Episode 002: Identity
Casey reminisces about the appearance of several Mark Wunsch Twitter parody accounts and is reminded of the "unmasking" of Satoshi Nakamoto by Newsweek. How does anonymity or pseudonymity coexist with authorship? What connects our virtual avatars to our physical presence? Mark (who is not a cryptographer) does his best to explain cryptography and how it's used to verify identity and establish trust. Casey and Mark evaluate Keybase.io, a public key directory. Casey asks "Is there such a thing as anonymity online?"
Notes:
- Casey and Mark both worked together at Gilt for a time.
- The Wunsch Bunch
- Gilt TV
- @FakeMarkWunsch (account deleted), @NotMarkWunsch, @YAFMarkWunsch
- The Face Behind Bitcoin in Newsweek
- "Satoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonymous person or group of people who designed and created the original Bitcoin software..."
- Symmetric-key algorithm
- Public-key cryptography
- Mark's public key is on the internet
- Pretty Good Privacy
- GNU Privacy Guard
- Web of trust
- New TLDs
- Mark appears to have purchased markwunsch.guru, but markwunsch.voyage is still available.
- Keybase is a public directory of publicly auditable public keys.
- Mark is wunsch on Keybase and Casey is casey
- Why Johnny Can't Encrypt
- Read the Manual for GPG
- TripleSec is a "triple-paranoid" encryption library used by Keybase to encrypt private keys in the browser.
- I'm just going to put a link to Javascript Cryptography Considered Harmful here without comment.
- Charging Badger
- What doxxing is, and why it matters
- Kathy Sierra was a victim of doxxing. She has since returned to the internet under a pseudonym and we're all better off for it.
- The era of Facebook is an anomaly, an interview with danah boyd at the Verge.
- How do we know who people are? in The Awl revisits the idea of the "universal reputation market."
- Let Me Introduce Myself: Farewell to Mobutu Sese Seko by Jeb Lund represented his move away from professional pseudonymity into blogging under his own name (and told a pretty gripping story about his experiences as a pseudonymous writer).
- Don't forget to check out inky and Voobr's bandcamp pages!
Thanks for listening.