Linguistics Identifies Anonymous Users 215
mask.of.sanity writes "Researchers have examined writing styles to identify previously anonymous carders and hackers operating on underground forums. Up to 80 percent of users who wrote at least 5000 words across their posts could be identified using linguistic techniques. Techniques such as stylometric analysis were used to track users who posted across different forums, and could even be used to unveil authors of thesis papers or blogs who had taken to underground networks."
Anonymous First Post (Score:5, Informative)
Anonymous First Post... you'll never guess who I am
Re:I can't think of a non-evil use for this (Score:5, Informative)
Are you serious?
You write as if some new method had been invented. There is no news in the above article. Authorship identification has been a reliable tool for many decades, a whole branch of linguistics (forensic linguistics) deals with it and similar topics like dialect recognition. Under certain circumstances you can even identify personality treats of the author, check out content analysis software like LIWC [liwc.net] for example.
And, yes, plenty of serial killers and blackmailers have been captured with the help of these methods.
Re:I wrote a letter to the CEO once (Score:3, Informative)
I give you the subject of my term paper that landed me top marks at forensic linguistics:
(tl,dr yes there is software that does precisely that Jstylo+Anonymouth)
https://psal.cs.drexel.edu/index.php/JStylo-Anonymouth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b0Ta9h62_E