Two GCC stories

Posted Jul 1, 2010 17:30 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
In reply to: Two GCC stories by gmaxwell
Parent article: Two GCC stories

I've yet to see anybody being able to "build several reputations" at once... besides that it is a lot of work to build a solid reputation, the reward from squandering it would have to be very large indeed.

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Two GCC stories

Posted Jul 1, 2010 23:42 UTC (Thu) by Kissaki (guest, #61848) [Link] (2 responses)

This sounds to me like what I have heard described as an "alt" or a "sock puppet". I've seen multiple people do / use this to build two (or more? How do you know?) reputations at once.

Admittedly the tendency seems to be to build at least one troll reputation in my experience, but the point is that multiple reputations seems pretty common to me.

Two GCC stories

Posted Jul 2, 2010 12:08 UTC (Fri) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link] (1 responses)

The important thing, I think, is that when someone goes through the trouble of building multiple reputations he doesn't trash them casually. If I have a troll identity and a respectable identity you can probably trust the respectable identity to remain respectable even if I were committing major crimes with another identity.

Two GCC stories

Posted Jul 4, 2010 3:18 UTC (Sun) by Kissaki (guest, #61848) [Link]

It sounds to me like the possibility exists that the reputation would not be trashed casually.

That reputation could be used as a tool to accomplish something worth more than the time spent to develop it. This is social engineering. Access to the development of GCC could (paranoia talking) be a stepping stone to compromising a wide variety of software.

In addition, you are assuming that the resulting identity would be 'trashed'. A clever intruder would not expose him (or her) self as a wrongdoer (where is the gain in that), but would act in secret. You might never discover their actions.

Online identity and reputation is worth something; no question. But you place too high a value on it in my opinion.