Paul Furber and Ron Watkins Identified As Q
>Forensic linguistics is fast becoming the solvent of internet anonymity.
>In the end, it was forensic linguistics that did for the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. The former university professor made the mistake of publishing his manifesto. Industrial Society and Its Future. Armed with a large enough a data set, an FBI team used the fingerprints of his verbal style in the same way that a forensics team would use real fingerprints.
>One member of the same team went on to identify ‘the longest serving attorney in the US Department of Justice’ as a notorious anonymous poster. And JK Rowling was ‘unmasked’ as Robert Galbraith by the decision to publish a data set in the form of Galbraith novel, A Cuckoo’s Calling.
>Using text samples with more than 100,000 words written by Q, and at least 12,000 words by each of the 13 other candidates who they analysed, two independent teams said their computers had honed in on two prime suspects: Paul Furber and Ron Watkins.
>The conclusion itself is perhaps the least interesting part. Many hours of both podcast and documentary have already been spilled on establishing that Furber wrote early-Q before being superseded by Watkins in around 2018.
>Much more gripping is how easy it has become to perform this kind of detection, as high-end computing and machine learning systems enter the picture. In a way, Q is just a high-profile version of a general use case. If one particularly infamous message board user can be found, why not all of them?
>Now, the new Online Safety Bill that is about to go through Parliament will make it an offence to ‘knowingly distribute seriously harmful misinformation’. The steppingstones to a total dragnet over the “chans”, some parts of reddit, and the lowest tiers of Twitter hell, are clear.
https: //unherd.com/thepost/if-they-can-identify-q-they-can-identify-you/