Show HN: Anon – A Unix Command to Anonymise Data • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Anon – A Unix Command to Anonymise Data

#11

Post by kevin_nisbet » Thu, May 24, 2018, 4:04 PM UTC

nathankleyn wrote: post #5

Cynddl wrote: post #3

How does this tool compare to other (libre) anonymization software programs, such as ARX [1]? From what I understand, there are only basic routines so to sample records and coarsen a few attributes (e.g. ZIP code, dates) implemented so far. This might also not be sufficient to truly anonymize data, as a large body of research has shown so far [2,3,4] [1] https://arx.deidentifier.org [2] https://www.uclalawreview.org/…

Hey! I'm one of the co-maintainers of the project here. What you see today in this project is really a means to scratch an itch we had - mainly to quickly and easily sample/obfuscate some delimited data in a way that is "good enough" for use for demonstrating a visualisation tool without using the original dataset. It's important to note that that we intend to use this data still within a secure environment. This too…

I would recommend you make this clearer in the readme, as I wasn't left with the impression reading the documentation that the tool was for limited scenarios and scope.

Re: Show HN: Anon – A Unix Command to Anonymise Data

#12

Post by magissima » Thu, May 24, 2018, 4:49 PM UTC

Json for a config that's intended to be used by humans is an abomination.

Re: Show HN: Anon – A Unix Command to Anonymise Data

#13

Post by parliament32 » Thu, May 24, 2018, 4:54 PM UTC

magissima wrote: post #12

Json for a config that's intended to be used by humans is an abomination.

Agreed. YAML is a much more human-manageable option, while keeping all the benefits of JSON.

Re: Show HN: Anon – A Unix Command to Anonymise Data

#14

Post by shabble » Thu, May 24, 2018, 4:57 PM UTC

magissima wrote: post #12

Json for a config that's intended to be used by humans is an abomination.

is it even technically json if it has line-comments (like the README example)?

Re: Show HN: Anon – A Unix Command to Anonymise Data

#15

Post by tomc1985 » Thu, May 24, 2018, 5:37 PM UTC

pdkl95 wrote: post #10

> anonymising ... columns until the output is useful for applications where sensitive information cannot be exposed This tool will not provide any significant amount of anonymity. > rows to randomly sample ... hash (using ... 32 bits) the column ... mod the result by the [constant] value This is not random. It deterministically selects the same very predictable fraction of rows. > UK format postcode (eg. W1W 8BE) and…

so why not hash with a very large salt and then throw away the salt?

Re: Show HN: Anon – A Unix Command to Anonymise Data

#16

Post by Tepix » Thu, May 24, 2018, 5:47 PM UTC

I'm surprised it doesn't support anonymisation of IP adresses. That would be pretty much the first feature I'd implement.

Re: Show HN: Anon – A Unix Command to Anonymise Data

#17

Post by unhammer » Thu, May 24, 2018, 6:06 PM UTC

Slightly related: Metadata Anonymisation Toolkit https://mat.boum.org/ (which seems to be in need of contributors)

Re: Show HN: Anon – A Unix Command to Anonymise Data

#18

Post by stepik777 » Thu, May 24, 2018, 6:08 PM UTC

Why is it a UNIX tool? What makes it UNIX? Would it not work on e.g. Windows?

Re: Show HN: Anon – A Unix Command to Anonymise Data

#19

Post by xomateix » Thu, May 24, 2018, 6:13 PM UTC

magissima wrote: post #12

Json for a config that's intended to be used by humans is an abomination.

Hey, one of the co-maintainers of the project here. And the one that decided to use json.

I agree with you. there are other options for configuration that are much better than json (yaml, toml).

Main reason for chosing json was simplicity. This was my first project in go and I didn't want to spend much time in it either. I found an example that was using json and I saw that I didn't need any external library to decode it. I thought that was good enough, at least for now.

Will probably look into using a library that supports yaml/toml for configuration in the future.

Re: Show HN: Anon – A Unix Command to Anonymise Data

#20

Post by littlesheephtpt » Thu, May 24, 2018, 6:14 PM UTC

stepik777 wrote: post #18

Why is it a UNIX tool? What makes it UNIX? Would it not work on e.g. Windows?

It ostensibly is a tool that follows the model/philosophy of unix: ie, a command line utility that does one thing well, inputs and outputs are text so they can be piped together, etc.