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Writing Style Fingerprint Tool Easily Fooled

Urchin writes "Some of the techniques used by literary detectives and courts of law to identify the authorship of text are easily fooled, say US researchers. They found that non-professional writers could hide their identity from 'stylometric' techniques by writing in the style of novelist Cormac McCarthy. Stylometric methods have been used in a number of high-profile legal cases in recent decades, including the 'Unabomber' trial. 'We would strongly suggest that courts examine their methods of stylometry against the possibility of adversarial attacks,' say the researchers."

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  1. Re:Cormac McCarthy Stlye? by Saint+Stephen · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Well, I was just as confused as you were, but it's fairly obvious that he writes in some gimmicky convuluted way that people think is cool. Did you ever try to read Michel Focault? He would string together sentences with about 6 clauses each containing participle/subject/predicate lists of 3 of 4 items, and the whole damn sentence would take up about a page or more.

    And then there is James Joyce in Finnegan's Wake, and that dumb guy we all had to read in college that told the story about the retarded guy and it jumped back and forth in time, so called "stream of consciousness."

    So it's fairly safe to assume that he has some other gimmick that just makes his shit hard to parse. Unless I thought maybe he prints his letters in some unusual way like ee cummings.

    Who the fuck knows.