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Re:U.S. Army Soldier Arrested in AT&T, Verizon Extortions by staunton on Tuesday December 31, 2024 @06:08AM (#42557980)
> We’ve had a few different posts on HN demonstrating that it is trivial to link aliases based on writing style.

Do you have a link? I wasn't able to find it...

Re:U.S. Army Soldier Arrested in AT&T, Verizon Extortions by randunel on Tuesday December 31, 2024 @06:27AM (#42558069)
In spite of every programmer at work following the same styling guidelines and programming patterns, I can quite easily identify the author of a pull request by reading their code alone. The commenter's claim seems plausible to me.
Re:U.S. Army Soldier Arrested in AT&T, Verizon Extortions by Marsymars on Tuesday December 31, 2024 @01:32PM (#42560707)
I might actually have an easier time identifying authors by commit messages/patterns rather than their content since the styling guidelines are mostly handled by linters.
Re:U.S. Army Soldier Arrested in AT&T, Verizon Extortions by ailef on Tuesday December 31, 2024 @06:23AM (#42558054)
Re:U.S. Army Soldier Arrested in AT&T, Verizon Extortions by ilamont on Tuesday December 31, 2024 @09:53AM (#42559021)
Someone created a tool two years ago that does this, https://stylometry.net but it appears to be offline. The creator at the time said:

This site lets you put in a username and get the users with the most similar writing style to that user. It confirmed several users who I suspected were alts and after informally asking around has identified abandoned accounts of people I know from many years ago. I made this site mostly to show how easy this is and how it can erode online privacy. If some guy with a little bit of Python, and $8 to rent a decent dedicated server for a day can make this, imagine what a company with millions of dollars and a couple dozen PhD linguists could do.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016

It's also possible to eyeball similar writing styles, although not at scale. That's how "Fake Steve Jobs" was uncovered in 2007:

Last year, his agent showed the manuscript to several book publishers and told them the anonymous author was a published novelist and writer for a major business magazine. The New York Times found Mr. Lyons by looking for writers who fit those two criteria, and then by comparing the writing of “Fake Steve” to a blog Mr. Lyons writes in his own name, called Floating Point

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/06/technology/06steve.html#:....