[HN Gopher] AI unmasks anonymous chess players, posing privacy r...
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AI unmasks anonymous chess players, posing privacy risks
Author : O__________O
Score : 148 points
Date : 2022-12-11 12:09 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| Havoc wrote:
| This seems incredibly ominous when transferred to social media.
| Large parts of the internet rely on the pseudo anonymity of it
| quite heavily - see reddit etc.
| dewey wrote:
| Basic opsec principles always say that if you want to stay
| anonymous you have to switch the way you are writing (by
| adopting a differnet personality, running it through
| translation apps etc.).
|
| If someone would want to stay anonymous the unmasking % would
| probably be lower. The threat-model of the chess players
| doesn't include that they have to stay anonymous and need to
| switch up their way of playing.
| Havoc wrote:
| >>switch the way you are writing
|
| I'd be very surprised if that actually works. Stuff like
| vocabulary can't exactly be turned off at will
| greggarious wrote:
| I'm fond of occasionally throwing in some ou s and references
| to cities other than Ontario to throw folks off, but it's
| hard to pull off long term
| wussboy wrote:
| I'm not convinced that, for 99.9% of use cases, anonymity is a
| feature. I think it's far more likely that the easy anonymity
| that has been the default for much of the existence of the
| Internet has harmed society.
|
| I get downvoted whenever I say this, but anonymous speech is
| only allowed by recent technology and has never been a part of
| our ancestral environment.
| potatototoo99 wrote:
| Freedom of speech is also a recent invention.
| hairofadog wrote:
| I'm not downvoting, but I think the concept of anonymous
| speech goes way way back to the origins of writing, doesn't
| it? The change in recent years is that it's extra hard to
| stay anonymous, what with the surveillance economy?
| wussboy wrote:
| Perhaps. But if you consider:
|
| 1. The cost of printing/transcribing something 2. Literacy
| rates 3. Constraints tied to physical distribution
|
| ...the reach of that potentially "anonymous speech" was the
| tiniest fraction of what we experience today. And even then
| it wasn't necessarily anonymous, unless you just left books
| lying around?
| hairofadog wrote:
| I think it was pretty doable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi
| ki/List_of_anonymously_published_...
| wussboy wrote:
| I won't argue that it wasn't possible. But that link
| shows 20-40 books, and covers 3000 years of human
| culture. That's about one anonymous book per century. I
| think we need more anonymity than that. But I think the
| amount of anonymity we have now is disastrous to civil
| society.
|
| Appreciate the link though. Thanks for engaging.
| kypro wrote:
| Seems quite easy to solve this though. An AI could easily
| anonymise your text by rephasing sentences.
| s3000 wrote:
| For those you haven't seen it, from 2 weeks ago:
|
| Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate
| accounts [1]
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016
| [deleted]
| makeworld wrote:
| Perhaps anonymous social media (like 4chan, with its lack of
| usernames) will become more popular.
| [deleted]
| LarryMullins wrote:
| Or less popular, because there is now a greater risk of your
| 4chan comments being associated with your other online
| identities.
|
| There may be some additional safety in conforming to the
| local "memespeak" dialect, and not using that dialect
| elsewhere.
| password4321 wrote:
| In case you missed this two weeks ago, "find by example" is
| possible in many datasets even without AI:
|
| _Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate
| accounts_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| This is one of the use cases I see AI helping with. You can
| already ask ChatGPT to reword content for you - breaking
| analysis like this.
|
| A (humorous) example: https://vc.blankenship.io
|
| If you want to remain anonymous, use an AI filter for your
| written content.
| jacooper wrote:
| Thats definitely not private, which is the point of defeating
| stylometry
|
| If only there was some kind of re wording AI that can be run
| locally.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| Given current trends, I guess I'd say give it 6months?
| Siira wrote:
| There is OPT and BLOOM, which need lots of expensive GPUs
| to run. Not as good as GPT3, IMO. I doubt there will be
| any good local alternatives in a year. StableDiffusion
| needed light compute, not at all comparable to these
| beasts.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > Given current trends, I guess I'd say give it 6months?
|
| I'm happy to give it 6 months until the technology is
| there to do it, if it's not already--but, as long as
| there's an owner of the technology (that is, as long as
| the technology is pre- the point where I can easily roll
| my own), I'm skeptical of any owner in today's privacy
| climate intentionally forgoing the opportunity to suck up
| personal data whenever and however they can.
| kristopolous wrote:
| This is nice. I consider my stuff fairly easy for me to
| recognize so when I read the other users I found a bit of
| myself in them.
|
| I thought "well this person seems a bit cynical" - you know,
| it's not a bad way to go outside yourself
| alkonaut wrote:
| Pseudonymous. Just like anyone who is willing to do the work can
| identify my real identity from my HN writing, a pseudonymous
| chess handle gives a lot of information. A chess player who wants
| to be anonymous should not re-use a handle for two games. There
| is no anonymity anywhere if you provide enough entropy which you
| do if you use a persistent pseudonym.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| If you want to play against good players you need some games to
| gain rating
| alkonaut wrote:
| Yes. That's fine so long as you never play in person as well,
| thereby tying a real identity to your pseudonym.
|
| Otherwise you can remain pseudonymous (not anonymous) for as
| long as you want.
|
| But there is no way to do a mix of in-person and pseudonymous
| writing/chess/art/anything with a personal "style".
| random_kris wrote:
| Mmmm this could be solved using Zero-Knowledge proofs.
|
| When registering pick an elo. Provide a proof that you own
| the account in that Elo range and then you can create another
| account that will start in that Elo range.
| cute_boi wrote:
| So, to solve such issue we can add noise? So, lets say I play 1
| game, i let another people/bot to play another game using same
| account?
| sureglymop wrote:
| What if the playing style of one game is already enough to hint
| at who might be playing?
| alkonaut wrote:
| Then you are never entirely anonymous. I doubt that's the
| case though.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| They aren't comparing two sets of games. They are comparing
| a single game with all player's known set of game. Any FIDE
| rated player will have a set of games that is known to
| everyone.
| matsemann wrote:
| To not get unmasked by things like this I throw in some blunders
| here and there. Unfortunately my other moves are often also
| blunders..
| djexjms wrote:
| Maybe the strategy here is to just not make any blunders.
| dtgriscom wrote:
| Oh, right. Like it sounds so easy when YOU say it.
| neaden wrote:
| There was recently a player who shot up the Chess.com blitz
| leaderboard under the name Sinister Magnus. They were eventually
| removed from the leaderboard, presumably for being an alt of an
| existing GM, but I don't think anyone has figured it out for sure
| who they are, it would be interesting test to see if they are
| able to figure the player out using this.
| rollcat wrote:
| Interesting! Why is it not allowed to have alt accounts? And
| why was such severe action taken, without enough evidence? Why
| do people want using alts in the first place, in a game with
| perfect information?
|
| In StarCraft II, having alts is tolerated (well, depending on
| your manners - nobody likes smurfing), but we have
| sc2revealed.com which takes crowd-sourced reports to try to
| unmask "barcode" (llllllllllll) players. Many pros try to
| practice anonymously on the ladder, because SC2 a game of
| imperfect information, and in a best-of-3 series (like in a
| tournament), you 1. don't want to use the same opening every
| match, and 2. don't want your opponent to immediately recognize
| what you're doing, or work on preparing a counter ahead of
| time.
| neaden wrote:
| You can have an alt account, and Sinister Magnus is still
| around, you just can't be on the leaderboard more then once.
| So SM is presumably the alt of someone who is already on the
| leaderboard. Similar to StarCraft a GM might want to prep
| openings without revealing that's what they are doing, so
| there are reasons for having alts but that applies more for
| longer time controls rather then blitz. Generally GMs do
| their prep with a small and usually secret team before a big
| tournament.
| version_five wrote:
| Reminds me of this - predating AI
|
| https://axbom.com/keystroke-dynamics/ As early as
| 1860, experienced telegraph operators realized they could
| actually recognize each individual by everyone's unique tapping
| rhythm. To the trained ear, the soft tip-tap of every operator
| could be as recognizable as the spoken voice of a family member.
| myself248 wrote:
| Oh yeah, every ham knows you can recognize the sending fist. If
| they're actually using a real key, anyway.
| Victerius wrote:
| I don't understand your sentence.
| wbl wrote:
| Hey's saying if you are using a straight key instead of an
| iambic keyer (different morse sending tech) then you can
| recognize the operator from their patterns (the first)
| dd82 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegraph_key#Operators'_%22f
| i...
|
| > With straight keys, side-swipers, and, to an extent,
| bugs, each and every telegrapher has their own unique style
| or rhythm pattern when transmitting a message. An
| operator's style is known as their "fist".
|
| > Since every fist is unique, other telegraphers can
| usually identify the individual telegrapher transmitting a
| particular message. This had a huge significance during the
| first and second World Wars, since the on-board
| telegrapher's "fist" could be used to track individual
| ships and submarines, and for traffic analysis.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Identifiable ... by the way they tap out Morse code with
| their hand/fist.
|
| Ham = amateur radio operator:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_radio
| flak48 wrote:
| This made my Google the etymology of 'ham-fisted' and I was
| disappointed that it had nothing to do with ham operators
| with carpal tunnel syndrome.
| mzi wrote:
| It's the opposite, really. The radio term was a pejorative,
| as the professionals saw the amateurs as ham-fisted.
| mattr47 wrote:
| My Dad was a morse intercept operator for the US Army, mid 60s,
| stationed in Northern Japan. He has stories of them naming all
| the Soviet morse operators by the way the tapped.
| Rodeoclash wrote:
| Cryptonomicon mentions this as well. Each operator having a
| particular "fist" that was unique to them.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| I remember playing FPS game called Enemy Territory as teenager
| and after awhile whenever I was in 1v1 shoot out with one of my
| "clan" members I knew who it was based on their movement.
| sitkack wrote:
| I was walking down the street a couple years ago, in my
| peripheral vision I noticed the gait of someone walking
| across the street traveling the other direction, instant
| recall of that former coworkers name from 10 years previous.
| It would have taken longer to recognize them visually if they
| were standing still. Still amazes me, years later.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Gait?
| sitkack wrote:
| Fixed, thanks!
| [deleted]
| erk__ wrote:
| Off topic, but if it was Wolfenstein ET I will just add that
| there still is a community for it and a Foss version of it
| that runs on modern operating systems
|
| https://www.etlegacy.com/
| smarri wrote:
| Thanks, I spent many hours and late nights into early
| mornings playing this game.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| I doubt those players are really anonymous anyway, as either
| lichess or chess.com can easily identify them.
|
| I don't see this changing anything, especially when we already
| know that chess.com is not impartial in its treatment of players.
| croes wrote:
| Could it be used to find cheaters?
|
| If you don't play like yourself you're likely cheating.
| recursive wrote:
| I really don't like this. Sometimes I want try a different
| style. It sounds like a presumption of guilt. "Machine doesn't
| know what' he's doing? Probably cheating"
| WJW wrote:
| For most normal humans, if they merely try a different style
| than what they are used to their performance would probably
| go down rather than up. After all, you'd have seen many
| common positions before and know most of the usual ideas for
| your chosen openings etc.
|
| If someone suddenly plays a different style and also their
| move quality goes up significantly, that might be an
| additional indicator of cheating. All cheat detection works
| in a probabilistic fashion, since it is not allowed (and
| would be way worse) to actually observe players 24/7 in their
| home to verify whether they're cheating or not.
| swayvil wrote:
| To state the obvious : of course we are using this exact same
| technology to identify people by writing style. All of us. Right
| now.
| quotemstr wrote:
| Just wait until quantum computing breaks all non-PFS encrypted
| internet traffic from the past 20 years. It's going to be _wild_.
| David Brin is going to get to live out his vision of a
| transparent society.
| [deleted]
| philippejara wrote:
| I'm not sure why they ham up the risk of privacy loss regarding
| unmasking anon players, the only "risk" I can think of would be
| someone developing and testing new strategies but then I'd assume
| the fingerprinting would be far less accurate, testing if you can
| effectively hide your own quirks while deviating from them would
| be far more interesting. As it stands this is nothing new and the
| concerns seem weirdly pointed, everyone(?) already knows the
| risks of fingerprinting and pattern recognition in more general
| applications. It was a fun paper to read, shame half the article
| promoting it was cautioning.
| lobe wrote:
| Often the new strategies top level players test on anonymised
| accounts are subtle tweaks in lines deep into / slightly beyond
| opening theory. Often these lines are slightly inferior to
| mainline but come with an edge due to the "surprise factor"
| making it harder for opponents to prepare. Each of these subtle
| tweaks will only arise in a small proportion of games (as only
| some of the time your opponent will play the line you want to
| test), so I imagine fingerprinting based on play style will
| still work relatively well.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| Super cool and fascinating.
|
| I don't know why, but I don't like that the headline frames it as
| a "privacy risk". Are we really concerned about privacy when
| playing chess?
|
| I think the world probably needs to accept there's no such thing
| as "anonymous behavior". Behavior itself is individualized.
| Therefore if behavior can be observed the probability that it is
| anonymous rapidly approaches zero with time and observations. The
| only way to be verifiably anonymous is to not be observed.
|
| This means if you are a person at risk of harm if your identity
| is unmasked that you can't rely on supposedly anonymous behavior.
| Bummer.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > I don't know why, but I don't like that the headline frames
| it as a "privacy risk". Are we really concerned about privacy
| when playing chess?
|
| To the extent that headlines matter, I'd way rather that people
| worry about the privacy risks of de-anonymizing technology long
| before it's at the point where it's a practical issue. If we
| only worry about it when it becomes an actual issue already
| being, or about to be, applied to unambiguously privacy-
| invading matters, then, well, that's the way we've already done
| it and it's too late now--why didn't you bring it up earlier?
|
| I'd also prefer to avoid the "what do you have to hide?" issue.
| Maybe someone, for whatever reason, _does_ have something to
| hide; if they intentionally play chess anonymously, presumably
| they intend to do so. It shouldn 't be up to me to decide
| whether or not their need, or even just desire, for privacy is
| legitimate.
|
| (Of course, it's already too late--and has been since, at the
| very latest, the AOL incident--to worry about the onset of such
| de-anonymization, but it's always (or only almost always?)
| better to face inevitable future problems now, rather than
| waiting for that future.)
| rvba wrote:
| Why did meta hire someome to study poker bots? Arent they afraid
| that after spending a lot of money on some developer that peraon
| will just quit facebook and write own poker bots?
|
| How does this research help facebook?
|
| Im very, very far away from Musk and his antics, but really some
| of those big companies seem to have lots of people who do passion
| projects.
|
| Meanwhile an actual user has low if no chance to get decent
| support (probably for the cost of that of programmer they could
| get multiple people).
|
| And yes I am aware that I sound anti illectual here and research
| the sake of reseaech can lead to nice things. I just think that
| the person will quit facebook to write poker bots and ruin the
| game for those who play it by detecting their weaknesses ( btw. I
| dont even play poker).
| Jerrrry wrote:
| Studying poker and humans style of play of the game translate
| directly to improving generalized agents that can play other
| games.
|
| For all we know, the guy who was kinda good at poker made the
| small break-thru that led Google's Alpha/Omega chess or Go
| achievement.
|
| It's actually difficult to tell what piece of such complex
| systems are responsible for which - but in general, applying
| incremental piecemeal improvements have been monumental for the
| magnitude jump in progress in recent years.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| > _Arent they afraid that after spending a lot of money on some
| developer that peraon will just quit facebook and write own
| poker bots?_
|
| That's a risk when you pay workers to research or learn nearly
| anything new. If you run a pizzeria, you teach your workers how
| to make pizzas; they could turn around and make pizzas for
| another business instead. Maybe even open their own pizza shop
| and compete with you, using your own recipe.
|
| I think accepting this kind of risk is simply table stakes for
| running a business.
| [deleted]
| Fricken wrote:
| In the early to mid-2010s AI hype peaked, radical Kurzweillean
| ideas became sales pitches from founders, and a great wave of
| discussion and speculation passed through the media public
| consciousness.
|
| For a time r/futurology was an interesting place for discussion,
| and there were really great comments to be found amidst the
| internet chaff .
|
| One of the things I speculated about then was that ai doesn't
| need be sentient to ruin everything. Powerful tools in the hands
| of malicious actors could wreak havoc on the internet.
|
| The internet could become compromised in so many ways via privacy
| invasions and data theft, aggressive spam, misinformation,
| propaganda and malicious code that nobody can reliably depend on
| it for much of anything any longer. One could receive a phone
| call from someone who sounds like their own mother, an ai that
| says things only a mother would know. That voice could be very
| persuasive.
|
| that was the kind of stuff we talked about years ago. There were
| no instantaneous results, of course, and it became boring and
| uncool to keep going on about such things.
|
| Nonetheless, it seems now that the tools and incentives needed to
| create a dystopia such as what I described are really starting to
| come into focus.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| The better the tech, the better it can be used for good as well
| as evil purposes such as deception/scams, disinformation, mass
| surveillance, election manipulation, etc.
|
| It's not the tech that's wrong, it's the populace in democratic
| states losing more and more power, to the point where most of
| these systems can only be described as hybrid regimes anymore.
| The actual power does not lie with the voters but corporations,
| the mega wealthy, their various lobby groups and corrupt
| politicians. There is no monopoly of power exercised by elected
| officials and law enforcement respecting the constitutions,
| it's different groups and fractions fighting each other for
| supremacy. AI is just another tool at their disposal, of course
| they're making use of it.
|
| Guns can be used for protection as well as oppression. The
| internet can be about free information or about censorship and
| spying on users. We can live in digital Maoism or digital
| liberalism. It's up to the common people and for them to
| realize this before it's too late.
| [deleted]
| O__________O wrote:
| Related paper:
|
| https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2021/hash/ccf8111910291...
| greggarious wrote:
| danuker wrote:
| Should downloading/looking at people's chess games not be
| socially acceptable, in spite of it being a good way to learn?
| greggarious wrote:
| I think the issue is if you go beyond "who am I playing" to
| connecting that to the rest of their online life, if that
| makes sense.
|
| It's fine to want to tailor strategy but not say, out their
| dissident writings.
| dmurray wrote:
| > They gave the system 100 games from each of about 3000 known
| players, and 100 fresh games from a mystery player. To make the
| task harder, they hid the first 15 moves of each game. The system
| looked for the best match and identified the mystery player 86%
| of the time...A non-AI method was only 28% accurate.
|
| This sounds incredible, to pick the right player out of 3000
| candidates 86% of the time.
|
| I am not sure that pruning the first 15 moves is enough to
| eliminate the information you get from choice of opening (which
| is presumably the intention of the restriction). For example, if
| a player religiously plays the Najdorf Sicilian as Black, you can
| immediately rule out many(most? ) positions that started with a
| French or a Ruy Lopez.
|
| I'd like to see what the best results are from a model that just
| looks at the position after move 15, and use that as a baseline.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| Does anyone good religiously play the same opening as black?
|
| I don't know chess but that sounds like a bad idea
| bee_rider wrote:
| It seems really impressive.
|
| I wonder how a chess GM would do at this test (although we'd
| have to restrict it to other top GMs that are active at the
| same time as them).
| dmurray wrote:
| > I'd like to see what the best results are from a model that
| just looks at the position after move 15, and use that as a
| baseline.
|
| Reading the paper, they have an "opening baseline" which
| consists of frequency analysis on a player's first 5 moves.
| That model has 93% accuracy!
|
| The mapping of first-five-move sequences to the positions
| obtained after them is almost a bijection (there are some
| transposition, but a small effect) so that's similar to my
| proposal.
|
| I can't tell whether the 15-move cutoff is 15 half-moves, so
| 7-8 moves per player, or 15 moves each which is how every chess
| player would read the sentence.
|
| Either way, I haven't completely read the paper yet, but I
| don't think it addresses the rebuttal of "I will just change my
| openings and the machine won't detect me".
| abecedarius wrote:
| Yeah, that means it extracts roughly 12 bits of information
| from observing a game after move 15. It takes 33 bits to pick
| out one human from everyone alive. You get at least 3 bits just
| knowing someone plays chess, so you're halfway there?
|
| Good point about baseline.
| dmurray wrote:
| From observing 100 games after move 15, I think you mean.
| abecedarius wrote:
| Oh, I thought the 100 applied only to training. But the
| article agrees with you -- thanks.
| kirse wrote:
| Where can one learn more about this technique of equating
| bits to pieces of information? I get that it's used in
| various contexts like cryptography, randomness, compression,
| games of Guess Who, etc. but basically just nod in fake
| agreement when someone formally describes a system this way.
| Like what first principles did you use to make this
| statement:
|
| _It takes 33 bits to pick out one human from everyone alive_
|
| Is it basically just 2^33 > ~8 billion humans, therefore
| that's the minimum information context to identify a single
| individual? But then what counts as an information bit - any
| valid Yes/No question? And how do you calculate the bit value
| of a piece of info (i.e. 3 bits for the knowledge of playing
| chess)?
| tijsvd wrote:
| It's the field of information theory.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory
| notafraudster wrote:
| It's any valid question at all, it needn't be yes or no.
| Humans have, at minimum, red, black, brown, blonde, dyed,
| grey, white, and no hair. Learning what colour hair a
| person has eliminates the other categories.
|
| The way to think about the information content of a problem
| or of something you learn is exactly what you're
| suggesting. If you numbered every living person on earth,
| it'd take more than 32 bits and not quite fill the 33rd
| bit.
|
| If you then learn a person's gender, you can eliminate all
| the people with the incorrect gender, which is going to
| leave you either 31.x bits (assuming binary gender) or
| 25-27 bits of remaining entropy (assuming some non-binary
| gender and, say, a 1-3% incidence rate).
|
| When the parent you're responding to says you get 3 bits
| for knowing someone plays chess, they're guessing that
| 1/(2^3) = 1/8 of people, in an undifferentiated sense, play
| chess. Of course if we knew someone's age or gender or
| country of origin, the conditional information value in
| knowing they play chess could be greater or lesser. And
| realistically no one is ever trying to identify a human
| among all humans (partially because it seems highly
| unlikely that there are many questions that could equally
| implicate the president of the United States and a six year
| old on the Marshall Islands in their answer). Each bit of
| information represents a halving of the entropy of the
| target surface.
|
| I think you got to within 1 bit of the answer from first
| principles ;)
| InitialLastName wrote:
| It's a rough estimation technique. If every choice/factor
| divides the number of candidates in half (on average), you
| can choose between 2^N candidates with N yes/no questions
| (on average).
|
| I'd assume that they are estimate that 1/8 of the human
| population plays chess, which feels like an over-estimate
| to me (but not absurdly, depending on your threshold of
| "plays"; by a similar process I'd estimate that at least
| 1/8 of humans alive are under 10 years old).
| abecedarius wrote:
| > feels like an over-estimate
|
| That's why I said at _least_ 3 bits. If chess players are
| rarer, then knowing someone is a chess player is a
| stronger filter. (By the same token, knowing that they
| 're not is a weaker one; but that's not the case we're
| discussing.)
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