I wonder ...

b1lk1

Tech Monkey
You'd sure see a helluva lot less trolls since they wouldn't be able to hide as easily.
 

Optix

Basket Chassis
Staff member
Pr0n sites everywhere would see a sharp decline in traffic resulting in a smut recession where hundred of thousands of porn stars are left without jobs. Sad. Very sad.
 

madstork91

The One, The Only...
I have lived in south Korea for a little over a year, and I know exactly what would happen:

Corporations would get away with more since there would be no anonymous way to speak out against them online.
Corporations would then sue any blogger as if they were a legitimate news organization, and what they wrote was liable by large, massive sums after a long legal battle.
We would have to find another country to go through in order to speak out against anything.
The US government would be able to instantly hold anyone legally accountable for anything said that could be construed to lead to any damage to a person or their property.
Corporations would be able to still anonymously make fake reviews on websites to try to convince you to buy their products.
Identity theft would actually be easier, since your action online would be connected to your personal identity. (Its the highest crime in south korea. Period.)
The RIAA and MPAA would stop making requests to youtube to remove a video that shows 2 seconds over the fair use allowance of a copyrighted material, and instead sue the person who uploaded it in order to intimidate people into not uploading anything even closely related.

Im sure i could go on, but everything except that RIAA and MPAA thing literally happens here on a daily basis.

If Techgage was a bigger operation, South Korea would already have notified rob that any user from south korea must be verified through a true identity check before I could post here, which would be at Rob's expense. Something similar would happen back home too.
 

b1lk1

Tech Monkey
I am 50/50 that I think the loss of net anonymity would be a bad thing for these reasons:

1. I really believe that the net is full of activists that really enjoy starting trouble more than helping a cause.

2. We cannot live our daily lives in the real world in anonymity so why is it so important on the web?

3. Other than identifying information, what could be posted about you without your permission that people could use to steal your identity? I don't post personal info of any kind anywhere so I feel I'd be relatively safe.

4. As I said earlier, all it DOES promote is trolls.

5. We could most likely alleviate alot of fraud since people selling would no longer be able to hide. This does relate more to forum style buying/selling, but that is a common source of easy fraud.

6. It would be a pain for forum owners, but in the end as long as the fees are not restrictive they would be doing the world a favor by eliminating trolls before they could post.

There are more reasons floating around in my head, but those are definitely the main ones. Besides, I have very radical political views. I already believe all our net traffic is fully filtered by the government, they just don't use it against us, yet.......
 
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madstork91

The One, The Only...
Read above... in the country with absolutely minimal anonymity, it has done NOTHING but increase fraud.

And if the information was taken from a hacked site, that site is then shutdown, and sued by thousands of people. As such, they only really have about 4-5 main websites in all of Korea. This is not a joke.
 

b1lk1

Tech Monkey
I read what you wrote very clearly. I also can see where it will behoove website owners to actually work hard to maintain their sites to protect their clients AND it will also lend to people being more proactive in protecting their favorite sites.

I understand that what we are discussing is repressive media tactics, but there is far too much garbage on the WWW and far too many garbage sites that steal your info the second you log on and sell it to the highest bidders anyways.

Any way you look at it, the powers that be will be making sure net anonymity dies in our lifetime.
 

Psi*

Tech Monkey
I heard about the politicians considering the idea of removing anonymity from the net a few weeks ago. Possibly the publicly motivated reason is to track terrorists. Yet anonymous proxy servers are still in abundance ... I am pretty sure.:eek: And anyone in some country with little law, order, or control could (& likely is) make use of this or similar tricks to hide their identity.

So I think that laws as this would actually be damaging to law enforcement as the laws would force all those who are not making use of such devices ... to start using them. Many examples with one of the most famous is US Prohibition back in the '20s.

The tighter controls get, the deeper those whose intent to do bad go ... as well as those who just want what ever it is they want ...

where there is a will, there is a way
 
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