Maigret: Collect a dossier on a person by username from thousands of sites

Post by smeagull » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 2:26 AM UTC

BlueTemplar wrote: post #122

smeagull wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You 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)

Somewhat 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.)

Post by d0mine » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 4:59 AM UTC

BawsMcGee wrote: post #176

d0mine wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, there is a recent ~"law"? (discussed on HN) that essentially forbids publishing research that may be misinterpreted by the pronoun people (i.e., any research can be banned).

Do you have a link / source for this?

Post by wruza » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 11:52 AM UTC

rtev wrote: post #192

wruza wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t work retrospectively. You either start a new web life or live under a risk of accidentally exposing or linking to one of your already vulnerable accounts. Also, if we don’t raise issues like this, the next actual fix will be “don’t reuse writing styles and vocabularies on different sites”.

I believe both are inevitable if you want to maintain an unlinked identity. Realistically, there is nothing you can do to avoid that future. The best thing you can do is choose to accept the risk or act to prevent the issue.

Post by voakbasda » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 2:36 PM UTC

jhugo wrote: post #190

voakbasda wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Defamation is definitely one problem with this tool. Once there is “evidence”, it can be (ab)used without consequence by someone, because they can simply point at the tool output. If the output is usually “good enough”, it will provide an alibi for their actions: “I didn’t make a mistake, the computer did.”

Nobody who bothers to check what the tool does will be swayed by this. If someone wants to make shit up, and their audience will not bother to spend 30 seconds looking at their "sources", they could just write a script that outputs whatever they wanted and then point at that script.

Post by rtev » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 9:10 PM UTC

wruza wrote: post #195

rtev wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe both are inevitable if you want to maintain an unlinked identity. Realistically, there is nothing you can do to avoid that future. The best thing you can do is choose to accept the risk or act to prevent the issue.

This line of thinking reminds me of a Roko’s basilisk situation. Embrace it and be prepared vs. don’t mind this nonsense and just actively stop creating/spreading it. And if it spreads enough, make it a punishable offense like hacking/piracy (e.g. via “canary” links) for it to live only in underground. I hope this project will just fly under the public radar due to non-ease of use by an average person or for a simila…