Sorry dang, aka sctb: https://stylometry.net/user?username=dang
In this particular case, it seems to be picking up the stock moderation responses as it looks like sctb was a moderator account until 2019.
Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
251–260 of 562 posts
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does the bolding indicate?
The explanation is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755466 As far as I’m concerned, it’s the killer feature of the app. The top 20 results may be noisy, but the bolded results have a signal to noise ratio close to infinity.
Of my top 20, 19 are bold, all are above 0.6, and I have no alts.
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#253After 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…
0.6 isn't much. I have 3 matches above 0.6, and they're not me. 20 or so over 0.5.
That's why you manually evaluate the matches. And like I wrote in that comment, I did that manual eval, and these clearly are alts of that main account, not spurious. Narrowing down the pool of accounts you'd need to do this kind of manual evals for by a factor of 100000 is a pretty significant change in capabilities.
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#254How much should we fear de-anonymisation ?
A lot of discussion on the thread are over "how can we prevent this". I would like to know why should we not embrace this and similar technologies?
The benefits in my view are large - online behaviour tracks back to real life - and epidemiology speaking the value of millions of test subjects across every question are invaluable - from traditional medicine to "mass psychology recommendations"
I can guess some downsides (hiding from abusive exes) but am interested in studies, surveys, reports etc - any HN thoughts welcome
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#255This doesn't seem to include text from submissions. I ran it on Brian Armstrong's temp account from here, and it said it didn't write 10,000 characters: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3754664 EDIT: Or maybe it's something else because Brian only wrote less than 6k characters. But then why can my account be looked up? Also, I would guess quoted replies are included, which muddies the analysis. Seems to be a very…
Quoted replies shouldn't be included unless there's a bug on my end. Submission text is not included though I probably should have.
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#256I played a little bit with it and it is baffling how well it finds accounts of people that know each other in real life. So it's not only good for finding alternate accounts but could be used to find peer groups.
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#257I really liked the informative and straight-to-the-point about page - describing how the algorithm works in a way that is easy to understand. All the important details are summarised there. Well done! Edit: From the "How to avoid .." page, there is the following sentence: > Also, most authorship identification algorithms have poor accuracy when working with small amounts of words. This means the optimal strategy woul…
> Can you clarify what this means Imagine that for every new comment you want to post you would create a brand new account which you would use precisely once and never again. Then the stylometry would have just a few words and wouldn’t have enough corpus to get a reliable signature. If a lot of people does this it would be hard to figure out which account belongs with which human. ( Of course if you alone do this, yo…
At the same time, HN doesn't let you delete comments.
Maybe with some GDPR magic.
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#258Cool stuff, thank you for sharing your findings!
I don't do throwaway. I either post or STFU. I also STFU on darknet. Its why I found it fun to read/lurk on things like I2P back when it was new. And I know that on a pseudonymous account it is only a matter of time until it can be linked to another pseudonymous account. It would not surprise me if stylometry was used on Dread Pirate Roberts or the people behind The Pirate Bay or the people behind Wikileaks (Assange's sockpuppet accounts). Such can also have been used to verify afterwards instead of beforehand. Though with TPB since it was on clearweb an advanced adversary could have used correlation/timing attack to figure who wrote what.
I'm having fun times recognizing other Dutch people though their usage of English language. For example, a distinctive word I see Dutch people use a lot is 'oke' instead of 'OK' or 'okay'. Its a red flag the person is native Dutch. I wonder if there are stylometry tools available for figuring if someone used physical vs touchscreen keyboard (I used Glider to write this post, spellchecker unavailable).
And yes, organizations like secret service and police should use such tools as well. It is a known tool, why not use it for good? As with any tool, it can be used for good and evil. On HN this could be useful for the mod team (AFAIK nowadays only dang) to find banned people's sockpuppets. Cross-community could also be a fun project: find a HN user's Twitter or Reddit account. And I hope this method is also used to find Russian trolls on social media.
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#259Since it looks for similar word usage, false positives seem to appear more often when specific topics are talked about, like stocks or crypto. Does this ignore stop words? Or do all words have the same weighting? I wonder if only focusing on stop words would give a more accurate measure. Maybe we are more comfortable with certain stop words more than others? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_words "Stop words are th…
All words have the same weighting. I don't ignore stop words, in fact most of the ngrams I use are compromised almost entirely of stop words. Maybe it'd be more effective if I ignored them.
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#260I have only ever had a single account but it returned 19 possibles with no confidence above .54 but 11 bolded. My own account was listed at the top with a confidence of .9999.
Yeah, I have a bunch of bolded mutuals but none above 0.45. I think I have had one or two alts in the past, but probably they didn't make the 10000 word threshold for inclusion (nor can I remember their names to check if they work in inverse).