Fun post!
The Federalist Papers: Author Identification Through K-Means Clustering
31–36 of 36 posts
Re: The Federalist Papers: Author Identification Through K-Means Clustering
#32Increasingly it feels like we can only "think" anonymously, not speak. Technology like Tor allows me to surf the web untracked, which is good. There are chilling effects from mass surveilance that cause people not read about sensitive topics[1]. It's good people can expose themselves to primary sources unimpeded.
But if a user tries to say anything of substance or simply become part of a community rather than rotate nyms every year or so, they're opening themself up to fingerprinting.
An interesting dynamic, in my opinion.
[1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/aekedb/chilling-e...
Re: The Federalist Papers: Author Identification Through K-Means Clustering
#33Fun post!
btw, mostly seems to run on python2!
I believe you intended to run in python3 based on your last cell.
changing maketrans and translate will have it run in python2.7
table = string.maketrans('', '') # remove punctuation from each word
stripped = [w.translate(table, string.punctuation) for w in tokens]
Re: The Federalist Papers: Author Identification Through K-Means Clustering
#34Fun post!
btw, mostly seems to run on python2! I believe you intended to run in python3 based on your last cell. changing maketrans and translate will have it run in python2.7 table = string.maketrans('', '') # remove punctuation from each word stripped = [w.translate(table, string.punctuation) for w in tokens] Did you read the book on nltk before writing this project? Curious about background skill development to undertake th…
I've tried to transition fully to python3, but yet it should mostly work in python2.7 as well!
I did not read the book on nltk. I've been into information/coding theory recently (just finished Information by James Gleick) and thought I'd try my hand at something closer to NLP/ML. Very little background in the topic - I've taken a few courses in college and chatted with a few friends that know ML fairly well, but besides that I relied on blog posts and papers found on arxiv!
Re: The Federalist Papers: Author Identification Through K-Means Clustering
#35Now try Satoshi Nakamoto with bitcointalk posts and papers in cryptography.
This assumes Satoshi discusses such things under a nym tied to his real name or IP. I have a suite of nyms I created over Tor, and exclusively use via Tor, which I use to discuss certain topics. It's hard to do a stylometric analysis when you don't have anything to compare to. Professional writing is very different from informal conversation. If someone doesn't have a Facebook, gmail, twitter, etc it would be very di…
It would definitely be hard to do. And my personal suspicion is that Satoshi is a group of individuals, making such an analysis almost impossible. However there is the possibility that there is some sort of "linguistic fingerprint" capable of uniquely identifying Satoshi, despite what I believe to be their efforts to create a highly specific and unique style of writing for the purposes of evading identification. The way the Unabomber used a certain phrase in the manifesto and a letter to a family member was what got him caught.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_can%27t_have_your_cake_and...
Another interesting analysis would be to compare the structure of code between the early bitcoin code and code written by likely suspects. Perhaps variable naming convention will identify Satoshi.
Re: The Federalist Papers: Author Identification Through K-Means Clustering
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
This assumes Satoshi discusses such things under a nym tied to his real name or IP. I have a suite of nyms I created over Tor, and exclusively use via Tor, which I use to discuss certain topics. It's hard to do a stylometric analysis when you don't have anything to compare to. Professional writing is very different from informal conversation. If someone doesn't have a Facebook, gmail, twitter, etc it would be very di…
It would definitely be hard to do. And my personal suspicion is that Satoshi is a group of individuals, making such an analysis almost impossible. However there is the possibility that there is some sort of "linguistic fingerprint" capable of uniquely identifying Satoshi, despite what I believe to be their efforts to create a highly specific and unique style of writing for the purposes of evading identification. The…
>my personal suspicion is that Satoshi is a group of individuals, making such an analysis almost impossible
I agree. My bet is at least two: one theory heavy "ideas guy" and one more software engineering oriented programmer who did the heavy lifting on implementation.
And I have also noticed that these types of analysis are for single authored documents.
I suspect it will stay a secret for a long time... maybe we'll get some deathbed confessions in a few decades.