Hackers and anonymity: some evidence
<p>When I have to explain how real hackers differ from various ignorant media stereotypes about us, I&#8217;ve found that one of the easiest differences to explain is transparency vs. anonymity.  Non-techies readily grasp the difference between showing pride in your work by attaching your real name to it versus hiding behind a concealing handle.  They get what this implies about the surrounding subcultures &#8211; honesty vs. furtiveness, accountability vs. shadiness.</p>
<p>One of my regular commenters is in the small minority of hackers who regularly uses a concealing handle. Because he pushed back against my assertion that this is unusual, counter-normative behavior, I set a bit that I should keep an eye out for evidence that would support a frequency estimate.  And I&#8217;ve found some.</p>
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<p>Recently I&#8217;ve been doing reconstructive archeology on the history of Emacs, the goal being to produce a clean git repository for browsing of the entire history (yes, this will become the official repo after 24.4 ships). This is a near-unique resource in a lot of ways.</p>
<p>One of the ways is the sheer length of time the project has been active.  I do not know of any other open-source project with a continuous revision history back to 1985! The size of the contributor base is also exceptionally large, though not uniquely so &#8211; no fewer than 574 distinct committers. And, while it is not clear how to measure centrality, there is little doubt that Emacs remains one of the hacker community&#8217;s flagship projects.</p>
<p>This morning I was doing some minor polishing of the Emacs metadata &#8211; fixing up minor crud like encoding errors in committer names &#8211; and I made a list of names that didn&#8217;t appear to map to an identifiable human being.  I found eight, of which two are role-based aliases &#8211; one for a dev group account, one for a build engine. That left six unidentified individual contributors  (I actually shipped 8 to the emacs-devel list, but two more turned out to be readily identifiable within a few minutes after that).</p>
<p>I&#8217;m looking at this list of names, and I thought &#8220;Aha!  Handle frequency estimation!&#8221;</p>
<p>That&#8217;s a frequency of just about exactly 1% for IDs that could plausibly be described as concealing handles in commit logs. That&#8217;s pretty low, and a robust difference from the cracker underground in which 99% use concealing handles. And it&#8217;s especially impressive considering the size and time depth of the sample.</p>
<p>And at that, this may be an overestimate.  As many as three of those IDs look like they might actually be display handles &#8211; habitual nicknames that aren&#8217;t intended as disguise.  That is a relatively common behavior with a very different meaning.</p>
