I wonder if this could be used to unmask satoshi. I remember a piece about applying stylometry to satoshi's writing, but they just compared him to the usual list of suspects (finney, back, etc.)

There's been some interesting threads about stylometry over the years [1]. The top link was quite decent at unmasking HN alt accounts with basic ngram analysis whipped up in one day [2].

1. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=stylometry

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33756141

• tarpitt

  today at 11:26 PM

  I remember this! it got me pretty good. I have a bad habit of generating alts because I forget the password.

  It makes me wonder if we could use non-instruct LLMs to slightly alter the wording of text while keeping the meaning the same meaning. Perhaps by using perplexity or some other metric. I don't know, maybe you compare the distance of the "meaning" vectors.

  You might also want to have some "style" vector associated with each pseudonym. For example, I might want it to produce british english under a certain pseudonym, and simulate an ESL speaker under another.

  Essentially, you would want some way of re-styling text. The basic way to do this would be to run the same sylometry tools the hunter uses and manually make synonym word/phrase subsitutions to lower your similarity.

  It's a cat and mouse game, but I think the mouse eventually wins. Consider a program that translates your english writing programmaticially into a low-entropy symbolic form and then translates them back to english in a procedural manner. Basicially you design an intermediary language that cannot contain style. It would be boring to read but it would remove all the style.

• saghm

  today at 10:42 PM

  Looks like the site was taken down. I was curious who wrote the most like me, given that I don't have any alt accounts, but I guess weighing privacy over my curiosity is a good thing in the big picture

Entropy is unfortunately a very bad metric to estimate if these identification techniques will scale. Plugging my work here as example: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-55296-6

Sooo, this implies such deep profiling hasn't been in use for a decade for target advertisements. 500M is not that large a number with the amount of traces we leave behind online :)

• DroneBetter

  today at 11:10 PM

  maybe by the platforms based on the non-publicly-disclosed behaviour (including usage patterns, like rates of opening specific menus), but not by other unprivileged users seeking to publicly out pseudomymous authors.

I wondered something almost the opposite the other day. With consistent interaction with chat bots and AI output, their linguistic ticks are surely bleeding into every day speech ("smoking gun" and other turns of phrase). What if our linguistic output starts to conform?

> Do they, incorrectly, position their adverbial clauses? Underrated line.

• rel_ic

  today at 9:55 PM

  That whole paragraph is clever :)

"Pseudpocalypse"... why not "pseudocalypse" or "pseudoapocalypse"?

As an aside, it's always surprising to see how English speakers split Greek words like "Apocalypse". That is to say, they always split them in the middle of Greek syllables, or just drop letters like "pseud[o][a]pocalypse" and often in a way that ends up sounding clunky and weird even in English.

Can't think of other examples now. Brain going to sleepzzzz....

Edit: oh wow there's actually a word for that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libfix

OK, now I go to sleep.

• dooglius

  today at 11:05 PM

  "pseud" is it's own atom here, see definition 2 in https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pseud

  It's not trying to say "something like an apocalypse" it's saying "an apocalypse of pseuds"

Related articles:

- Claude knows who you are: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jkb4CBB7rf4XYP5eb/claude-kno...

- ~ Opus 4.7 is the first model to correctly guess who I am based on unpublished articles: https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/2044962428547695007

I've gotten several dozen accounts banned on reddit over the years. I don't remember the names of them all. It would be hilarious to me if someone mined the archives and stitched them all together.

One would think that it could be possible to make a tool that takes some text and "anonymizes" it by making it a little more standard and boring (uniforming punctuation and sentence structure, changing words with some synonyms, etc). Maybe wouldn't make it particularly compelling, but would be valuable for political dissidents and other people with a high threat model.

Does anyone have some tools to share?

• jay_kyburz

  today at 9:40 PM

  Not sure if you are joking.

  Try ChatGPT.com

So anonymity of written speech is toast. We should, however, strive to preserve other forms of anonymity. For example, donations given to political causes should be kept confidential. Let protesters wear masks up to the point where they break the law.

• RetroTechie

  yesterday at 5:40 PM

  > So anonymity of written speech is toast.

  No just use a text-mixer: in goes your text, set parameters to have output match <scapegoat> (or just pick "standard_Neanderthal_3"), out comes text conveying the message you wrote, in the style of your choosing.

  Of course that would also strip the attributes that made it your creation.

• inigyou

  today at 8:56 PM

  Hmm, the Kill Puppies Movement received $500,000,000 from an anonymous donor.

yes but no, can't we just ask AI to sufficiently shuffle our words or for algos to do so?

"boom", pseudoanonymity (spell?) restored?

• tacostakohashi

  today at 9:18 PM

  for future words, sure. but lots of people have an extensive volume of word they already published with the hope / expectation of remaining anonymous.

Huh, I just realized he (she?) was pseudonymous and not Matt Might[0] this whole time. Oops.

Also, I wonder about this analysis in the age of AI slop. I wonder how much that removes the identifying bits, vs how much carries through of the original prompt (e.g. topic and guidance). It's interesting that a pseudonymous blogs might take on very generic Claude-voice, which could be worthwhile if the topics were interesting, but could also just be a completely humanless bot.

[0] https://matt.might.net

• hungryhobbit

  today at 10:12 PM

  AI is clearly the correct answer to this specific problem: Claude can not identify another writer if they use Claude (or another LLM) enough to massage the text.

  The problem, as the article correctly identifies, is that this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are tons of other cases (e.g. identifying a car without a license plate by the scratches) that AI is going to enable ... and in those cases we can't just get anonymity back by using an LLM.

This always seems theoretical. Has it happened?

• axus

  today at 10:43 PM

  As mentioned in a comment above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016

• tacostakohashi

  today at 9:22 PM

  Things like it have happened. The Unabomber was identified through his writing idiosyncrasies.

  Lots of criminals have been identified by reanalyzing old DNA samples using data and genealogical techniques that weren't possible at the time the samples were left.

  • ButlerianJihad

    today at 9:38 PM

    > The Unabomber was identified through his writing idiosyncrasies.

    By his brother, apparently. His brother read the manifesto, and said, “hey, sounds eerily familiar!”

    But wouldn’t it be deliciously ironic if A.I. had caught Kaczynski‽

• pphysch

  today at 10:38 PM

  This is the kind of thing that is totally technically plausible, and useful to intelligence groups but not the general public, and therefore I would assume it is 100% in production in international intelligence agencies. But nothing we can "prove" without getting shot.

  Similar to ultra-accurate multimedia geolocation models.

> A stronger conjecture is that we’re heading towards a sort of generalized pseudpocalypse. Perhaps, in the future, if you interact with the world through essentially any high-bandwidth channel, then you identify yourself. Say you wear a mask in public and only speak by sub-vocalizing into a voice changer. That’s fine, you’ll still be identified using your body shape, gait, or chemical signature. Or say you don’t like your car being tracked everywhere, so you stop carrying a phone and you somehow convince lawmakers to ban license plates. No problem, your car will still be tracked using tiny scratches or unique pinging sounds from the engine. Or say you don’t like being tracked on the internet, so you lock down your browser profile, buy stuff only with Monero, and connect through a chain of three VPNs. That’s OK. You’ll still be identified through how you wiggle your finger as you scroll down the page. We’re all just too unique, and the information theoretic limit is coming for us.

Forensic research, NSA, Palantir…

Btw 42. Sleep, eat, have sex, have fun, be useful.

• inigyou

  today at 9:56 PM

  Useful to whom?

  See, I used "whom", messing up my fingerprint.

  • sixtyj

    today at 10:07 PM

    Just be useful. To community, to family, to company, to yourself.

    Sometimes I see people that consume and take only. (I am not judging, I just observe.)

See the classic Gwern post: https://gwern.net/death-note-anonymity

Which quotes Tao on using deliberate disinformation to preserve anonymity.

> …one additional way to gain more anonymity is through deliberate disinformation. For instance, suppose that one reveals 100 independent bits of information about oneself. Ordinarily, this would cost 100 bits of anonymity (assuming that each bit was a priori equally likely to be true or false), by cutting the number of possibilities down by a factor of 2100; but if 5 of these 100 bits (chosen randomly and not revealed in advance) are deliberately falsified, then the number of possibilities increases again by a factor of (100 choose 5) ~ 226, recovering about 26 bits of anonymity.

Intentionally adding writing "tics", scheduling posts to appear between 2am and 6am in your timezone, or pretending to have a different gender/location/age should help a lot in staying pseudonymous for a while longer.

• pixl97

  today at 11:18 PM

  Possibly, but it can be very difficult to conceal age or location reliability, especially as your corpus of text grows. And of course that is with just the text, when you start adding in other bits of digital information it gets even more difficult.

Eh isn't authorship linking a whole field of study? Yes it is. Here's a review paper form 2006 [0]. Its an old subject, with are literally thousands of papers. Really wished the author had taken a cursory glance at the literature.

[0] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/11889342_20

As long as you're fine with losing your distinctive voice (which should be taken as table stakes for people who value anonymity to the extent of worrying about this), it's perfectly reasonable to use tools to stymie stylometry. I'm not even suggesting using an LLM (which may or may not be sufficient, it would be difficult to verify either way); it would suffice to have a tool that rewrites your prose (or analyzes it and flags it for manual correction, etc.) if it isn't written in, say, a form where every sentence is primitive subject-verb-object, limited to the 1,000 most common English words, with no contractions, idioms, or exotic punctuation. Yes, this doesn't completely eliminate all possibly identifying bits of entropy, but it would more than suffice for hiding in a crowd ("hiding" in the sense of obviously standing out as someone trying not to be noticed, and as long as you're also careful about your opsec in other ways, like time of posting, etc).

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[flagged]

One potential solution here I suppose is to make deanonymization or contributing to it a serious crime. I doubt that will happen in most places, though, since it’s often the government that wants to do this to its own citizens.

• inigyou

  today at 9:57 PM

  downvoted because the government doing stuff is communism