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Comment by chaos0 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if there is a tool to obfuscate text to prevent analysis. one way I could think of is to use any online translation tool to translate to a foreign language and then back to english. and then fix the grammar slightly. the structure of the text should hopefully be different enough for any tool/human to recognize it's your style. is there an easier way to do this?

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There was an interesting talk about this (adversarial stylometry) at 28C3:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9SgAOcCm0I

One of the methods they mentioned is machine translation, but they found that it wasn't terribly useful. It's a really neat talk and I highly recommend it. They also wrote some software to anonymize texts (Anonymouth) and their stylometry software (JStylo) is also freely available:

http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/Fahrplan/events/4781.en.h...

There is some free software available[0] to do stylometry analysis. And some software which purports to assist in anonymizing writings[1]. I've not really played around with either, so I can't speak to their ease of use and/or effectiveness. But it's at least somewhere to start.

[0] http://evllabs.com/jgaap/w/index.php/Main_Page

[1] https://github.com/psal/anonymouth

A pretty neat idea, but of course if you use an online tool you would still be disclosing the original text to an untrusted third party...

Yeah, some work has been done in this area, but I only know about it in passing via a mention in one of Jacob Appelbaum's talks. This seems like it might be a decent place to start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b0Ta9h62_E

Reminds me of a concept of "google translate fixed point", i.e. you translate between english and an foreign language back and forth until the translation stops changing.

Interesting, however, I would not use google translate to obfuscate my writing, as it might appear in google logs :)

:). Speaking of which, can you recommend any non-Google online translation tool?

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