When Writing, How Anonymous Can You Be, Really? 184
An anonymous reader writes "Do you still think your online writing is, basically, anonymous? Think again! Research has it people put much of their personal traits into their writing, and computers may just be able to pick them up. That's at least what a recently announced competition on author identification (Given a document, who wrote it?) and author profiling (Given a document, what are its author's age and gender?) wants to find out. Alas, re-using other people's writing is no solution either; there's also a competition on plagiarism detection (Given a document, is it an original?). Wanna revisit your recent rants?"
Yes, we know (Score:1, Informative)
As previously reported [slashdot.org] on Slashdot. Now, please identify me. Here's a hint: I have a 5 digit UID.
Re:Guess who I am! (Score:3, Informative)
>Based on the above, who am I?
Anonymous
Re:That's pretty easy (Score:3, Informative)
Most people would just use something like Tor (or Tor and another VPN/proxy service).
Erm... the transport doesn't matter if you're analyzing message composition.
Right, it's not about the identity - it's about matching different pieces of text as written by the same author
Once the texts are matched, your identity is compromised as long as ONE of the texts is coming from a known identified source (email, etc.)
Re:That's pretty easy (Score:5, Informative)
Yep - that was part of Barr's stock in trade. He compared posts made by anon members in various venues, then traced some of those members to identify them. An IRC server was critical to Barr's process, as I recall. Or, more accurately, the IRC server was critical in this particular instance, as it maintained logs that some of the other servers did not.
Re:Betteridge strikes again (Score:4, Informative)
Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no
Whoosh.
No -- he got the guy's name from WHOIS (Score:5, Informative)
The only thing that Barr did correctly was look up WHOIS info on the People's Liberation Front's website after an Anonymous guy claimed to be "Supreme Commander" of the PLF... When Barr confronted him, the guy claimed it was a joke, so Barr pointed to an innocent man [salon.com] instead. (Ars Tech article on the 'correct' Commander X [arstechnica.com].) Otherwise, Barr's tactics -- including analyzing what the people wrote -- gave him completely wrong answers [salon.com].