9 ms·
Seems incredibly prone to false positives. For example, I can guarantee that I'm not the AdmiralAsshat on Reddit, Gmail, or Twitter, because that username was a
by AdmiralAsshat 4y ago
Seems incredibly prone to false positives. For example, I can guarantee that I'm not the AdmiralAsshat on Reddit, Gmail, or Twitter, because that username was already taken by the time I tried to sign up for them.
- TheAdamist 4y agoAs a commissioned officer, you may be responsible for everything done in your name. More rations of rum, i think thats how the british managed it. I wouldnt complain, much.
- lol768 4y agoYup; for common/short usernames it's all too common for other folks to register using the same identifier. The end result seems to be that this tool decides you're interested in "dating", "porn", "stocks" and tags you with a "ru" country code - despite not owning any of the accounts that the determination has been based off of. The README should come with a disclaimer really.
- jhugo 4y agoIsn't it obvious just from reading one sentence about what it does? As it clearly says, it's based on username only, so multiple people's results may be mixed in the dossier if they share a username. We don't need a disclaimer for every thing that a moment's thought can reveal.
- voakbasda 4y agoThe people that use this tool to dig up dirt on someone will love to see a mixed bag, because it could be useful to cast shade on their actual target. This tool will be abused on purpose.
- jhugo 4y agoThat makes no sense. They could just make stuff up, it wouldn't be any more or less believable.
- voakbasda 4y agoHave you ever been part of a civil lawsuit? The lawyers will absolutely lie through their teeth to make their cases. They will introducw any “evidence” that they think will help them. Would you really trust a jury or a judge to understand and believe that this report is not accurate? Having been through the process, let me tell you straight up: you should not put your faith in the justice system.
- jhugo 4y agoNot sure where the rant about the justice system came from. You are making my point — people willing to lie through their teeth can just make up any report they like, the existence or accuracy of Maigret changes nothing.
- bee_rider 4y agoSome annoying people seem to have used my gmail to sign up for things like Twitch. I have all the three factor authentication stuff set up, so I don't think they can get in to click the "verify" links, but I wonder if this sort of tool would be able to verified that the account was... verified. Probably not.
- JasonFruit 4y agoI get email all the time for a Jason Fruit in Chicago who uses my email address as a dummy. I even called him once to ask him to stop. He didn't.
- bee_rider 4y agoThe annoying this is, my email address is based on my name, which is fairly unique (no relation to my account name here), to the point where I'm nearly 100% certain that it is intentional (gotten from a leak of emails which have signed up for some service or another).
- dhosek 4y agoMy wife has a firstname@gmail.com account and she gets a lot of other peoples’ emails including some rather sensitive stuff (bank statements, employment info, etc.)
- rightbyte 4y agoMe too. It is the same guy each time though. He has a dot in his addres and I think it is dropped in many hand written signups.
- romeoblade 4y agoMy Gmail is first.last name. I get very sensitive documents for a lawyer with my same name who resides in Texas. We've actually had some decent conversations over the years.
- 4y ago
- eek2121 4y agoI intentionally steal nicknames I've seen. I'm an asshole as well, so sometimes it works out. I have 13 different nicknames so far that I use/have used since 1997, though I tend to rotate between all of them regularly. I DO hope they try to use "AI" to track me. That will be fun.
- smeagull 4y agoI have never used the same nickname on multiple sites. Often when I get a new device, I just make a new account. Especially for HN and Reddit.
- kdtsh 4y agoThat almost seems a shame because smeagull is a fantastic username.
- numpad0 4y ago…that’s an interesting behavior
- orange_fritter 4y agoWhat's the benefit? It sounds like you might have to explain yourself one day if someone posts something racist/horrible.
- BuyMyBitcoins 4y agoI look at it differently, even if someone isn’t going around posting racist/horrible things, people and tastes change over time. I’ve been a part of fandoms that are now seen as cringey or toxic. I’ve also grown up more as a person and I look back at a lot of my old comments as sophomoric. I write differently, and my opinions on things have changed as well. I’ve had people dig through my post history on sites like Reddit to try and find a “gotcha” based on some remark I made years ago. All in all, I personally feel like it is a good thing to cycle through usernames throughout life.
- 4y ago
- smeagull 4y agoYou always need to balance Precision and Recall. For something like this, you want to be exhaustive. I've worked on search engines, and depending on who is using them, that balance gets struck differently on the ROC curve. For legal matters, for example, they want every record that might match. For ad-hoc (google style) queries, nobody reads the second page so you care more about Precision @ 20 (or really, at 3)
- BlueTemplar 4y agoSomewhat offtopic, I'm curious about this "nobody reads the 2nd page" meme... I find myself reading pages 2-5 quite often, because page 1 just didn't give enough results, and I doubt I'm that much in a minority ? (I'm talking about actual generalist searches, not people that use a global search engine as a replacement to bookmarks or directly searching, for instance, Wikipedia.)
- mjevans 4y agoI imagine that each additional page presentation is exponentially less likely to be reached and considered a 'reputable' result by someone normal. If I'm looking for a specific issue I'll sometimes try out things as deep as 10 or more pages of search results if nothing on the first 100 ish hits selects the issue, but then only if I can't think of any keyword variations to use that might get me a better result match. I don't expect the average user to go even remotely that far.
- daanlo 4y agoSource: https://www.sistrix.com/blog/why-almost-everything-you-knew-about-google-ctr-is-no-longer-valid/ https://www.sistrix.com/blog/why-almost-everything-you-knew-... TLDR: on the second results page, each result gets <1% click through rate. So it‘s not nobody, but statistically speaking not very many.
- kqr 4y agoThat's not how statistics work. I consider myself a frequent visitor of the second results page, but even for me the CTR of the results on the second page are < 1 %, because I almost always find the thing I want on the first page. The question ought to be "conditional on not finding the result on the first page, how likely is the user to go to the second page versus balk, or re-try a different query?" I'm fairly confident that number is higher than 1 %, but I don't have the data.
- z9znz 4y agoThis tool finds existence of accounts by username. It does not promise that all found accounts belong to the same human.
- xenocratus 4y agoProject description in the README: > Maigret collect a dossier on a person by username only... The About field: > Collect a dossier on a person by username from thousands of sites "on a person" seems to imply that they'd belong to someone in particular. Obviously if you have any experience of creating accounts you'd know that's unlikely to be the case, and it's not written in a promissory tone. But it does imply it.
- ohgodplsno 4y agoI'm more surprised by the fact that people have used my standard username on not just one, but three porn sites, and that I am now a 31 year old camgirl from Thailand, a 36 year old man from Norfolk looking for love and a 31 year old man from South Africa.
- GoblinSlayer 4y agoSometimes I used other people's usernames too for this reason.
- Findecanor 4y agoPlease don't steal. You may be making it difficult for the people you steal from. I often use the same username(s) on multiple forums where people discuss similar topics because I want other people who visit the same forums to recognise me as being the same guy. I've found this username taken a few times, and it has bugged me every time. While it is from Tolkien's Elvish, it is obscure and then misspelled (actually a portmanteau). I've had to add a prefix, such as "TheReal" to it.
- belter 4y agoThe next step is when Google blocks your account based on the behavior of said similar alias, in other parts of the internet tubes....
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoAn interesting extension to this tool would be to let you specify the interests and the site you want to sign up to, and it would generate a username that fits that profile and is available on the specific site.