331–340 of 562 posts
Also, talk about a chilling effect. I was already vaguely aware of this, and now I'm overthinking every word I'm thinking/typing.
> uberduper: 0.9999999999999991
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I keep no alternate accounts, but this tool reports best matches for me that appear to be Slavic or just Russian - and I am Russian. Best match score in my list is just above 0.5. There are some clearly alternate accounts on the list, their match scores with this tool are well above 0.7. It is probable that persons of same cultural origin will have similar writing style and vocabulary. It is also probable that person…
There're 19 other accounts this tool finds similar to me. Those are not my accounts. 0.46 - 0.56 are numbers.
Now they know just who cares about which alternate accounts. They know!
They freaking know, man!
You have all fallen for their ploy. Fools!
I’m a native English speaker as well, so I’m unsure how to feel about that.
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MD5 of the username is 9abc27e93b7e3c04b7c599017c1cfe5f ? The top one seems an odd one out in that case?
Usernames aren't random enough to be safe as a simple MD5. Perhaps with a strong bcrypt, but similar to PIN codes, it might be better to give partial information like "is the second character an ...", assuming nobody else made similar statements. Or give the first ~two hex characters of the hash, so that it would match 1/(16²)rd of the usernames. I'm sure there's also a clever way for a zero-knowledge proof here, pro…
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…
Hmm isn't a spot check of comments somewhat tautological, since that is how the tool identifies alts (rather than something like IP address or time of day)? If this had been promoted as "find accounts with similar writing style to yours" would people immediately assume alts?
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> but this functionality turned out way creepier than I thought the moment I tried it Hopefully this raised awareness means that people who actually need anonymity will be more likely to know to take precautions.
Genuinely asking, what way is there to combat this? Is there a tool that takes out stylistic elements of your comment?