Comment by fluoridation
2 days ago
For a very brief time, "doxing" (that is, dropping dox, that is, dropping docs, or documents) used to mean something useful. You gathered information that was not out in public, for example by talking to people or by stealing it, and put it out in the open.
It's very silly to talk about doxing when all someone has done is gather information anyone else can equally easily obtain, just given enough patience and time, especially when it's information the person in question put out there themselves. If it doesn't take any special skills or connections to obtain the information, but only the inclination to actually perform the research on publicly available data, I don't see what has been done that is unethical.
Call it stalking or harrasment if you prefer. Regardless its rude (sometimes illegal) behaviour.
That's no justification for using visitors to your site to do a DDOS.
In the slang of reddit: ESH
It's neither of those. Stalking refers to persistent, unwanted, one-sided interactions with a person such as following, surveilling, calling, or sending messages or gifts. Investigating a person's past or identity doesn't involve any interaction with the physical person. Harassment is persistent attempts to interact with someone after having been asked to stop. Again, an investigation doesn't require any form of interaction.
> Harassment is persistent attempts to interact with someone
No, harassment also includes persistent attempts to cause someone grief, whether or not they involve direct interactions with that person.
From Wikipedia:
> Harassment covers a wide range of behaviors of an offensive nature. It is commonly understood as behavior that demeans, humiliates, and intimidates a person.
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In this case archive.today has a lot of influence over the information we take in because of the rise in paywalls. They have the potential of modifying the news we absorb at scale.
In that context I don't think the question ("actually, who is providing all this information to me and what interests drive them") is one that's misplaced. Maybe we shouldn't look into a gift horse's mouth but don't forget this could be a Trojan horse as well.
The article brought to light some ties to Russia but probably not ties to its government and its troll farms. Rather an independent and pretty rebellious citizen. That's good to hear. And that's valuable information. I trust the site more after reading the article, not less.
The article could have redacted the names they found but they were found with public sources and these sources validate the encountered information (otherwise the results could have been dismissed)
Did you read the article? They dug deep, they didn't just do a google search and leave it at that. They drew links between deleted posts and defunct accounts, they compared profile pictures of anonymous profiles.
I'm not defending the archive.today webmaster but it's unfortunately understandable they are angry. Saying what the blogger did was merely point out public information is a gross oversimplification.
Did you read the comment you're replying to? They didn't use any information not publicly available.
That is NOT the line for doxxing at all, I don't know why you hang your argument on that aspect. Even institutions that care about secrecy like governments state that documents that aggregate ostensibly public information can raise the classification level of a document above being non-classified. The reasons for this are obvious, essentially aggregated information can lead one to draw conclusions that otherwise are not obvious. That is akin to what the original article by Gyrovague does.
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Eh, you can find in public data things like "what is someone's address" based only on their name by looking up public records of mortgage records. That however is quite bad form, and if you did do that, I think it would be pretty unethical.