[sandworm101]

If that were true, a great many more people would be locked up, or disappeared, across the world. Pseudonyms have been essential long before the internet, long before electricity. They should not be looked down upon.

Nor should they be a privilege. It is cute when a celeb adopts a "stage name". We don't really consider that hiding, but politicians use stage names too. When you want to actually research a person, say to find out if they have a criminal background, cute "stage names" become barriers to legitimate research. If the wealthy and powerful get to use pseudonyms, everyone gets to use pseudonyms.

[noobermin]

Any devoted individual with sufficient will and power can track you down. Even with a little less power, will can do it. We rely on the fatigue of adversaries and limits on their time and resources. Any sufficiently motivated entity can find out who you are.

[gambiting]

Any sufficiently motivated entity can easily bypass any kind of lock on my front door, no matter how much money/effort I put into securing it. Doesn't mean I should leave my door unlocked though.

[noobermin]

Of course not. I don't think it need be stated on HN but just in case, security is all about probability, and part of that guess is how motivated your adversary is. If you do a good job of making it too much of a hassle to target you, you can get away with not worrying about being successfully attacked.

If you are a high value target, then you need to step up your game, but people always make mistakes and don't appreciate unusual attack vectors.

[sandworm101]

>> Any sufficiently motivated entity can find out who you are.

Then the CIA and FDB have jobs for you. There are a great many people who very effectively hide their online activities from even the best and most determined adversaries. Encryption, obfuscation, old fashioned trade craft, it isn't all that difficult to hide online. Anyone who deems the fight unwinnable has accepted an end to privacy.

[noobermin]

I don't think it's unwinnable, but why would you put out the impression that it's not actually very hard to thwart any adversary? Note that the people who can truly get away with it are a very small bunch or they aren't valuable enough to target.

See Dread Pirate Roberts for a good example. People eventually get caught if they make enough mistakes and are sufficiently valuable to powerful adversaries.

May be we actually agree about how hard it is, but are saying different words, like when you say "a great many" and I say "very small bunch" (like a "great many" in light of the power of actors like governments and ubiquity of surveillance). But such a perspective of complacency expressed here could only lead poor folk to being too lax, and thus, eventually finding their security compromised.