Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts

stylometry.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 562 posts

Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts

#161

Post by CrypticShift »

woodruffw wrote: post #123
CrypticShift wrote: post #61

Ingenious idea. At the very least, this is just about finding people who write like us, the same way we seek those with similar tastes (music...) How long before large commercial indexers start offering an efficient (AI based ?) stylometry to agencies and states ? wait... do you think the NSA is already doing this?

Stylometry is an old hat technique; you can assume that intelligence services around the globe regularly apply it. (Statistical stylometry is a little newer and more rigorous than manual stylometry, which essentially involved a human being's judgement call around the similarity of documents.)

What about "deep leaning" stylometry ?

Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts

#162

Post by faeriechangling »

4qz wrote: post #44

This is an evil website. We won’t have any anonymity soon. The highest match is my years old banned account that I forgot about. Where did you get the data from?

It’s just statistics. I recall that during his whistleblowing, Snowden intentionally took anti-stylometry measures.

Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts

#163

Post by VyseofArcadia »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #66

Ha, gruseom shows up for pg, which is dang’s old account. A worthy successor. This is a fascinating way to find similar HN users who aren’t the same person. It’s a surprisingly great recommendation engine. “If you like pg, you might also like…” Sure, the privacy concerns are valid, but the cat’s out of the boot. Might as well enjoy the benefits. montrose is almost definitely pg. Someone who talks about ancient histor…

> but the cat’s out of the boot

It's my first time hearing that variant. Usually its, "the cat's out of the bag" where I'm from.

Do you mean boot in the UK sense, what Americans would call the trunk of a car? Or do you mean a sturdy piece of footwear?

Obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/2390/

Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts

#164

Post by nanidin »

woodruffw wrote: post #56
4qz wrote: post #44

This is an evil website. We won’t have any anonymity soon. The highest match is my years old banned account that I forgot about. Where did you get the data from?

HN has an Algolia-based API. It’s also very easy to crawl. I wouldn’t call this evil, however: it’s merely demonstrating a technique that you should be aware of, if you’re a privacy-conscious person. It looks like they also provide some resources for avoiding stylometric detection.

I would bet my bottom dollar that the likes of Reddit and Google already have models to turn a corpus of text into probable demographic data and models to measure the similarity of users.

Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts

#166

Post by costco »

bscphil wrote: post #139

The scary thing is that once you have this data, finding HN matches for individual targeted users on other sites becomes trivial, even if those sites are harder to scrape. I bet most people here have an anonymous Reddit account, for example. If you wanted to know who was behind a particular Reddit account, you could feed it into something like this and compare the results with HN, where accounts are less likely to be…

I could have used a part of speech tagger, looked at time of day a user posts, capitalization, spelling errors, etc. From what I understand the state of the art is lightyears ahead of this, there are even companies with actual linguists who will act as expert witnesses in court to say stuff like "we can say with 95% certainty that xyz authored this email." Honestly it's kind of scary. There are papers that talk about cross platform authorship attribution, one I think did it with Twitter, Blogspot, G+ and had pretty good results.

Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts

#168

Post by notduncansmith »

kcarter80 wrote: post #151
jsnell wrote: post #105

After a few tries on boring accounts, I thought to try the account of somebody who was notorious for an incident outside of HN, and had a (deservedly) bad time at HN for a couple of years before the account went dark. And yeah, there's a bunch of high confidence (.6-.8) hits for that account, and from a quick browse of the comments of the recently active ones, they look really likely to be alts. Like, all three that…

Could you elaborate on why it's obvious why you won't name the account?

Maybe to avoid attracting any extra attention to this user? Also, as someone who’s read HN for a few years, it only took me 2 guesses to find an account that the above comment describes (and not necessarily the same person).

Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts

#169

Post by culi »

Similar to how they make adversarial fashion[0][1] in order to not be tracked by face id AI, I wonder if we can make adversarial stylometry tools to run your comments through in order to anonymize it

.. [0] https://hackaday.com/2022/10/20/render-yourself-invisible-to...

.. [1] https://adversarialfashion.com/

Post reply on HN