is there something called a "RL" that identifies an indy writer here in any way that is intrusive or abusive ?

who can locate our computer ID # and then maybe our address or email addresses or any personal info about ANY ONE WHO WRITES ON THIS INDYMEDIA SITE ????

is there an undisclosed or unadmited danger to using anonymous names ...for the very reason of needing to Protect our identities from maybe unscrupulous attackers or invaders of our privacy?

A recent post threatened and implied that it was possible to reveal or investigate anyone here further than their writing on this site...is that actual or wishful power-thinking?

Enough that NSA and other big govt and big corporate organizations use us as guinea pigs and slaves to their advertisements.

Have you all seen the great movie - free download -
"Terms and Conditions may Apply'....???

check it out.
how much we are unaware we are "agreeing' to that is to the advantage of the commercial advertisers or services they offer 'for free' w/o revealing how they gain & benefit on back side [hidden side] of our automatic agreement .

What does anyone actually know of this free-wheeling site that may have few to no monitors and cannot afford to do more than keep it 'going' on...barely...maybe ???

what else do we idiots in USA and regular folk NOT KNOW??

Plse....tell us what you know ...not paranoidal think but actually know is so.

click to enlarge ^

so many questions, so few functioning brain cells


if you're THAT worried about it _why do you post here_ ?

because you're not, this is just yet another installment of the 'lets badger the few people who bother to post here at all so the site will go from almost dead to completely dead' - except for the ayn rand jism


John has tried to limit the ways publishers and commenters can track visitors, such as re-encoding uploaded pictures, however embedded off-site links and images, when they go to servers the 'enemy' has access to, _but not to Tor hidden services_ (which is where I am) will then know your IP when your browser automaticly loads them. The Images can be invisible too, such as 'web beacons' (1x1 transparent GIF's are the most common), JS exploits, and cross-domain cookies, flash cookies, hidden IFRAMES and other methods.

It mostly depends on your choice of browser and it's security settings.

This site can only do so much and still maintain functionality, and it's not the admin's responsibility _or mine_ to review, tutor, or even comment on such issues.


If you're looking to open a dialogue with the admin here I'm afraid you'll be sadly disappointed.


I am the one most likely to reply here to general requests and questions. Who else comments here are almost entirely shills, trolls, (including hasbara and tea baggers) sometimes people who have published, responding to their story but with no other interests, and every once in awhile, John, _when the mood strikes him_ which isn't very often..


I was part of a group that used to post here pretty regularly going back 10 years, but THEY'RE ALL GONE NOW.

One by one they dropped out, finding other sites like blogs, etc. I run a forum on Tor hidden services, among other activities, and out of habit, sometimes try to keep people here updated on climate chaos, although nobody here actually cares about the climate, so I don't bother to publish or even update much anymore unless it directly applies to where this site is based - LA



for example:


Ongoing drought means Central Valley farmers to receive no federally allocated irrigation water this year.


Central Valley farmers in drought-stricken California just got very bad news: the ongoing drought means they will get no federally allocated irrigation water this year.

The Bureau of Reclamation made the announcement on Friday.

"This low allocation is yet another indicator of the impacts the severe drought is having on California communities, agriculture, businesses, power, and the environment," Michael L. Connor, Reclamation Commissioner, said in a statement.

The state's snowpack is at just 29 percent of normal levels, and the latest Drought Monitor shows the entire state blanketed in some level of drought, with over 68 percent hit with levels classified as "extreme" or "exceptional."

This follows a month in which Gov. Jerry Brown declared a drought State of Emergency and state officials warned that 17 communities could run out of water.



David Hayes, a former U.S. Interior Department official, says Bureau of Reclamation's announcement is the reality of California's unsustainable water usage coming home to roost.

"California is running out of options to deal with the fact that it has basically been relying on more water than it has long-term access to," Hayes told the Los Angeles Times.

"It's like reality is closing in on California," Hayes said.


- or this -


1400 gigatons of methane lay sequestered under Arctic submarine permafrost in the ESAS, but the Arctic submarine permafrost isn’t the only zone in which large volumes of methane lay hidden. The Amundsen Basin, one of the deepest trenches in the Arctic Ocean, in the Laptev Sea is a known emitter of methane from sub-sea sources. A region near Svalbard both stores and emits large volumes of methane.

And, recently, high rates of methane release have been observed near Baffin Bay. A complete catalog of these stores has not been adequately assessed. But, in combination, it is likely that they at least approach the total volume of stores in the vulnerable East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS)



- or this -


"The fantasy of expectation created by mass media, besides being a driver of consumption for the few who can actually afford crumbling junk, also has other malignant features.

It makes nearly everyone else feel like a loser.

Many psycho-social problems in industrial ‘civilization’ can be traced to these counterfeit assurances, these dangling pseudo-carrots… including but certainly not limited to: the prevalence of dysfunctional families and work places, rampant unacknowledged alcoholism, and a wide variety and gradient of aggressions that bludgeon quality of life and foster defensibly rational paranoia.

The feelings of inferiority which result from minds being marinated in slime mold programming that dredges up hankerings for ‘unobtainium‘ engenders many discomforts and psychoses throughout society.

All that layered upon emergent fear of rapidly encroaching poverty.

Of course, worse, there are the absolute conundrums: the plumes of radioactive substances, catastrophic climate change, and the 6th Great Extinction… all caused by, but now beyond, human control.

Further, in such dire circumstances, the mass media sector is under intensified pressure to continue to ramp up and regurgitate the fantasy version of Life on Earth. To spew glossy fictional dream paths in the midst of decline.

Creating more vicious cycles of stormy doom."



..but of course _nobody here cares at all about any of these things_


- and so I quote this -

"this is so much BS

It’s worse than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It’s spending your last minutes analyzing the Titanic engineering specs or the steering dynamics while the engine is fully engaged, stopped, or reversed."

It’s spending your last minutes analyzing the rental market or bitching about the working poor and homeless then playing the victim when called out on it

ok....
conversationally noting those who have longest words- those that must be read with patience if not much comprehension- sound like they know….it all…but we can't all be paranoid and smart too, can we ?

fear of death and destruction – or call it climate-CHANGEs or apocalypse or catastrophe or ‘the end of this earth’ in exaggerated stories…or disasters or even “hell on earth” or in human hearts / imaginations …. [these are more ordinary words - that then elude the dumb and dumber of us]...those depicted traditional descriptions that leads to fear and fear and fear

if not of death but then all else too - ok, descripts that may pertain to some Endings...[note the plural, end-ing-s, not ‘just 1 end’ = as insisted upon by limited stories in religious dogmas – by those who insist Only Their version/ definition is "True" and surely, ONLY ‘one truth’ exists …at least for them]…

fear of climates being different than what many humans have become accustomed to and find most convenient to maintain their current life images/ life styles too.

But : questions of privacy are fair to be asking...for those who are not so computer tech savy and not so educated in those ways, but in other ones.

and when threats are stated that imply someone - a stranger of dubious motivations - can find more than any LA Indy Writer Here r or there intends, then it would be smart to actually Ask, to learn, to know and maybe then hide in some dank cave or dry desert with turtles - where privacy and ID is irrelevant

But if some are wanting to COMMUNICATE here , with whomever may also want to know or learn or discuss That Topic, and not shift off to other topics on the same page, well....

then, privacy and preventing external unwanted access is a concern. so looking a bit and not yet knowing much, this was a site that remains for further exploration....
http://whatismyipaddress.com/ip-lookup

so what is RL ? as in "PS. I didn't post your RL info.... ????

and like the crazy guy's above comment and technical language - and apparent knowing stuff most of us ordinary humans may not - at least in those tech sci fi mechanical prgm’g computer areas - do not give anyone their desired superiority nor exclusivity nor longevity possible.

Sorry. That illusion also needs to be dismantled, from way up high where thoughts like to reside.

Repeat: can anyone reading these posts [or comments on other newspaper sites] be a secret source to further locate more info about the writers of comments ? Is it possible ? How ?

"I understand some people have called you insane.

They are quite right.

By the standards of the prevailing establishment you are completely insane. You are as insane as those abolitionists who opposed slavery. You are as insane as those antiracist activists who fought for civil rights. You are as insane as those Germans who opposed Hitler.

If everyone was as insane as you, there would be no wars, there would be no poverty and humanity would not be headed for extinction."


RL = Real Life.. another internet slang term for it is 'meat space'

I was refering to John - that I already know the stuff he posted but didn't because there's no point..

..there's even less point with you



"I can think of nothing more misleading and underhanded and unpleasant than faux optimism in the face of fatal danger."

"Yes Logspirit.

Thanks for putting that so clearly.

“Baseless optimistic foolishness” is so well put and sums up the American dream to me. Most people over here are not so easily infected. Maybe this pursuit of happiness is at the bottom of it: happiness being interpreted as my right to make my personal dreams come true rather than a contentment in a peaceful society."

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

you'll find these discussions, that I'm quoting, on :

http://www.guymcpherson.com/

http://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/

http://arctic-news.blogspot.fr/

I function as a messenger here nothing more

lots of info but a direct simple answer for everyone else to also be able to read and maybe maybe maybe might find something they did not yet know...

is that possible here ?

same question remains...if not a victim, nor an aggressor oppressor, are other categories equally possible in tech worlds ?

superiority assumptions do not help anyone but the person wanting to elevate status to stay safe...mostly.

♫ eeny meeny miny moe ♫

♫ catch a tiger by the toe ♫

♫ if he hollers make him pay ♫

♫ fifty dollars every day ♫

my mother told me to choose the very best one and

you

are

IT!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I post here mostly for amusement, nothing earth shattering has ever happened here in over 10 years, so I've no reason to expect anything ever will - until it's too late.

By then there will be no one left to post to..

The above links are tame & mild compared to what I say on my forum. This is nursery rhyme public space, the above links are adults having polite conversations, while my forum is like Encyclopedia Dramatica.

In light of the info about the NSA, the definitive answer is "no".

But it's the same at all sites.

However, all that said, this is an older server and that's a potential problem. It's more likely to have unknown security holes.

the site software and server config don't log things, but we can log the poster IPs and we sometimes do when too many maniacs jump onto the site.

however, c_i is correct that if someone posts HTML code that includes an image, the image will leak visitor info. that's a security hole but hard to fix because some people like posting those images. it would be possible to leak your ip address to a third party, and then if you comment, you cause another "hit" to the page, and the person might correlate the posting time with the times of the hits on their logs, and find the ip address.

that said - your overall risk is low. consider that avowed anarchists and communists use various google services. so do avowed nazis. and there are such people on facebook of all places. many also put up ads, which are another kind of "beacon". people are out there giving up a hafl dozen cookies to these giant services that openly cooperate with the big police and spy agencies.

c_i probably found my name on the imc list, or maybe from the registration of laindymedia.org which had my name and previous address on it. i like being anonymous, but i also don't hide my personal info all the time.

Trying to figure out how they manage to marginalize people at the front lines (like me), to see if there was a pattern or method to it, to see if this policy is systematic or based on individual sites, to see what types of published stories and comments get hidden, to track the syndication process, to see what IMC 'seeds' the stories (mainly hasbara pieces out of NYC), to find out what experiences other people and groups (especially overseas - the international IMCs) have, to find out 'where it all went sour' (I was one of the original Seattle IMC publishers, back when Seattle was the only IMC)


- in essence muckraking everything I could find, more than once. I've done this three times - and compared what I found, tracked the de-evolution of the IMC network (again, like with pacifica, like KBOO)

One can label the commenting of the results of such work 'weird' 'mean' 'asshole' and so on, but it doesn't alter what I've found.



I found you simply by googling johnk, which led me to your code writing, the discussions I've already cited about the priorities of sf-active, etc.


several years ago..

I also have your picture. (all this is refered to as 'dox', there are dox sites on the Tor hidden services, which anyone is free to anonymously post dox on anyone. ) I didn't 'drop your dox' for the reasons I've already stated. But that doesn't stop anyone else from doing so. Some people drop dox _just to be mean_, for the lulz.


About those groups you just mentioned using the various sites that I myself have blocked - the real action takes place on Tor hidden services, (and I2P) which is why I have over a hundred of them (I'm the single biggest hidden service operator on Tor - out of around 700 public live onions total, I run 132 of them at this point)

The large group of 100 are all gateways to an overlaid P2P network which filters access based on user agent whitelisting, while the older group of 28 are 'dummy' onions (all starting with 22222xxxxxxxxxxx) meant to trap unwanted traffic (mainly bots) along with a few ordinary onions that go to the webservers including the forum.


(naturally I'm only counting and mentioning the public onions)



There's a whole other world out there, which 'clearnet' server operators like you seem to be unfamiliar with. Ditto for security vulnerabilities. One IMC is on Tor hidden services - theres no reason why you can't be too.


"But it's the same at all sites. "

no it is not



I'm consolidating the rest of your replies to just this comment:


"and looking at some of my old posts, i get the impression this site just attracts assholes."

see this is what I mean by sheltered, imagine running servers in a network where no IP is available to log or block, where everyone is anonymous, and feels free to do or say ANYTHING including DDoS'ing servers, where the bulk of the visitors are kids looking for thrills pretending to be adults (and act accordingly) and where several dirty bot operators routinely ignore ROBOTS.TXT and noindex, nofollow meta tags, and even direct, personal requests, to not spider, with dubious intentions. The Tor hidden services are a MUCH more hostile environment than here.

and you shouldn't need to look at _your_ old posts, provided you're not going senile.

speaking of which:


"I don't have a BofA account anymore. IMC had one, and may still have one. Where did you get the info?"

You posted it. I consider this weaseling. "anymore" "may"




"PHPSESSID cookie"

where there's a will there's a way


The forum here uses session IDs to track both visitors and authenticated users (members logged in) and optional cookies and JS, if the browser allows.




"Regarding entering email addresses - I just don't like it. It's a bad habit, and one that's hard to break."

Doesn't have to be live e-mail, in fact I have no live e-mail, I got rid of mine years ago. Any passcode would do, e-mail is just a convenient form most people already have.

As long as it's not public, only the server and the person posting know it, so it serves as an authentication.


Relying on cookies and JS are 'bad habits' (on the hidden services the perspective is a bit different)

You once insisted JS was secure (not exploitable) yet this was how Freedom Hosting was brought down, and it's visitors identified, through a 'zero day' JS exploit, along with mozilla's cooperation (again) and the Tor developers deciding to have JS enabled by default in the Tor Browser Bundle.

This led to the biggest bust in Tor's history, hundreds of sites shut down. I had several accounts on FH myself and was none too happy about it.


I had invested months worth of posting, thousands of posts, on Onionforum 2.0 and all that was lost. Then an inmature person set up Onionforum 3.0 which almost immediately started censoring my posts (because I was 'mean')

- you start to see now what being mean accomplishes, it's an excellent test for censorship, among other things.


Investigative journalism that goes wherever the leads are, and takes no prisoners, and is, by it's very nature, mean.

"oh ok" - I didn't realize i put the IMC bofa stuff up, but yeah when we started we had an account there. I say "may" because that account might still exist within bofa. I don't know if we told them to cancel it. It's probably gone. Anna runs the money - and we basically don't get any except some money for bandwidth, so, there's not much to do. You're seeing nefarious intent behind every word, even when there isn't any.

I've thought about running Tor services. There just aren't enough hours in the day. I try to "do my part" by running a freenet node, but don't know if it helps at all.

I sometimes use Tor, so, thanks for running a node and relay.

As far as requesting email and hiding it or disposing of it - I don't like it not because I'm worried about me. If I don't know a site and don't want to be known, I use a fake address. I'm worried about the readers, who I've seen post really risky or angry comments and then use their real addresses. Sometimes, people put their email addresses on here, and then write in asking to have the address removed.

I would think the ideal imc news software exposes everything that's recorded. So, if you put it in, it comes back out... or maybe something is deleted and less comes out. But the point is, there shouldn't be huge invisible areas.

JS is not required on this site. It is required to report posts, but I think that's all. I'm going to try posting this with js off.

I agree - investigative journalism is mean, but you're just being mean without that as the reason. just own it. sometimes i'm an asshole online because I feel crappy about something going on in my life. it's not good, but it happens.

"You're seeing nefarious intent"

Funny I was thinking the same thing when you asked where I got the info.


"I sometimes use Tor"

So you don't need the web2tor gateway and you're able to get to my forum at it's new onion

http://rv6slztxzaydpo62.onion:8000/phpbb/

notice it's port 8000



"you're just being mean without [investigative journalism] as the reason"

Sorry you'll need to quantify that. Mean to who, when, where? Compared to the norm in what net?

Compared to on air? On my forum?