Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2017 August 25

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August 25

COIN/atrocity

Hello,

I'm looking for in-depth sources (books, journal articles, etc.) that deal with the interplay of counterinsurgency and atrocity/genocide. Thanks very much for your help, GAB^gab 15:19, 25 August 2017 (UTC)

Finding out a reddit user's personal identity

How can one find out a reddit user's personal identity? I'm not asking because I want to do it, I'm just wondering. Uncle dan is home (talk) 22:38, 25 August 2017 (UTC)

You can ask them. There are other ways, but I don't know if you can be trusted with that kind of information, and what you are going to use it for. (((The Quixotic Potato))) (talk) 23:53, 25 August 2017 (UTC)

Don't you hate it when people are like that? The real bad guys know everything - who would you hide this from?

The most obvious way is a honeypot, though I don't really mean in the sense of honeypot (computing). You say you totally agree with his comment about that stupid Game of Drones mistake, and here's some hilarious commentary about it ... and you link to a site that has never been mentioned online before in the history of the world, which receives a visit from one IP address besides your own. Who do you think it might be?

This might be combined with other modalities of attack, such as legal. For example, if you work for Game of Drones you have some hacker totally unknown to you put some leaked footage up on the site, then you file suit for copyright violation and demand the target's ISP hand over the name to go with the IP address. Then you can quietly let that lawsuit drop if you don't want awkward questions to come up, and focus on suing him for libeling you or whatever. (Police might find it handier to put some child porn on the site and call it a "sting" - nobody will be taking your side after that. But they scarcely need to since they're used to just asking and getting answers from ISPs without so much as a court order.)

There's also phishing - you make your promised hilarious Game of Drones footage look like a Facebook page with a URL that kind of looks like it might be Facebook's if you don't look too hard, then demand they log in to see the content like Facebook so often does. Then you have that username to track back, and you could have fun with the password if you were not scrupulously following the law. Wnt (talk) 16:01, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

WP:BEANS (((The Quixotic Potato))) (talk) 19:01, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

That's a humorous Wikipedia essay. Security through obscurity is an article about a widespread point of view. Besides, I neglected a lot of ideas in that last reply, like social engineering (security). ("Hi, this is Lori in accounting. I'm trying to figure out how this account got $850 in Reddit Gold without submitting a payment. Can you tell me if Emmanuel Goldstein's email address has been updated? Oh, that's not the name? Does the address match XXX XXX XXX? Well what name and address do you have on file...?") Wnt (talk) 01:31, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

Abolishing slavery in the US

This morning, I went through each of the "slavery in [state]" articles for US states that were unambiguously considered free states in the lead-up to the Civil War, i.e. everything that didn't secede to form the Confederacy, minus the border states. I noted that New Jersey was the only one in which really-small-scale slavery continued until the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution ended it entirely. However, New Jersey was one of several states in which slavery was abolished gradually; the typical route seems to have been a law providing that all slave children born after a certain date were to be free from birth, and thus letting slavery literally die out as those born before this date aged and died. Rhode Island was typical of this route, prohibiting the enslavement of everyone born on 1 March 1784 or later; as a result, there were only five slaves remaining in 1840, and conceivably slavery would have been legal there until the 13th Amendment, had any one of these five lived to a great age.

Now for the question — in how many states did slavery get outlawed gradually (whether by the Rhode Island route or something similar) and eventually die off before the Civil War, but without a formal legal end to the institution before 1865? To qualify, obviously a state would have needed to have legal slavery in the first place (excluding Ohio, for example), it couldn't have had a specific end date (excluding Illinois, where slavery ended in 1825, for example), and it couldn't have had slavery "actively" going in the 1860s as in the Southeast. Nyttend (talk) 22:45, 25 August 2017 (UTC)

Note that this is just one mechanism by which slavery could be phased out. Others include mandatory freeing of slaves when the master dies, "commuting" slavery to a limited term, as in indentured service, etc. Some combo of these methods could also be used. StuRat (talk) 22:59, 25 August 2017 (UTC)

Of course. I'm asking about any mechanism that didn't have a defined end date; if beginning in 1800 your slaves were automatically freed when you died or you sold/donated/etc. them, that's workable, since if a young master had young slaves in 1800, it would have been easy for slavery to have lasted long past 1865. Nyttend (talk) 23:02, 25 August 2017 (UTC)

An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery#Other states gives several examples (you should include what the article itself covers of course) which practiced gradual abolition although in about half of them, slavery was formally abolished before the 13th Amendment, generally I think via a later law rather than a sunset clause with the initial law. Rhode Island and New Jersey are the only examples cited where this wasn't the case. Nil Einne (talk) 15:51, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

Our article Slave states and free states#West Virginia who were admitted during the civil war and just before the thirteenth amendment with a gradual abolition plan but ended up abolishing slavery and ratifying the 13th amendment later anyway. Nil Einne (talk) 15:59, 26 August 2017 (UTC)