"He that would keep a secret must keep it secret,
    that he hath the secret to keep."

    Who said that?

    It was Sir Humphrey.

    - Who said it originally?
    - Francis Bacon, wasn't it?

Starting a subtitle 2653 in https://yes-minister.com/ym2x01-2x07.srt

Best show ever

Still perfectly relevant today as well.

Human nature never changes

The only way you can tell it wasn't made today is that nobody has a laptop or phone.

I read an OpSec manual around the time of GamerGate. One truly basic thing: never do anything to link two accounts together. Never mention it, never promote it. I doubt many people know who I am on reddit but I 100% know that anyone sufficiently inclined could identify me.

Next: obviously avoid biographical details. People can compile a lot of information about you online.

Quite a while ago somebody shared some post analysis tool that would try to pair up the accounts of multi-account users. Used some cosine distance magic IIRC. Anyway, can’t remember the link, but it seemed to impress folks (I have only one account so wasn’t able to test it myself).

I wouldn’t be surprised if anybody you wanted to do opsec against had a much better version of that tool…

I do sort of wonder where that sort of stuff will go. In one hand, we’re all mostly just shitposting anyway so we don’t really need privacy. On the other, I dunno, we all enjoy being able to explore ideas pseudonymously, right? I wonder if we’ll all end up having to pass our arguments into LLMs to get any sort of pseudonymity in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 (offline now, though).

if your profiles are not filled with random made up data that is never the same across accounts, you're doing it wrong :)

As a former president of the United States, I’m inclined to agree but the random made up data needs to be subtle enough not to warrant suspicion.

I totally concur, Mr President. Now I must steal back my spaceship from the Russian embassy before moon fall tomorrow night or I won't get my deposit back!

Profiles with random data stand out and get extra attention. What’s the same between your accounts? Random data.

A person in Alaska is fishing. A person in China is sleeping.

Those two people are the same person.

How does that work?

It doesn't

I wonder if that really works / throws anything off?

Every time we see someone caught it is one very solid and clear link that triggers the rest of pieces to fall into place. It almost never seems like it's a bunch of minor bits making up the whole.