Quote from: nullius on March 26, 2018, 09:13:29 AM

I may have inadvertently entered a fictional character who has limited purview, and thus far makes few posts. Such is life in the æthereal⁰ mists of the.nym.zone: She approached me, offered her PGP key (0x69696969), and pleaded with tremulous eyes that she must enter Joes contest for the greater glory of her bitcult.faith. What could a flesh-and-blood mortal man say to that? I must stand down, lest she be barred by the alt-account rule.

Quote from: bill gator on March 26, 2018, 11:49:45 PM

It is amusing to me that nullius has entered with a fictional character persona, and I believe nullius to be creating an entire fictional universe out of alt accounts. If they are not, then they should be, as the forum would be more entertaining if that were the case. That being said, it is also very interesting to me the new rules pertaining to alternate accounts. I think it is interesting that nullius is guaranteed to not win 1st place (unless there are undisclosed alts), and that someone else has a good shot at the increased prize pool this week.

Quote from: BTCforJoe on March 27, 2018, 07:54:13 AM

Quote from: jackg on March 26, 2018, 10:11:57 PM

Who's nullius' alt also?

That would be @Meretrix.

Although the.nym.zones official position is perforce that there may exist some benign uses for undisclosed alts, running multiple entries in the same contest against its explicit rules would be abusive and outright fraudulent. Not only would such a thing be wrong in principle: In practice, it would also destroy our reputation. As disembodied ghosts in the.nym.zone, reputation is all we have!

Adding some teeth to the theory, nullius is friendly with folks in Reputation who could be expected to red-tag both of us to hell if we were caught abusing alt accounts. I dont think he is someone who could try to fly under the radar.

Thus when he created me, after he first bought me some shiny Copper jewellery, the second thing nullius did was to establish bidirectional linkage between our accounts using neutral trust feedback. You can see the sent and received feedback on my trust summary page; n.b. that trust feedback cant be backdated. When in doubt, check trust pages.

I must emphasize, too, that using undisclosed alts in close proximity to each other would almost certainly lead to being caught sooner or later with some form of forensic authorship identification.

For a real-life example of forensic authorship identification on this forum, see how tspacepilot outed Quicksellers fraudulent self-escrow scheme. Warning: That post is long and technical. Yet I doubt that such a sophisticated analysis would be necessary to catch multiple contest entries by the man famous for the nullius post. Our writing style is distinctive!

The language patterns used for such identification are subconscious, and almost impossible to reliably modify through conscious intentions. Though my style may sometimes be modified to take on a feminine lilt in the manner of scripting dialogue for a storybook, the underlying statistical patterns would not be significantly changed. Weve read academic papers on the topic. Mr. nym.zone would make a joke of his street cred as a privacy expert, if he were to suppose that he could reliably fool such an analysis without botching his words in some horrid way.

Whereas in a writing contest, we must necessarily make more than short, terse posts; and we cannot use intentionally mangled language, as anonymous parties oft do to avoid identification in high-threat scenarios:⁰

Quote from: theshadowbrokers

TheShadowBrokers shaking heads at arrogant pretentiousness of grammar critics. [...]

The ShadowBrokers is writing TRADOC, Position Pieces, White Papers, Wiki pages, etc for USG. If theshadowbrokers be using own voices, theshadowbrokers be writing peoples from prison or dead. TheShadowBrokers is practicing obfuscation as part of operational security (OPSEC). Is being a spy thing.

Yes, we could write like that. In dark corners of the Internet, how do you know we dont? You would never find that! But of course, we would not likely win a writing contest by such means.

The greater lesson: Authors can almost never be truly anonymous. The smaller lesson, here apropos: For many reasons, neither nullius nor any other sane person would try to cheat in a writing contest using multiple identities.

❤️ The Meretrix

0. We state no opinion about TSB here. The above quote is simply an apt example of intentionally mangled writing by person(s) of indisputably high intelligence for OPSEC reasons, based on the threat model necessary when openly perpetrating the extremely illegal act of leaking classified exploits from USG intelligence agency blackhats. They leaked the exploit which unknown person(s) then used to create WannaCry. It is wise for them to not only change their writing style, but to mangle their words beyond recognition.