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Plans? I assumed lots of people were already working on this. There's already a lot of training data out there, and I suspect most users can be identified by us
by dehrmann 4y ago
Plans? I assumed lots of people were already working on this. There's already a lot of training data out there, and I suspect most users can be identified by use of a handful of uncommon trigrams and sentence stats. I know you can recognize things I've written at work because they have real em dashes—people rarely type with those.
- RobRivera 4y agoI'm a big counter intelligence man, so I love deliberately inserting randomness into potential identification metrics. In the words of martha stewart, it's a good thing
- boomboomsubban 4y agoYou probably don't want to associate yourself with a convicted criminal as a deflection technique.
- matheusmoreira 4y agoI wonder if there is a way to do that automatically.
- RobRivera 4y agorng shuffling of style and library usages, paradigms. and naming convention. camelCase vs NOCAMELCASE based on a coinflip, etc. leverage Lint static analyzer tools to enforce prior to submission. lot of fun ways to stick it to those bulk surveillance data lakes that may be the targets of such training sets
- CTDOCodebases 4y agoRemember to do it with your code as well. I doubt TrueCrypt developers decided that it was Not Secure As Microsoft’s bitlocker after considering the paper that got released the following year.[0] [0] - https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity15/sec15-paper-caliskan-islam.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurit...
- ben_w 4y agoI briefly considered making one. My idea was simple — build a Markov chain for each person plus the text with the unknown author, do a dot product of the intersection of the all the chains, pick the author with the best match. Never got around to it. Perhaps this weekend?
- kps 4y agoI use em dashes — though with space — and also ellipses… Also 2×4s (that are actually 1½×3½), where 2 ≠ 4 above −270°C, and footnotes¹ and all that. ¹ There.
- edgyquant 4y agoGreat. Even easier then
- noir_lord 4y agoYou can probably spot me at work because I use really simple words. I write obviate then I re-read and replace it with “removes the need to do $foo. Some writers at work forget that the goal of the written word is to communicate to the reader not impress them with word salad. I regard it the same as clever code (note: not the same as complex code) - written for the author not the reader.
- club_tropical 4y agoYour example doesn't match the principles you highlighted. Obviate->remove is replacing a perfect-fit with a generic alternative. "Obviate" was neither a word salad nor complex, it was straight up (marginally) better. This was a tradeoff to appeal to people whose vocabulary is narrow, not improve comprehension.
- noir_lord 4y agoPeople reading what I write are frequently users of English as a second language. Expecting most of the English people to know obviate is pushing it, for someone using English as a second language it’s just adding complexity. It’s about aiming where you expect the average reader to be. Because you know the word don’t fall into the trap of assuming everyone else does.
- groffee 4y agoTreating everyone like an idiot is just doing you and them a disservice. The word exists for a reason, use it.
- Shorel 4y agoMany times it's the other way around. Obviate has several cognates in romance languages, so it is straightforward. Now, the phrasal verbs that are so obvious to a native speaker, these are the real head-scratchers. Or street slang. It may sound like dumbing it down to you, but it actually adds complexity for a non-native.
- throwaway0x7E6 4y agoyeah. I've read about this many years ago, and it had scared me enough to develop an alternative writing style for my squeaky clean real life persona I wouldn't doubt for a second that NSA is already using shit like this for their global passive adversary thing
- dorkwood 4y agoYou can pick me out because I use double hyphens -- the poor man's em dash.
- JasonFruit 4y agoTriple hyphens --- the LaTeX man's em-dash.
- bombcar 4y agoOn my phone the failure is manifest — it linebreaks between the hyphens.
- langsoul-com 4y agoThe basic version would be university code detectors that try to match similarities between users code. That isn't detecting who wrote it, but certainly is the first step.
- geysersam 4y agoHow robust is it though? If you scale to thousands or tens of thousands of people. If it depends on trigrams and uncommon characters it can be countered by incredibly simple measures.
- denton-scratch 4y ago> most users can be identified For some value of "identified". However good it is, it can't definitively nail someone as the author of a piece of text.
- _8j50 4y agoNSA already does this. "Stylometry" I believe is the term. Perhaps they used heuristics and algorithms so far? I would NLP was good enough for this years ago.
- dehrmann 4y agoBack in 2015 you might have some linguists work with data scientists to do feature engineering and use those as inputs to an LR model. I suppose you can let a deep learning model feature engineer for you, but either way, you'll get to some of the same heuristics you're thinking of.
- canjobear 4y agoI taught this as a routine class project in 2018.
- geysersam 4y agoWhat training data did you use in that project?
- jacooper 4y agoDidn't they de-annonymize Satoshi through analyzing his "stylometry" too?
- ProllyInfamous 4y agoTwo of the people who [likely] made up "Satoshi"s core team are now deceased, RIP (Hal Finney [ALS] & Len Sussman [Suicide]).
- midmagico 4y agoBoth of these have been widely debunked as Satoshi candidates, especially the latter.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y agoSomeone unintentionally did something similar with HN comments to find users who sound most similar to you/eachother and people were finding their throwaway and alt accounts.
- vmoore 4y agoYes I recall that: 'Find Your Hacker News Doppelgänger': https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27568709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27568709
- dhosek 4y agoInteresting. There was commentary about finding anonymous/throwaway accounts, but on mine, I did not find my anonymous account (although I use that very rarely). The accounts that turned up seemed to be all real, and in a couple cases I could guess what might have made the checker match us (e.g., mentions of MFAs or Apple //e or similar politics), but not all. I didn’t notice any linguistic similarities.
- rkagerer 4y agoYeah back then I felt mine didn't produce good matches either.
- ravenstine 4y agoNeat experiment, though it took me fewer than 30 seconds to rule out my nearest "doppelganger". Too many patterns there I've never used.
- matheusmoreira 4y agoThat's interesting. I wonder if they will periodically update the data set to reflect new posts.
- lajamerr 4y agoThe next step after is to build an AI to convert your style of writing to another person's style.
- notadev 4y agoRunning all writing through AI to re-write everything in a different style while conveying the same information might work. Create a way to apply it to all online writing and you have something like a writing VPN.
- klabb3 4y agoExactly. You barely need "AI" for this. Changing style enough to put some sand in a sophisticated text identifier could be as simple as introducing some spelling and grammar variations. It could easily be commoditized (isn't grammarly doing this already minus the privacy part?). Of all cat and mouse games LE and intelligence are playing, for this one I'm betting on the mouse.
- autoexec 4y agoJust write all your 'sensitive' texts in leetspeak, use very few words, and very short words and it should be fine. It's like the typing equivalent of cutting letters out of magazines.
- iinnPP 4y agoI proposed this as an automated process for our provinces social services/inquiries email. The idea being that the text would be harder to use as a method of discrimination.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- copperx 4y agoAbout 15 years ago, at JHU, I heard about an algorithm that detected a writer's gender with more than 90% of accuracy, and the NLP professor considered that problem solved.
- matheusmoreira 4y agoIs this algorithm published?
- wsinks 4y agoI forget that they're called em dashes -- but I also love to use them to offset what I say from other people.
- Cupertino95014 4y agoThey've broken more than one Python script of mine. That'll make you declare everything UTF-8.
- pessimizer 4y agoIf you have a compose key, (–) is compose + (-) (-) (.) Or compose + (-) (-) (-) for (—) which is wider depending on the font.