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Comment by tolmasky | Hacker News Reader

Are there "text mixing" services you can use to anonymize your writing? Seems like analysis like this could prove to be dangerous for free speech in the future. Perhaps just round-trip babble fishing a few times.

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Machine translation doesn't work: http://www.cs.drexel.edu/~sa499/papers/adversarial_stylometr... "Adversarial Stylometry: Circumventing Authorship Recognition to Preserve Privacy and Anonymity" Brennan et al 2013

Fortunately, simply trying to write like someone else does.

Perhaps Satoshi Nakamoto should have written in faux-Engrish in order to really confuse people.

I can see choosing an affected writing style becoming an integral part of creating an anonymous persona.

There's some preliminary research software for this :

http://www.i-programmer.info/news/105-artificial-intelligenc...

There are many Text Spinners online that do the trick for many cheating students and spammers.

Not even students. The modifications performed by spinners are frequently silly - they amount to taking some percentage of words, looking them up in a thesaurus, and replacing them with a randomly chosen synonym. It's pretty common that the synonym is inappropriate for the context, so the results are ridiculous. For instance, here's what a spinner does with this paragraph:

    Not even understudies. The alterations performed by spinners are oftentimes
    senseless - they measure to taking some rate of statements, turning them
    toward a thesaurus, and reinstating them with a haphazardly picked
    equivalent word. It's pretty regular that the equivalent word is unseemly
    for the connection, so the effects are ludicrous. Case in point, here's
    what a spinner does with this paragraph:

It's good enough for spammers, I suppose, but it's easy to spot. The overall sentence structure isn't changed, either, so that's still ripe for analysis.

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