From: ab411@detroit.freenet.org (David R. Conrad)
Date: Wed, 19 Jul 95 04:58:10 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Automatic Rant generator
Message-ID: <199507191158.HAA20377@detroit.freenet.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain




Jonathon Blake <wd803@freenet.victoria.bc.ca> writes:

[ Various words of Tim May, Martin Hamilton, Monty Harder, Harry
  Bartholomew, and myself elided. ]

[ Re: plotters and Metafonts: ]
>
>    Making the little problem Tim presents, a major headache for 
>    somebody else --- handwriting analysts.
>...
>    Actually, True Type fonts of your handwriting are available, 
>    for any platform that accepts that font type.
>

It needs to be more complicated than this, however, because if just a
font is used then each 'e' looks like every other--easy to detect.

>    Tim May > Of course this is also similar to the "style
>    Tim May > detectors" we so  often talk about.
>
>    I don't remember the program name, but there is software 
>    available now, that analyzes a document, and figures out who 
>    wrote it --- based on the frequency count of the letters of 
>    the alphabet.  Secondary measures are frequency counts of 
>    letter pairs.  Words, phrases, sentences etc are totally 
>    ignored.  So what you'd need to do here, to pass your pseudo- 
>    Turing Test is a program that generates different statistical 
>    results, for allegedly different people.   

Interesting.  I've not heard of this.  The situation bears a great
similarity to stego--you need to emulate a statistical pattern to
make it undetectable, and if your opponents statistics are more
sophisticated than yours, you'll be found out.

[ Re: Introducing simulated spelling and typographical errors: ]
>
>    Actually, the usual give away, is in letter and letter pair 
>    frequencies --- not spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, 
>    etc.
>
>    However, there a technique called _Scientific Content 
>    ANalysis_ that looks at how things are said, to judge their 
>    "truthfulness."  A good program will not show that the text 
>    was randomly generated, nor show that the author is off-the- 
>    wall, so to speak.

Then again, what are the chances that Congressional staffers will be
using such sophisticated methods to sort out the 'astroturf'?  If
a staffer is suspicious but then sees "recieved" and "I been" and
"heplful" and decides, "Okay, this was written by a human," well,
that's Good Enough for Government Work, as they say.

--
David R. Conrad, ab411@detroit.freenet.org, http://web.grfn.org/~conrad/
Finger conrad@grfn.org for PGP 2.6 public key; it's also on my home page
Key fingerprint =  33 12 BC 77 48 81 99 A5  D8 9C 43 16 3C 37 0B 50
No, his mind is not for rent to any god or government.