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."
I recognise my own writing (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:College essays (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, it's the exact opposite.
Anti-plagiarism software searches for the same content with completely different styles.
Writer identification involves searching for the same style amongst completely different content.
Re:I wrote a letter to the CEO once (Score:2, Insightful)
And Google (a.k.a "The Evil Empire" TM) will have a cached copy of the original with the IP address you posted from. In other words you'll also need to go through the magic 7 proxies !
Re:I wrote a letter to the CEO once (Score:2, Insightful)
I think a bigger threat to geeks in business are when they approach such situations without due caution. If you make a claim, you must be prepared to back it up to everyone that could be interested. Real concrete evidence. References. Citations. Etc.
And that IS approaching the situation without due caution. Geeks think that having real concrete evidence means that other people must believe you. Real world people are not like that, especially the political minded ones. Evidence be damned, political minded people play power games without regard to reality, all the way until the company bankrupts, then they play their game elsewhere.
Approaching with due caution means you must first prepare by finding someone more powerful to back you up, and be ready to find another job even so.
The OP survived the episode because he implicitly have the CEO's backing, as the CEO challenged the managers (i.e. already publicly shown that he agreed there was a problem with some manager). Had the CEO simply quietly sent a copy of the letter out to the managers and told them to "deal with it", the OP would likely have been fired or forced to leave.
Re:Anonymous First Post (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing, as long as you have a large enough corpus of the framee's writing. If the framee is your friend, this probably isn't a problem. If they're a public figure, maybe not a problem (depending on how much editing and PRing their written statements undergo before they are released.) If they're $RANDOM_PASSERBY, not so easy.
I think a more common usage would be to tweak your own writing just so it doesn't sound like you. Write something you don't want identified as your (the test sample), check it against a corpus of your own written work. If it detects as your work, rough up the test sample until it doesn't. This would be an easier problem than the framing case since you're not trying to make it look like a specific other person's work, you're trying to make it look like it's ANYONE else's (you don't really care whose) work.