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A challenge, identify this HN user, I tried twice and failed

jacquesmattheij.com

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Re: A challenge, identify this HN user, I tried twice and failed

#121

Post by jacquesm »

lkrubner wrote: post #119

Is the question serious, or is it meant as a joke? As a riposte to the earlier thread, it is fantastic. The user writes "privacy is dead" and here, on Hacker News, and also on jacquesmattheij.com, you have a thread with a lot of intelligent people trying to figure out the person's identity, and failing. Therefore, the user's original point is disproven simply by starting this new thread. If this was deliberate, then…

Exactly! That's the whole idea here, I was quite surprised that my first solution (with a very high correlation) failed, even more surprised when the second one failed as well (especially since that person had been commenting in the same thread and had a very high correlation as well).

Elsewhere in this thread someone is jumping up and down to stop trying to identify the poster, the funny thing is I think he/she is in no danger at all of being identified, at least not without his/her cooperation.

The only person that could identify this user is PG, and maybe alaskamiller, and I'm pretty sure that our secrets are safe there.

edit: and if that person is the original poster then they're not helping themselves by increasing the sample size :)

Re: A challenge, identify this HN user, I tried twice and failed

#122

Post by sorbus »

eru wrote: post #104
jacquesm wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's an easier challenge at all. Disprove that pink elephants exist vs prove that gray ones do. Which one is the easier challenge ?

Yes, and still people seem take the denials of the other users at face value.

I think that we're all treating this as a game, under the assumption that if we figure out who onetimetoken is he'll tell us, as it supports his point that privacy is dead. Also, it wouldn't be fun if we assumed that he will deny it if identified. Never underestimate the importance of having fun.

Re: A challenge, identify this HN user, I tried twice and failed

#123

Post by jimmyjim »

jacquesm wrote: post #121
lkrubner wrote: post #119

Is the question serious, or is it meant as a joke? As a riposte to the earlier thread, it is fantastic. The user writes "privacy is dead" and here, on Hacker News, and also on jacquesmattheij.com, you have a thread with a lot of intelligent people trying to figure out the person's identity, and failing. Therefore, the user's original point is disproven simply by starting this new thread. If this was deliberate, then…

Exactly! That's the whole idea here, I was quite surprised that my first solution (with a very high correlation) failed, even more surprised when the second one failed as well (especially since that person had been commenting in the same thread and had a very high correlation as well). Elsewhere in this thread someone is jumping up and down to stop trying to identify the poster, the funny thing is I think he/she is i…

However, as I tried pointing out (in a seemingly dead thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1200091), identity management is something that only the technically savvy can pull off. And even they are likely to stumble apart at some point, because being perfect in every way is inhumanly hard. And so, as it stands, privacy is dead in this age.

Re: A challenge, identify this HN user, I tried twice and failed

#124

Post by rjett »

lkrubner wrote: post #119

Is the question serious, or is it meant as a joke? As a riposte to the earlier thread, it is fantastic. The user writes "privacy is dead" and here, on Hacker News, and also on jacquesmattheij.com, you have a thread with a lot of intelligent people trying to figure out the person's identity, and failing. Therefore, the user's original point is disproven simply by starting this new thread. If this was deliberate, then…

"I'd say the current thread offers proof that privacy can be defended. After all, here we have all these smart people, failing to identify the earlier user."

Imagine the hassle of creating brand new identities for every action taken online. If privacy isn't dead, then it sure as hell is tough to maintain (and to do so would not be very practical).

Re: A challenge, identify this HN user, I tried twice and failed

#125

Post by jacquesm »

jimmyjim wrote: post #123
jacquesm wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly! That's the whole idea here, I was quite surprised that my first solution (with a very high correlation) failed, even more surprised when the second one failed as well (especially since that person had been commenting in the same thread and had a very high correlation as well). Elsewhere in this thread someone is jumping up and down to stop trying to identify the poster, the funny thing is I think he/she is i…

However , as I tried pointing out (in a seemingly dead thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1200091 ), identity management is something that only the technically savvy can pull off. And even they are likely to stumble apart at some point, because being perfect in every way is inhumanly hard. And so, as it stands, privacy is dead in this age.

On /. posting anonymously is as simple as checking a box, even if you have an account.

Plenty of people have done so over the years, checking a box is nothing that only the 'technically savvy' can do.

If you do that rarely then I think your anonymous words are reasonably safe. If you do it regularly then you are open to the kind of attack that I attempted, and then it will have a better chance of success.

Privacy is dead in a general sense, companies like facebook, google and twitter facilitate identified communication and in that sense every letter you wrote using the old postal system was just as revealing, it just wasn't open to be read by the public.

People are slowly coming around about all this stuff being visible online. I can see that with the 'reocities' project, on average two people every day ask for their old account to be wiped because of privacy reasons. That's not much, but it still means that 1,000 non-technical users per year that I happen to have backed up a few pages for realize this. So if you extrapolate that to the internet at large I think that the number of users that are wising up to this is much larger than you'd expect at first glance.

Time will tell if there will be enough support for this, the 'think of the children' and 'war on terror' people seem to have the advantage for now, but laws that are enacted can in due course be repealed.

I've never bothered to hide my identity, there is nothing that I have to say that I wouldn't put my name to, even if not all of it is received equally well, that doesn't bother me (maybe it should).

There are people in positions that are sensitive that have stuff to tell us, in such cases (which are rare) anonymity really serves a purpose and I think this little experiment shows that without at least access to some log files these exercises get a lot harder.

edit: your thread definitely isn't 'dead'.

Re: A challenge, identify this HN user, I tried twice and failed

#127

Post by gridspy »

eru wrote: post #105
jacquesm wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Informal is cool with me. Someone could just state their challenge, and the prize, if any (which need not be money), and if others think the challenge is interesting enough they could paypal the author their contribution to the pot, or they could publicly state that they want to up the stakes (or both).

Yes. Probably a common protocol will emerge. Also posting bets and searching for someone to take the other side (or be the arbiter--in case any is needed) could be interesting. Similar to http://www.longbets.org/ , but embedded into HN and not focussed on long-term bets. Edit: I have opened a new top-level post about this topic. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1200153

Payment could be in the form of services provided by startups at HN. Subscriptions to our SaaS systems, free products, discounts, etc.

Re: A challenge, identify this HN user, I tried twice and failed

#128

Post by petercooper »

jacquesm wrote: post #106
petercooper wrote: post #87

So I wrote a bit of code to compare against other HN comments Do you have a corpus? Further, and this is an open question, is there an archive/downloadable corpus of HN in part or entirety anywhere? It would be fascinating and I'd love to keep a copy to look back at in years to come.

> Do you have a corpus? Yes, that's why I thought it would be an easy challenge. My bad :) > Further, and this is an open question, is there an archive/downloadable corpus of HN in part or entirety anywhere? Yes, you can query the google cache. It's fairly easy to do. The only things you don't get that way is the stuff you can see as a logged in user.

Yes, you can query the google cache. It's fairly easy to do.

You could, but I'm not trying that again. It's easy to get your IP busted depending on what random algorithm Google decides to run each week..

Re: A challenge, identify this HN user, I tried twice and failed

#129

Post by smokinn »

tokenadult wrote: post #72
aresant wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word "token" is used in two completely different contexts, so I don't think that's right. EG: "tokenadult" = the included minority adult "onetimetoken" = account used once, like putting a disposable token into a machine

You are correct. I first used the screen name on a forum, and then another forum, where the majority of users are teenagers. The screen name doesn't fit well here on HN (where almost everyone is an adult, even though I am older than most participants), but I like to minimize my use of distinct screen names. However, I am sure by screen name searches that other people now use this same screen name.

Maybe you could switch it up and use commonadult along with tokenadult depending on the perceived demographic?

Though I'm not one to speak, I've used "smokinn" (or "Smokinn" which I generally prefer) for, I believe, 16 years now.

Re: A challenge, identify this HN user, I tried twice and failed

#130

Post by petercooper »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #88
petercooper wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"high-end criminals" isn't unusual. Certainly not to these British eyes. If you Google for "high end criminals" even without the hyphen, about half of the results use the hyphenated version. The other things you point out encourage me to share your opinion, however.

Google's regular search doesn't handle hyphenation but Trends appears to: http://www.google.com/trends?q=%22high-end%22%2C%22high+end%... . Google searches give me results which suspect this Trend search is not sound however. I'm from the UK too.

The problem is context, a common issue with tracking things with Google Trends in particular. Tracking programming language usage with it, for example, has been a nightmare ("ruby" and "python" having far too many meanings, but few write "ruby programming").

"high end" has more uses than "high-end." For example, "I bought a car at the high end of my budget." In that case, "high-end" wouldn't make sense. In "datacenters have been targeted by high-end criminals," however, "high-end" is a compound adjective.

Alternatively, you could drop the hyphen and/or form an entirely new word: "highend." The word "highend" doesn't seem to have caught on yet, though. I suspect that's because "upmarket" covers the same meaning already and is less susceptible to these morphological mishaps.

(On seeing what OS X had to suggest as a correction for "highend," it suggested both "high end" and "high-end.")

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