Anonymous Cowards, Deanonymized 159
mbstone writes "Arvind Narayana writes: What if authors can be identified based on nothing but a comparison of the content they publish to other web content they have previously authored? Naryanan has a new paper to be presented at the 33rd IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy. Just as individual telegraphers could be identified by other telegraphers from their 'fists,' Naryanan posits that an author's habitual choices of words, such as, for example, the frequency with which the author uses 'since' as opposed to 'because,' can be processed through an algorithm to identify the author's writing. Fortunately, and for now, manually altering one's writing style is effective as a countermeasure."
In this exploration the algorithm's first choice was correct 20% of the time, with the poster being in the top 20 guesses 35% of the time. Not amazing, but: "We find that we can improve precision from 20% to over 80% with only a halving of recall. In plain English, what these numbers mean is: the algorithm does not always attempt to identify an author, but when it does, it finds the right author 80% of the time. Overall, it identifies 10% (half of 20%) of authors correctly, i.e., 10,000 out of the 100,000 authors in our dataset. Strong as these numbers are, it is important to keep in mind that in a real-life deanonymization attack on a specific target, it is likely that confidence can be greatly improved through methods discussed above — topic, manual inspection, etc."
First (Score:5, Funny)
Re:First (Score:5, Funny)
Got you! Using the power of de-anonymisation, I have discovered there you are none other than...
Bicx! [slashdot.org]
This stuff really works.
Re:First (Score:5, Funny)
Then I wouldn't want to do any different.
-- Ethanol-fueled
Re:First (Score:4, Funny)
Anyway why do you cower? what are you afraid of?
Wait a minute...
This is why (Score:4, Funny)
Remember, kids, practice redundant privacy measures to ensure you will never be exposed.
Re:meh (Score:4, Funny)
floxinoxinihilipilification (Score:4, Funny)
Damn! I'll have to stop using floxinoxinihilipilification so much in my anonymous posts or people will know it's me!
Using the logic proposed in the article- can we assume that all the anonymous cowards using "the other f word" are all Samuel L Jackson?