1993-11-04 - ID of anonymous posters via word analysis?

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From: jazz@hal.com (Jason Zions)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Message Hash: 5e2ed9912cd82801eb4712d581c5a1d22a4a43205389b39c7dabf5b2d7eb2f40
Message ID: <9311040344.AA02307@jazz.hal.com>
Reply To: N/A
UTC Datetime: 1993-11-04 03:47:34 UTC
Raw Date: Wed, 3 Nov 93 19:47:34 PST

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From: jazz@hal.com (Jason Zions)
Date: Wed, 3 Nov 93 19:47:34 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: ID of anonymous posters via word analysis?
Message-ID: <9311040344.AA02307@jazz.hal.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


   This brings up the subject of how one can post without
   leaving an "ASCII fingerprint".  I suspect the use of a spelling
   checker and grammatical checker would help.    Perhaps running
   your text through a language converter, (say English to French)
   then back would remove many identifying characteristics.

Two words:  "jive"; "valspeak".

Okay, two more:  "swedish chef".

Sure, it makes it a little harder to extract semantics from a message, and
it can be hard to keep from giggling at the results, but those lex-based
filters would work much better than some English->French->English translator
program. You'd want to run the results through a reading-level checking
program to make sure you knocked out the 64-dollar words; the size of ones
vocabulary is one of those "identifying characteristics."

Jazz





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