Apparently, the Reds also want to initiate a real name blogging system, too. So much for noms de plume!
In all fairness, my American jingoism is pierced and saddened to see Bush and the neocon contingency have vied for the same. The problem is that while knowing a cyber-stalker's real name might help the authorities catch him, it would cut just as easily the other way: a cyber-stalker could by some means find out the real name of someone he interacts with (say, threateningly) online and then extend his malice offline to that real person. To my knowledge, there's a simple way to trace cyber-IDs back to their author: identify his IP address. It's a bssic feature of hosting comments on a blog,
so it's not at all unfeasible. Even though knowing an IP address doesn't help locate the baddie offline (because he uses a mobile compy or changes compies, etc.), it would still, if need be, allow authorities (or, yes, hackers) not only to go to work on that IP (e-embargoes at eBay or Paypal, blocking the IP from registering for websites, posting an online "WANTED" poster, etc.), but also to trace his behavior online and then perhaps catch him offline. If a villainous IP posted on some innocuous board, "I'll see you at the Linkin Park show Friday", authorities could at least have that lead in the real world.Anyway, what do you think?
UPDATE: Just read this piece about online pseudoynym generators. Man, in all his wily freedom, is why communism will never succeed in perfecting Man, in all his materialist subjection, and why Marxism will never reign. Only that which takes man seriously in his radical freedom -- freedom for both good AND EVIL -- will earn man's free submission. And that is the Gospel: to allow man to see himself as he really and freely is, but then still to find an infinitely superior love waiting to transform him.
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