Agreed. This feels similar to how armchair security experts will tweet about bad opsec every time someone is identified.
Obviously, Scott didn’t expect the blog to be so big or his anonymity to be such and issue when he started using his real first and middle names. It’s self-congratulatory to imagine that you would have made a different decision given the full benefit of hindsight. It’s not like Scott could go back and change his online name to something more anonymous after the blog became more popular.
> In the financial industry we get around that most commonly by giving people “desk names.” If you’ve called and spoken to Sarah Smith, you are very likely not speaking to someone who answers to Sarah or Smith outside of work.
His Tweetstorm is a long-winded way of saying “Scott should have used a completely fake name instead of a partially fake name.” That’s not really a guarantee that his real name wouldn’t have been discover. It’s also missing the point of the issue.
My point was demonstrating that there are broadly accepted professional situations where even quite public people operate under pseudonyms due to perceived risk of harm, in a way which is probably not legible to the news media.
> Obviously, Scott didn’t expect the blog to be so big or his anonymity to be such and issue when he started using his real first and middle names
He definitely did. Slatestarcodex was started to replace his old blog which was not anonymous and was becoming too popular for him to be comfortable with that, especially with his career starting to take-off. The old blog linked to the new one briefly to allow current readership to migrate, and then cut ties. That's why I know his real name. Perhaps he didn't expect it to be quite that big, but it being too big to be linked to his real name was part of the equation when he chose to use his first and middle names.
First and middle names are hardly better for tracking someone down than than first names only, since middle names aren't really used anywhere except very official things. Unless you have access to some official database that contains addresses and middle names or something (hey, isn't this what phone books used to be?), the middle name doesn't really add much IMHO.
Obviously, Scott didn’t expect the blog to be so big or his anonymity to be such and issue when he started using his real first and middle names. It’s self-congratulatory to imagine that you would have made a different decision given the full benefit of hindsight. It’s not like Scott could go back and change his online name to something more anonymous after the blog became more popular.
> In the financial industry we get around that most commonly by giving people “desk names.” If you’ve called and spoken to Sarah Smith, you are very likely not speaking to someone who answers to Sarah or Smith outside of work.
His Tweetstorm is a long-winded way of saying “Scott should have used a completely fake name instead of a partially fake name.” That’s not really a guarantee that his real name wouldn’t have been discover. It’s also missing the point of the issue.