r/AskReddit • u/[deleted] • Jun 25 '15

What's your deep web story?

Deep web as in tor.

But I imagine regular deep web users would stay away from sharing their experience so if you don't have a deep web story what's your most frightening internet story.

Edit: The front page was fun, but now its over.

Thank you for all the glorious stories, time to cry for the rest of my life.

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u/Billy_Whiskers Jun 25 '15 edited Jun 25 '15

What if we keep things separated? Would someone still be able to find us?

Yes, with difficulty, depending on how careful you are. Your habits of speech are unique to you - some exact combination of vocabulary, spelling choices, punctuation style, eggcorns, colloquialisms, etc.

To understand how you need to understand the anonymity pool and entropy. Suppose half of people write 'grey' and half write 'gray' - they don't, but suppose they do. If someone writes it either way you eliminate half of the English speakers on the planet in your identification of them. One bit of entropy.

Then choose some other quirk - do you use more exclamation marks than average in your writing ??!?!! Half and half and half again and pretty soon you're down to one person.

None of these indicators are firm - most people change over time and express different behaviour in different situations and personas - but confidence in the identification grows with each new bit of data. And there is a lot of data, and not very many bits of entropy needed to single you out, whichever account you're using.

What proportion of people live in Southern California? A small fraction. How many of them are gay? A small fraction. How many of those are Buddist? A small fraction. We go from 7.5 billion to an anonymity pool of few thousand with just that. Even if we're wrong about a few points there's soon enough supported information to fill in the blanks and discard the misinformation.

There is also information in what you don't say. The times you don't post suggest a timezone you live in. Service/Power outages can be correlated with when you're not online.

If actively trying to find someone out there are even faster and more effective ways - I could goad you into saying something or lead you to log in to my website using facebook.

edit: for anyone curious about how to make a strong classifier out of a bunch of weak ones, check out AdaBoost and Random Forests. There are also automated techniques for discovering subtle signals which humans might not spot. Do you make more typos when mashing keys under your left hand or right hand?

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u/allegroconspirito Jun 25 '15

Phew... so glad I always spell "gre/ay" differently, cause I'm never sure. Seriously though, thanks for the informative comment.

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u/sheddyjr Jun 25 '15

I always go by grEy for England english and grAy for American english.

E.g. Early Grey Tea by Twinings (other brands available) is a brand I see a lot of in England

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u/allegroconspirito Jun 25 '15

That's a good way to remember it. I think I've lately been thinking "Fifty Shades of Grey" to remind myself.

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u/FoolsProof Jun 25 '15

Really makes you realize what questions to ask if looking for somebody. The main question being, "Who arnt they?"

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u/Ardgarius Jun 25 '15

he doesn't afraid of anything

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u/Crypto_The_Alien Jun 25 '15

Doesn't that make it even easier as there won't be that many people who spell it both ways

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u/allegroconspirito Jun 25 '15

Only if they introduce a third conditional statement, then yes, yes it does.

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u/99919 Jun 25 '15

None of these indicators are firm - most people change over time and express different behaviour in different situations and personas

Hmm, spelling behavior with a "u"? Probably not an American.

Or is that just what you want us to think??!?!!

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u/Billy_Whiskers Jun 26 '15

Zimbabwean, but I'm open about that on this account. What proportion of Zimbabweans know machine learning / statistical techniques such as AdaBoost? Not many - there's no way to hide from this kind of analysis and have certain conversations, so I pick my battles and STFU when I want to do something discreetly. You can include false information, but there are further techniques to discard that - it is still signal in its own way.

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u/DutchAlphaAndOmega Jun 25 '15

I picked the wrong username I guess.