Moore's Law, the more transistors, the more Gates
|
|
|
Anonymous emails can be traced
RESEARCHERS at Concordia University claim that it is possible to trace an anonymous email back to its sender through pattern tracing.
The researchers, presumably bored with current ways of tracing emails that often involve meandering IP searches, said that their approach has high levels of accuracy and produces results that are good enough to use in a court of law.
"In the past few years, we've seen an alarming increase in the number of cybercrimes involving anonymous emails," said study co-author Benjamin Fung, a professor of information systems engineering at Concordia University. "These emails can transmit threats or child pornography, facilitate communications between criminals or carry viruses."
Fung and his team have developed a method for tracing emails which, rather than attempting a literal trace, apes speech recognitions and data mining to identify patterns in an email and, by noting recurring trends, attributes authorship.
"Let's say the anonymous email contains typos or grammatical mistakes, or is written entirely in lowercase letters," explained Fung. "We use those special characteristics to create a write-print. Using this method, we can even determine with a high degree of accuracy who wrote a given email, and infer the gender, nationality and education level of the author."
Fung and the team used a notorious dataset to access the accuracy of its technique, the Enron email collection. Using a sample of ten emails written by each of ten Enron employees, 100 in total, they were able to identify the authors accurately in eighty-odd cases.
"Our technique was designed to provide credible evidence that can be presented in a court of law," says Fung. "For evidence to be admissible, investigators need to explain how they have reached their conclusions. Our method allows them to do this." µ
Share this:
Share
My esteemed collegue Mr. Pooh fails to appreciate the complete impossibility of masking ones' inherent writing-style characterictics. It is perfectly inconceivable that one could switch styles intentionally in an attempt to mislead these investigators.
As they sometimes post on the Interweb, "LOL."
THiers no waay in hell that thay can sift thru the simple misdirections.
Theyre claim is obvious garbage.
menioned beneath: Panasonic joins the 3D TV party
I mean, ????
Another way for legal systems to completely mis-understand and mis-use science, peer review and scientific proof at the expense of actually finding out what happened. We're all doomed.
ASK AROUND, ASK ANYONE. IN FACT MOST PEOPLE WRITE ALL CAPS, ESPECIALLY SHOPPING LISTS.
FOR EG. EVERY SINGLE STOP SIGN IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD IS WRITEN IN ALL CAPS, DOES THAT PROVE THE SAME GUY WROTE THEM ALL?
WONT STAND UP IN CORT.
They just want grant money.
They can identify the author "eighty-odd" percent of the time when the sample set is 10 and the data is in-hand. If you have an author in a small group containing the known author, your analysis is right most of the time. This is identification, not "tracing".
I bet that goes to nil when the sample set and number of actual traces between source and destination is equivalent to the Internet.
If the author of, say, 10,000 "anonymous" emails is determined to be one person, and you still don't know who that person is, what F**KING good did it do to "trace" those emails?
Just drop nukes on Nigeria's and China's BGP border routing locations, and you'll eliminate 99% of the malicious email on the planet. Problem solved.
They seriously think an 80% success rate is good enough to be used in court?
But I'm betting the real reason is so they can go to a judge with their pseudo-evidence to get a warrant for more invasive spying.
This sounds pretty sick. It reminds me of US courts where it is almost tradition, that the accused is flamed on his personality on basis of pseudo scientific handwriting analysis.
This is basically the same system that is widely used by exam boards to identify people copying each others work by looking at patterns in text, admittedly its not the same but its by no means disimilar. Also this is pointless as it would be very easy to forge a writing pattern and would not provide sufficient evidence to convict someone in court on.
All of the creepy anonymous e-mails I send henceforth will consist mainly of text occupied from the Enron e-mail archive.
As long as we get through Y2K all right I don't see them ever catching us. Give my love to President Reagan. And Michael Jackson. Oh how I love being illegitimately rich!
What if the e-mail is encrypted?
That's what all the oldschool Cypherpunk and Mixmaster remailers exhort their users to do. All completely legitimate protection of individual privacy, there's absolutely no law against any of this.