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Wired is reporting on a presentation given at Def Con 26 by Rachel Greenstadt, an associate professor of computer science at Drexel University, and Aylin Caliskan, Greenstadt's former PhD student and now an assistant professor at George Washington University, entitled Even Anonymous Coders Leave Fingerprints. Stylistic expression is uniquely identifiable and not anonymous, that includes code especially. There are privacy implications for many developers because as few as 50 metrics are needed to distinguish one coder from another.
The researchers don't rely on low-level features, like how code was formatted. Instead, they create "abstract syntax trees," which reflect code's underlying structure, rather than its arbitrary components. Their technique is akin to prioritizing someone's sentence structure, instead of whether they indent each line in a paragraph.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday August 13 2018, @04:02PM (6 children)
1. Go to random subroutines, and put a comment at the top consisting of this text: //Who the fuck writes this garbage? I would never have done anything this fucking stupid
2. Include several if(!condition){//handle this later I'm sure it won't come up}
3. Follow zero project-wide indentation and code-style rules.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday August 13 2018, @04:34PM (3 children)
All or part of that could make your code easier to identify.
Some real solutions are to copy or "steal" code, have other parts of your code written, tidied, or obfuscated by computers (not you) if possible, don't share code if you can't take the previous steps, or never post code that can be linked to your real name or identity, so that your code (written however you like it) can only be linked from one Anon (you) to another (also you).
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(Score: 4, Funny) by ikanreed on Monday August 13 2018, @04:42PM (2 children)
I was trying to joke about what it seems like every coder does. I knew when I was posting it it was a kinda limp joke. Didn't realize it was so flaccid as to be unrecognizable.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday August 13 2018, @04:59PM (1 child)
The problem is that somebody is going to end up reading this [ic.ac.uk] and consider it a legit strategy for writing anonymous code.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @02:47PM
omg I love that!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13 2018, @05:57PM
Those things don't go into the compiled code.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @05:57PM
That's not fair, I at least put in:
if (badcondition) { throw new Exception("How did that happen? "); }