This is just one reason why both people (individuals) and businesses should have actual, official identities on the internet. It prevents illegal and fraudulent activity. It also keeps things like bots from exploiting us, which people do fall for. There are a handful of countries (not many), though, that do give you an official identity on the internet.

While official identities may solve some problems, I'm more concerned about the myriad new problems they create, e.g. privacy concerns, who/what is in charge of setup/maintenance/verification/updates, tech literacy of the public, misuse of the data, etc.

I also worry about how difficult it would be to the statutes and regulations for such a system. Many of the people creating, regulating, and adjudicating on such a system are not very tech literate. Even well-minded politicians would have a very difficult time creating a benevolent/benign official identity system that couldn't be misused like many of the allegations against China's social credit system.

Personally, I would prefer most of my internet use to be distinct from my official identity. But, I wouldn't stand in the way of others that want to have a way to prove their identity. Optional enrollment might be a compromise? If fraud could be consistently prevented and enrollment didn't become compulsory in a round-about way through most large internet adjacent corporations requiring its use.

So said 'disabled'

I strongly disagree with Drudge's politics and sensationalism, but I've been a long time regular visitor just because of the layout and design.

And I've always assumed he used the secondary sources (including shady ones) to avoid paywalls.

Isn’t this effectively sending your friend a torrent link to a pirated game so they can avoid paying for it? NYT oughta sue for this.

From what I heard Matt no longer runs the website

You'd think a "long time regular visitor" of the site would notice that lately it's been indistinguishable from the Huffington Post.

If you like that layout, citizenfreepress is significantly better, it _appears_ Matt sold the site long ago.

Didn't know about citizenfreepress, will add it to my rotation. thanks!

This does sound like an interesting story, is there a link that's not Buzzfeed?

This looks like original reporting by Buzz Feed News, so linking to Buzz Feed News would seem to be the right choice.

Listicle Buzz Feed ≠ Buzz Feed News.

Drudge has been doing this kind of linking for a while – rather than linking to WaPost, for example, he links to greenwichtime.com, which prints WaPost articles.

Fair enough. My fault for not knowing the difference between the two sites.

I honestly don’t know why they didn’t do a rebrand for their hard news division. Neither of the sites benefits from being associated with the other.

I assumed greenwichtime.com carried WaPo content

Also thought dnyuz was some new nyt operation

lmgtfy ?