited )

A failed attempt at security culture that remained as a likely useless stopgap measure while admins try to find better ways to navigate security concerns.

I think it does raise interesting questions about the safety of admins if you need to build a personality/trust profile to become an admin.

It means that being admin does come with real risks that are heightened in specific circumstances that admins might find themselves in. Seems largely unavoidable.

All these things being said, I think it's probably important that we keep on top of basic security culture concerns. If the basic premise of security culture is that everything should be on a need to know basis, where does the balance get struck between security and trust in this context, where in in my case and others our profile is already compromised - ie. there is a significant amount of information that can be attained or deduced about us just by looking at what is available.

Definitely it seems to me that the first action should never to be making a public post full of questions towards transparency, which alerts everyone to something that clearly was not public, on a website built for anonymity. Given that this is not the first time that this has happened it does say something about the culture of the space. (and also said admin's naivete)

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zoom_zip wrote (edited )

i think there are ways you could daisy chain your anonymity to allow some users to maintain that trust relationship while also abandoning one account and replacing it with a new one that doesn’t have a history of potentially compromising profile info.

for example.

zoom_zip is my account. it says a lot about me. someone could use it to build a profile of me. it’s probably about time i abandon it and make a new account.

so i do that.

i can’t let people know in an obvious way because that defeats the purpose of changing account, but i could let people i trust know on matrix, on mastodon, or in private message.

then if a question like this comes up, that group of users could just say “they are vouched for” and that would alert people that this is a known person, without expressly revealing who they are.

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Tequilx_Wolf wrote (edited )

Yeah, versions of this are likely possible. There are more issues though, but that's not for here.

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emoticons wrote

This is advice you didn't ask for so please skip if you don't need

If you made new_zoom_zip do not stop posting on zoom_zip unless bit by bit, post on both accounts to stop correlate new_zoom_zip account creation date with zoom_zip last posted date

new_zoom_zip is a new user so they likely not know about /f/akeplastictrees so be careful if wanting to post in /f/akeplastictrees with new_zoom_zip, Most of the post in /f/akeplastictrees are zoom_zip so if new_zoom_zip start to post most of the posts it can be a fingerprint too

When you stop zoom_zip you will lose moderate on /f/akeplastictrees and if new_zoom_zip wants that and posts to /f/meta about moderate /f/akeplastictrees it can also be fingerprint

also you type with very rarely uppercase so it is a fingerprint. I have no advice for that sorry

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zoom_zip wrote

NEW ZOOM_ZIP TYPES ONLY IN UPPERCASE

thanks for the tips

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Bezotcovschina OP wrote (edited )

Thank you! Now everything fell into place!

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lettuceLeafer wrote (edited )

If the basic premise of security culture is that everything should be on a need to know basis

It isn't tho. If such a premise was actually done by any posters on raddle there would never be any posts. Any halfway decent writing on security culture outlines the severe pitfalls and dangers of such a mentality.

Ig I could write more but I'm not sure what it would look like. It's like critiquing an argument built on laughable ridiculous concepts. Like flat earth or gravity not existing. I guess the big one is a disagreement with the idea that there is some line of info u need to give out or not give out. For the vast majority of important reasons to give out info you can choose to not give it out but sacrifices to security culture are mostly made to have semi decent social relationships and mutual aid. Both of which more often then are optional. Not doing them is a very bad choice but an option regardless.

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zoom_zip wrote

Who made them admin?

why would something like this matter?

also, in anarchist relational security we should look out for each other’s privacy. your curiosity is probing. do you really need to know? if you don’t need to know, then asking those kinds of questions could be putting that person in a compromising position.

curiosity is a funny thing. i understand your desire to want to know, but unless marco wants to come here and answer this question for themselves, it’s not anybody else’s place to say.

maybe send them a private message to ask.

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[deleted] wrote (edited )

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zoom_zip wrote

you’re right and i agree. i think the “admin” hierarchy makes this more complicated. but i do think this could be a pm before a public post.

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kin wrote

It's for their opsec, they are an old user here

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lettuceLeafer wrote

Nah I think it's a good idea to be curious. Having some rando have admin privileges is a bit concerning. Having some rando being able to override the direct message rules of people who specifically turn off direct messages so they can't be groomed isn't the best.

I guess there's not much more of an issue than that. But I still thjnk the one issue above is good enough to be curious / have cause for concern.

Now I don't think there is a problem with admins having that ability. I think having that ability added with not having any trust of that user is a bad combo. Tho I don't have to do any admin work so I don't really have a horse in this race or am advocating for anything being done.

I am saying that your concerns are valid and people trying to invalidate reasonable concerns suck.

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zoom_zip wrote

why do you trust any other admin more than marco?

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lettuceLeafer wrote

How can I trust someone I know literally nothing about. I have some level of confidence in TW ziq and monfogo not being predators. Marco has done literally nothing to give me any confidence in them not being abusive. U can't and shouldn't trust someone who has done nothing to gain trust, bc abusive predatory behavior is the status quo.

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ziq wrote

do you really know more about marco than mofongo? they're both pretty invisible. mofongo only shows up to rail on me when i'm being petty

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lettuceLeafer wrote

ehh monfogo has taken the time to do some moral panic against my post and has kids which helps gain some trust at least. Which is a lot more than literally nothing

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ziq wrote

I'm pretty sure mofongo is Matthew McConaughey.

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kin wrote

Marco Will eat your soul at midnite

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