Authenticating Meat

[Major Variola (ret)]

At 11:22 PM 4/25/03 -0400, Patrick Chkoreff wrote:
>All this talk about meatspace suggests we should have some spare ribs
>with those beers.

Ribs from sacred cows are the best.

>Of course, writing style and personality can help expose private key
>hijacking and impersonation somewhat, though even that can be
>counterfeited.  I can recognize a post by JP May with my eyes squinted,

>just looking at the shapes of the letters and paragraphs.  But I bet I
>could do an utterly, mind-bogglingly good impersonation if I tried.

Try John Young sometime, after those beers.  And Hettinga is probably
a perl script :-)

But seriously, you've just mentioned what's called "textual analysis".
Spelling errors and other idiosyncratic choices can be used
to "pierce the veil" of anonymity.  That's what did in Dr. Kaczynski,
who pissed on the FBI for over a decade, until his brother recognized
his text.

Running text through automatic translators (engl->german-engl) has
been suggested, but deeper signatures may remain.  It probably wouldn't
have helped Dr. K.

---
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only

exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from

the Public Treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for
the candidate promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with
the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy
always followed by dictatorship." --Alexander Fraser Tyler