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Comment by Fnoord | Hacker News Reader

Makes me wonder what GitHub can see (e-mail addresses, IP addresses). I also wonder if it is possible to use code analysis to figure out who these people are. Not that it is relevant for me, just curious...

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Look up "authorship attribution" if you're interested in the identification part. There's quite a bit of research into identifying people by their unique habits. Some claim that this is possible even after your code has gone through compilation or other obfuscation processes, but academics have a habit of exaggerating claims based on small data sets. I spent around a year researching this and it's a really fun field - and no doubt the non-public research and technology is as always further advanced than what we can see.

GitHub can see what you send it. If you're concerned about leaking IP data, use a VPN and a remote box for git operations.

Perhaps OP is referring to traking based on the coding? I.E. if you had all the code repos from an individual and ran some sort of pattern reconition software to cross refrence thigs like folder structure, layout of the code, frequency and time of uploads, function & variable naming techniques, etc. This reminds me of a technique called eBiomentrics[0]

[0] https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/keystroke-dynamics-wha...

Yes that is what I was referring to. I forgot the exact name for it. It is akin to (hand)writing analysis, but for code.

Certainly an interesting idea, I suppose most of the things I listed can in fact be mitigated quite easily. Compilers and obfuscators exist even now that would totally destroy most distinguishable patterns. If anyone knows any case studies on this, please drop a link here.

https://psal.cs.drexel.edu/index.php/JStylo-Anonymouth

Edit: The main page of above site has a lot more publications referenced. Worth a look.

https://psal.cs.drexel.edu/index.php/Main_Page

https://evllabs.com/

Stylometry but for code.

My comment misspellings would give me away in a heartbeat.

They probably use their sharklazers emails to sign up.

Nope, they all use gmail addresses - I contribute a bit to this project so I've sent a few emails back and forth.

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