[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What are the implications of Hacker News alt...
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Ask HN: What are the implications of Hacker News alt accounts being
revealed?
This post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 shows that
many HN alt accounts have been exposed, not through hacking but
stylistic analysis. HM famously does not permit deletion of
previous accounts or comments. So for some people who assumed
anonymity this could be anything from unimportant to awkward to a
real problem. Presumably now people will routinely search for alt
accounts of any HN commenter and bring what they find into the
discussion. It's not a hack, but in many ways the implications are
similar to those of a hack. How do you feel about this? @dang
what do you think?
Author : throwawayhghcj
Score : 11 points
Date : 2022-11-26 21:36 UTC (1 hours ago)
| newZWhoDis wrote:
| I'm not worried, I use one of my many personalities for each alt!
| berbec wrote:
| don't use sockpuppets and you won't have a problem
| c22 wrote:
| I always assumed that some actors had this capability and acted
| accordingly. The existence of a publicly available tool merely
| democratizes this power. Anyone seeking complete and perpetual
| anonymity should have been practicing better opsec from the
| beginning.
| adriand wrote:
| This argument, which the creator of the tool also uses, strikes
| me as essentially, "I'm going to harm you to show you that
| there is potential for you to be harmed".
|
| To make a crude analogy, what if I punched you in the face to
| demonstrate that you should consider learning kung fu? Or
| perhaps to indicate that, if a corporation wanted to, they
| could hire people to assault you and there would be little you
| could do about it? At the end of the day you've got a busted
| nose either way. Are you really better off?
| tjrowalway wrote:
| HN should more to support privacy. Allow anonymous posts
| instead of forcing users into the pattern of throwaways that
| are linkable. Karma right now also makes it hard to use a
| throwaway per comment. getting downvoted on a first post might
| lock your account for some hours, so you are forced to build up
| karma with lots of posts.
|
| + give users a way to delete their profile once posted. If not
| whole comment history, at least remove their username from the
| db.
| c22 wrote:
| If you're only using the account for one comment why do you
| care if it gets locked?
| bheadmaster wrote:
| What opsec measures could one take against language analysis?
|
| Everyone has a particular style of writing, and the only way of
| hiding it I can think of is not writing anything at all.
| hinata08 wrote:
| use the same words and logics as everyone / some mainstream
| show like SNL ? Or force yourself to use completely different
| words every time ? Be open minded ? Comment under different
| posts to hide your interests ?
|
| Use short sentences ? Use newspeak ? Copy the features of
| other users ?
|
| I also talk to ppl from various backgrounds. I could prove
| you why you need to vote for any candidate, thanks to the
| logics of coworkers. I used to copy the style of MS
| documentations to refactor code, so that juniors could get
| started right away. Before that, I used to learn English. My
| patterns and word usage where just a medley of recently
| viewed content.
|
| I'm sure it can be achieved.
|
| You just need to read enough, or be exposed to so much
| content than you can choose your patterns.
| Oxidation wrote:
| > Use newspeak
|
| Would only work if enough people did it. Otherwise all your
| accounts will stand out as being "the newspeak person"
| paganel wrote:
| > What opsec measures could one take against language
| analysis?
|
| Be aware that it's almost impossible to defeat it, and act
| accordingly. More exactly, if you think that a tech-capable
| state actor is coming after you then you should be outside
| the reach of where said state actor holds its monopoly of
| power. Real text-anonymity is gone for good.
| c22 wrote:
| * Make a small number of posts per account * Run your
| posts through machine translation services * Pay
| someone on fiverr to write a synopsis of your content, then
| post that * Intentionally vary your style, build rich
| back stories and identities for your nyms, including telltale
| mannerisms.
| theCrowing wrote:
| GPT3?
| rich_sasha wrote:
| One consequence is me realising just how meta and stuck-up-its-
| own-derriere HN is. I knew it's bad but I wasn't expecting a meta
| response to a meta post.
|
| Perhaps we should just iterate. What does this post reveal about
| HN? Discuss.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >So for some people who assumed anonymity this could be anything
| from unimportant to awkward to a real problem.
|
| If that's the case, then that was a bad assumption, IMHO.
|
| I don't assume anonymity. I assume _pseudonymity_.
|
| Then again, I don't use alt accounts either. And, interestingly,
| the closest "match" for me is 0.51 on the site you mentioned.
|
| Which, I guess, is both good and bad. Good in the sense that I'm
| expressing myself as me. And bad in that if folks were to use
| this dataset to compare to _other_ sites where I also post, my
| activities on multiple sites could be correlated. Which would
| probably annoy me, but not for the reasons you may think.
| f38zf5vdt wrote:
| I finetuned T5, a text-to-text transformer, with a loss function
| based on the cosine similarity of any given text with statements
| made by individual HN users. It's like Dreambooth but for text. I
| have been posting under 40 different alt accounts that
| approximate the top users of this site textually and match them
| within an 80th percentile. AMA.
| jimrandomh wrote:
| Wait, you're posting AI-generated spam under 40 different
| accounts? That sounds very unethical.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| How much did it cost to train?
| [deleted]
| f38zf5vdt wrote:
| 3090
| kbelder wrote:
| >Presumably now people will routinely search for alt accounts of
| any HN commenter and bring what they find into the discussion.
|
| First, only obsessive or crazy people will do that, or maybe
| journalists. It'll show up occasionally in discussions, but I
| don't think it'll be 'routine', and I think most commenters will
| avoid subthreads with those sorts of shenanigans.
|
| But more importantly, these static analysis tools are only
| probabilistic. They find likely matches, but in most cases
| there'll be a factor of plausible deniability.
| naruvimama wrote:
| TheHideout wrote:
| Alternate take - if you submit content you think is interesting,
| you can now see people who submit similar interesting content and
| go check out their posts. I tried it and found some stuff I'm
| genuinely interested in.
| cinntaile wrote:
| It seems awfully naive to assume that certain people on this
| forum wouldn't work with or utilize this kind of tech to try and
| identify alts. It's hard to tell if it's accurate or not without
| having knowledge of actual alts.
|
| This isn't the first time someone posted site like this by the
| way, nothing bad came of it.
| eddsh1994 wrote:
| * It only works on accounts with 10k characters, alts tend to be
| for throwaway comments like your account
|
| * Deniability - dang has matches that are close but probably not
| him, you can just say it isn't you
| alkonaut wrote:
| Pseudonymity isn't anonymity. The problem of course is if you
| first had a non-anonymous account (e.g with your real name) and
| then for some reason switched to a pseudonym you thought _wasn't_
| linked to your real identity.
|
| The bottom line I guess is: if you did that, your choice is
| basically to never post at all or to create an account where you
| practice some kind of opsec to try to disconnect it from your
| previous account (e.g run it through a service that rewrites the
| text).
| krapp wrote:
| It doesn't matter, and no one cares.
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(page generated 2022-11-26 23:02 UTC)