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I wonder if those passages are enough to perform style analysis. reddit doesn't let us search comments, but we know they're a member of /r/Anarchism. These pa
by nilved 12y ago
I wonder if those passages are enough to perform style analysis. reddit doesn't let us search comments, but we know they're a member of /r/Anarchism. These parts seem identifying to me:
* Capital letters and proper punctuation. Investigating the source code shows that they one-space.
* Single quotes, not double quotes, around individual words.
* Repetition in triplets with a serial comma ("...more empowering, more fun, and far more...", "...programmers, hackers, and reverse engineers...".
* No semicolons, sparing use of exclamation points at the end of comments only.
* Always uses contractions.
With further analysis we could probably find regional dialects, average sentence length, rate of punctuation use, etc. Crawling /r/Anarchism with that criteria could identify them.
Pure guesses and speculation follow: the hacker probably posts comments on /r/Anarchism. With 50,000 subscribers, there may be about 5,000 commenters. Of those, perhaps 80% of them put one space after a period. So, with only that criteria, we've reduced the anonymity set to 4,000 people.
For what it's worth, I commend their efforts (and am seeding the hell out of the torrent) but think it was a serious mistake to make a post announcing it. They should have posted it on major sites anonymously, not pseudonymously. To post prose online risks being identified by stylometrics or things like time between key presses, etc. (Perhaps these could be defeated by copy and pasting to and from Google Translate.)
- sitkack 12y agoOne needs a grammar proxy to clean their writing.
- rhema 12y agoI've got json (includes) for the top 1000 posts from July 27. If someone wants it for this, PM me.
- e12e 12y ago"PM me" Sarcasm?
- infinity0 12y agoIf someone is going to try this, be sceptical of the results. We do not know for sure they're a member of /r/Anarchism. If you run the analysis only on the members of that subreddit, you'll only get "the member that writes most like the leaker".
- afro88 12y agoSorry to burst the bubble but you can't rely on the result of this kind of analysis. Identifying people through their writing style isn't new, and you don't know they haven't already done a prior analysis and ensured their writing style doesn't identify them (or maybe matches to someone else on /r/anarchy). Things that can be faked have every chance of being faked. Especially when it comes to hackers who need to cover their tracks daily.
- nilved 12y agoVery true. My post was self-described guesswork and theory, but I wouldn't be so dismissive of it!
- tripzilch 12y agoOr you could do like the post itself suggests: If you're going to try your hand at forensics, why not dig into that 40GB data dump, see what you can find out this Gamma/Finspy business. Sure it's interesting to figure out who hacked/leaked all this data. But in the same sense, it's extremely counterproductive to do so, if you agree in any way that it is wrong what this company is doing, collecting and selling 0day malware kits. (hmm, for some reason I missed your last paragraph, so the above doesn't really apply to you. however the point still stands for others / in general)