5 ms·

Note to self: If I need to publish something and have it remain completely anonymous, convert it to ASCII TEXT. That is one of the few formats I understand wel

by mcherm 12y ago

Note to self: If I need to publish something and have it remain completely anonymous, convert it to ASCII TEXT. That is one of the few formats I understand well enough to be CERTAIN that it is free of metadata. Now all I have to worry about is how I can anonymously publish it, text style analysis, and how to include diagrams without resorting to ASCII drawings.

supergauntlet 12y ago
You could always just release the raw LaTeX source and let people compile it themselves or something.
- lallysingh 12y ago
  Or build the latex in a clean VM
  - willvarfar 12y ago
    http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html suggests you cannot trust anything!
- VMG 12y ago
  I'd imagine you reveal too much information with your personal latex writing style.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - alex_doom 12y ago
    That's why I compose all my top secret documents in emoji. If anyone finds them they'll just assume it's gibberish from a 13yr old girl.
    - dasil003 12y ago
      13-year-old girls are more fluent digital communicators than you or me.
      - reitanqild 12y ago
        Strongly disagree. This is something you will hear from a lot of places, often from people who never were early adopters of neither mail, sms or skype etc.
        dasil003 12y ago
        Yeah well that's not me... I've been on BBSes since 1988 and got my first proper internet shell account in 1991 when, incidentally, I was 13. The reason I made the comment is because it rubbed me the wrong way to cite 13-year-old girl talk as prototypical gibberish. Are 13-year-old girls generally excitable and potentially annoying? Yes. Do they talk in gibberish as a matter of course? No, that's a thoughtless sexist trope. And I'll place a blind bet that they text faster than you.
        reitanqild 12y ago
        Agree that the girl part should have been left out. Still think an average hn-er should be able to type faster and more correct on a normal keyboard than the average 13yo, regardless of gender.
        dasil003 12y ago
        You're stacking the deck. Physical keyboards are ancient technology ;)
        corpselord420 12y ago
        you use 'proper' english capitalization punctuation etc in informal context i dont think youre really in a position to make calls about digital fluency when you write like a mid 20th century layman teleported to 2014 lmao
  - keithpeter 12y ago
    Might markdown be sufficiently basic to reduce style based fingerprinting? I suspect that the actual writing style apart from the markup would provide some clues.
  - x1798DE 12y ago
    It's not foolproof, but that does require that you have released a sufficiently large sample of LaTeX source under your real name (or something that can be traced to your real name) for comparison. Additionally, if you really want to release something typeset like that, but you're worried about fingerprinting, my guess is that it's not that hard to deliberately change your personal style by using a minimal set of packages and when necessary restricting yourself to the most popular packages. Even if your new personal style still ends up unique, it wouldn't match the fingerprint of anything you've released under your own name.
chaos0 12y ago
I wonder if there is a tool to obfuscate text to prevent analysis. one way I could think of is to use any online translation tool to translate to a foreign language and then back to english. and then fix the grammar slightly. the structure of the text should hopefully be different enough for any tool/human to recognize it's your style. is there an easier way to do this?
- graedus 12y ago
  Yeah, some work has been done in this area, but I only know about it in passing via a mention in one of Jacob Appelbaum's talks. This seems like it might be a decent place to start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b0Ta9h62_E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b0Ta9h62_E
- bumblebeard 12y ago
  There was an interesting talk about this (adversarial stylometry) at 28C3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9SgAOcCm0I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9SgAOcCm0I One of the methods they mentioned is machine translation, but they found that it wasn't terribly useful. It's a really neat talk and I highly recommend it. They also wrote some software to anonymize texts (Anonymouth) and their stylometry software (JStylo) is also freely available: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/Fahrplan/events/4781.en.html http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/Fahrplan/events/4781.en.h...
- privong 12y ago
  There is some free software available[0] to do stylometry analysis. And some software which purports to assist in anonymizing writings[1]. I've not really played around with either, so I can't speak to their ease of use and/or effectiveness. But it's at least somewhere to start. [0] http://evllabs.com/jgaap/w/index.php/Main_Page http://evllabs.com/jgaap/w/index.php/Main_Page [1] https://github.com/psal/anonymouth https://github.com/psal/anonymouth
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Reminds me of a concept of "google translate fixed point", i.e. you translate between english and an foreign language back and forth until the translation stops changing.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
kruczek 12y ago
Don't be too sure about ASCII text file either, it may still contain a bit of metadata like the BOM (although then technically it's not pure ASCII, but rather UTF, but still it means you have to check the encoding used by your favourite text editor).
- mcherm 12y ago
  The BOM isn't exactly identifying information, but it's things like that (and encodings) that made me specify ASCII.
  - jarman 12y ago
    In case of UTF8, BOM isn't information at all, it's always the same 3 bytes (endianness mark is meaningless on byte-based encoding). And being added by default Windows plain text editor, it's fingerprinting usefulness is rather limited.
slashdotaccount 12y ago
http://www.darkside.com.au/snow/ http://www.darkside.com.au/snow/ https://mat.boum.org/ https://mat.boum.org/ https://psal.cs.drexel.edu/index.php/JStylo-Anonymouth https://psal.cs.drexel.edu/index.php/JStylo-Anonymouth
solomania9 12y ago
And that's why I created Bitcoin Megaphone! http://bitcoinmegaphone.com http://bitcoinmegaphone.com
rwallace 12y ago
I think you'd be okay with any format, such as HTML, that you can eyeball in a plain text editor; you just need to eschew binary formats. So diagrams in SVG in preference to PNG?

by mcherm 12y ago

supergauntlet 12y ago

You could always just release the raw LaTeX source and let people compile it themselves or something.

lallysingh 12y ago
Or build the latex in a clean VM
- willvarfar 12y ago
  http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html suggests you cannot trust anything!
VMG 12y ago
I'd imagine you reveal too much information with your personal latex writing style.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- alex_doom 12y ago
  That's why I compose all my top secret documents in emoji. If anyone finds them they'll just assume it's gibberish from a 13yr old girl.
  - dasil003 12y ago
    13-year-old girls are more fluent digital communicators than you or me.
    - reitanqild 12y ago
      Strongly disagree. This is something you will hear from a lot of places, often from people who never were early adopters of neither mail, sms or skype etc.
      - dasil003 12y ago
        Yeah well that's not me... I've been on BBSes since 1988 and got my first proper internet shell account in 1991 when, incidentally, I was 13. The reason I made the comment is because it rubbed me the wrong way to cite 13-year-old girl talk as prototypical gibberish. Are 13-year-old girls generally excitable and potentially annoying? Yes. Do they talk in gibberish as a matter of course? No, that's a thoughtless sexist trope. And I'll place a blind bet that they text faster than you.
        reitanqild 12y ago
        Agree that the girl part should have been left out. Still think an average hn-er should be able to type faster and more correct on a normal keyboard than the average 13yo, regardless of gender.
        dasil003 12y ago
        You're stacking the deck. Physical keyboards are ancient technology ;)
      - corpselord420 12y ago
        you use 'proper' english capitalization punctuation etc in informal context i dont think youre really in a position to make calls about digital fluency when you write like a mid 20th century layman teleported to 2014 lmao
- keithpeter 12y ago
  Might markdown be sufficiently basic to reduce style based fingerprinting? I suspect that the actual writing style apart from the markup would provide some clues.
- x1798DE 12y ago
  It's not foolproof, but that does require that you have released a sufficiently large sample of LaTeX source under your real name (or something that can be traced to your real name) for comparison. Additionally, if you really want to release something typeset like that, but you're worried about fingerprinting, my guess is that it's not that hard to deliberately change your personal style by using a minimal set of packages and when necessary restricting yourself to the most popular packages. Even if your new personal style still ends up unique, it wouldn't match the fingerprint of anything you've released under your own name.

chaos0 12y ago

I wonder if there is a tool to obfuscate text to prevent analysis. one way I could think of is to use any online translation tool to translate to a foreign language and then back to english. and then fix the grammar slightly. the structure of the text should hopefully be different enough for any tool/human to recognize it's your style. is there an easier way to do this?

graedus 12y ago
Yeah, some work has been done in this area, but I only know about it in passing via a mention in one of Jacob Appelbaum's talks. This seems like it might be a decent place to start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b0Ta9h62_E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b0Ta9h62_E
bumblebeard 12y ago
There was an interesting talk about this (adversarial stylometry) at 28C3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9SgAOcCm0I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9SgAOcCm0I One of the methods they mentioned is machine translation, but they found that it wasn't terribly useful. It's a really neat talk and I highly recommend it. They also wrote some software to anonymize texts (Anonymouth) and their stylometry software (JStylo) is also freely available: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/Fahrplan/events/4781.en.html http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/Fahrplan/events/4781.en.h...
privong 12y ago
There is some free software available[0] to do stylometry analysis. And some software which purports to assist in anonymizing writings[1]. I've not really played around with either, so I can't speak to their ease of use and/or effectiveness. But it's at least somewhere to start. [0] http://evllabs.com/jgaap/w/index.php/Main_Page http://evllabs.com/jgaap/w/index.php/Main_Page [1] https://github.com/psal/anonymouth https://github.com/psal/anonymouth
TeMPOraL 12y ago
Reminds me of a concept of "google translate fixed point", i.e. you translate between english and an foreign language back and forth until the translation stops changing.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

kruczek 12y ago

Don't be too sure about ASCII text file either, it may still contain a bit of metadata like the BOM (although then technically it's not pure ASCII, but rather UTF, but still it means you have to check the encoding used by your favourite text editor).

mcherm 12y ago
The BOM isn't exactly identifying information, but it's things like that (and encodings) that made me specify ASCII.
- jarman 12y ago
  In case of UTF8, BOM isn't information at all, it's always the same 3 bytes (endianness mark is meaningless on byte-based encoding). And being added by default Windows plain text editor, it's fingerprinting usefulness is rather limited.

slashdotaccount 12y ago

http://www.darkside.com.au/snow/ http://www.darkside.com.au/snow/ https://mat.boum.org/ https://mat.boum.org/ https://psal.cs.drexel.edu/index.php/JStylo-Anonymouth https://psal.cs.drexel.edu/index.php/JStylo-Anonymouth

solomania9 12y ago

And that's why I created Bitcoin Megaphone! http://bitcoinmegaphone.com http://bitcoinmegaphone.com

rwallace 12y ago

I think you'd be okay with any format, such as HTML, that you can eyeball in a plain text editor; you just need to eschew binary formats. So diagrams in SVG in preference to PNG?