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Comment by lwneal | Hacker News Reader

The best protection against this type of de-anonymization is to take measures now, while you still have time, to prevent it. It is possible to change the style of one's writing by using a language model which alters the original text in order to create a new piece with a different style. For example, to translate your text into the grandiose and flowing diction of a bygone era, you might consider the project below.

[1] https://github.com/lwneal/victorianhackernews

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Tools like this probably fool traditional stylometry, but what about de-anonymization tools that find similar ideas, not writing style? Perhaps most people have boring common ideas they got from others, but the sort of people the US Government is most interested in are likely quirkier than most.

Then they'd literally just go after people because they think they might harbor certain ideas?

"sir you are under arrest for maybe thinking about banning dairy production, which is at conflict with national security. We found an anonymous text online that has the same idea."

Why even bother to come up with a pretext then?

To provide comfort to the masses that it was fair.

It would be trivial to mask text and change irrelevant opinions to be anonymous again. Though the real problem is related to posing as others.

Reminds me of ilillliillilill. There's a reason people use names like this.

There is a case to be made, not just for natural language but code.

AFAIK there is quite a bit of examples from security labs where malware authors aren't necessarily identified but at least fingerprinted based on naming conventions, patterns they use across multiple projects etc...

That sort of fingerprinting could expand to correlating someone's anonymous software projects to other examples of code elsewhere (ex: if they contribute to source available stuff).

re: the example project you mention specifically, it does feel like using tools like that almost as a linter for natural language would be a fingerprint in itself.

EDIT: As far as OPSEC goes, a fun tidbit. A friend of mine identified a PR I submitted anonymously to them, simply because of the style of PR comments I made.

I suspect this is why TrueCrypt shut down.

A paper got released in 2015 that claimed 94% accuracy in identifying authors.

I’m sure it would have been quite easy for the NSA to figure out who Satoshi Nakamoto was too considering PRISM was also scooping up everyone’s email.

I find the examples given in the README to be quite tame for Victorian English. Compare it with the ending lines of A Tale of Two Cities:

"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.",

or this from Pride and Prejudice:

"However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters."

I someday hope for style transfer for language, so I can write a paragraph and convert it to Michael Creighton's writing style.

Kennyblanken opens up the fifteen inches of aluminum that is his aging Macintosh Book Pro, produced by a company laughably named after a piece of fruit and formerly headed by a brilliant but somewhat psychopathetic man, now long pushing up the daisies, and taps out the commands to login to his account on the antiquated and increasingly inaccurately named hackernews, bathing in the yellow-orange theme as he stretches across the pale green couch in his small apartment in the big city. Outside, a 2007 Neopolitan Flyer bus roars by, half full with tired commuters.

He expertly massages the worn keys to type out a lengthy and witty response about how he'd imitate the style of a famous novelist whose prose exists mostly to result in the sacrifice of as many innocent trees as possible - demonstrating how to stretch "I'd use Dan Brown's writing style" into nearly two full paragraphs of text.

To be a proper Dan Brown, you'd need to start with "Internet Commentator KennyBlanken" (or some other prefixed descriptor.)

cf [1]

"I think what enabled the first word to tip me off that I was about to spend a number of hours in the company of one of the worst prose stylists in the history of literature was this. Putting curriculum vitae details into complex modifiers on proper names or definite descriptions is what you do in journalistic stories about deaths; you just don't do it in describing an event in a narrative."

[1] http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000844.h...

Aren't GANs all about creating both the generator and the discriminator? Seems to me you can also build the "reverser" quite easily.

> export OPENAI_API_KEY=hunter2

lel

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