Alts (AKA alternate accounts) exist in pretty much every online and offline service, from Second Life to Social Security. Usually, identifying an online alt is just a little bit easier than identifying an offline alt.
Now, first things first. There’s no completely reliable method, while online alts are easier to identify, it doesn’t mean that they’re easy to identify, in an absolute sense.
Common alt-detectors usually rely on the IP-addresses (that is, the IPv4 Internet addresses) of multiple users, and that’s very unreliable indeed, if for no other reason than IP-addresses often change. Also, with the global scarcity of IPv4 addresses, an increasing number of people will share a common network address. Most business and educational networks keep their users behind a public front address (or a small handful), so it isn’t unreasonable for ten thousand or more people – who may not know each-other – to have the same IP address on a given day, if they all attend the same university, for example.
Plus, of course, with cable network addresses in the world being dynamically allocated, it is relatively trivial to get a new one – which might be the address last used by another person who uses the same online services… or not.
Now, I’ve had alt-troubles before, a couple of times. I’ve never had to rely on gadgets to successfully discover the user behind them. That isn’t to say that it was easy. There’s no golden rule for making the identification, but the most telling cues for me when determining the identify of an alt are: knowledge and wrist.
Knowledge is fairly self-explanatory. A lot of people who use alts maliciously frequently slip up and demonstrate knowledge that could only be possessed by a small number of other people. Sometimes by only one other person. Just paying a little attention can help you narrow it down.
The other factor is ‘wrist’. The term ‘wrist’ ‘fist’ originally referred to the distinctive speeds and rhythms of Morse and telegraph operators as they tapped out code sequences. Each operator’s wrist fist was unique, and operators could identify each-other by it, even in the absence of other identifying information.
After the advent of keyboards and teletypes, ‘wrist’ (a new name for essentially the same phenomenon) has been used for authentication purposes with keyboards as well, with software measuring the timing between different pairs of keys for individual typists. It proved quite easy to determine one typist from another.
Now, you or I don’t have access to that fine sort of detail, but what we do generally have access to are the sentences that an individual user types. Given our educations, backgrounds, moods and vocabularies, we – as people – tend to choose our words in particular ways. We use some words commonly, and others rarely, we tend to make certain typographical errors over and over again, and make repetitious errors in our selections of written homonyms or punctuation. That’s someone’s ‘wrist’.
In short, even when we’re pretending to be someone else, everything about the way we write marks us as an individual. You might try to conceal your style, but whenever you lose concentration, you’ll reflexively slip back to your individualistic, default style. Look through what I’ve written here, and compare it with other things I’ve written. You’ll see key phrases that appear over and over again.
While you might think of this as a cop-out, I’ve always found that the best way to identify an alt is to simply pay attention. Pay attention to what is said and how it is said, and compare that with the knowledge and wrist of your suspects. With a little practice, it isn’t actually all that difficult, and – quite frankly – most people using alts for malicious purposes just really aren’t all that smart.
The distinctive personal style of sending Morse is called “fist”.
Pardon me, quite right. “Wrist”, as a term, didn’t come about until keyboards and teletypes were about. Will add in a correction.
The distinctive personal style of sending Morse is called “fist”.
The problem of identification arises principally because it is difficult to differentiate the written English of ESLers from that of the semi-literate denizens of SL.
Pep (Which two categories make up 90% of SL residents.)
Couldn’t agree more. I am a very good typist, but always joke that anyone paying attention could ID my alts by noticing the single mistake I make relatively often. I myself discovered someone’s alt simply because her cadence and choice of phrasing in her new store’s notices were quite familiar and used a lot of phrases I’d thought of as “hers”.
You can make a new alt but wherever you go, well, there you are.
With everything you’ve written, this is exactly how I detect most of the alts I’ve banned. However, there’s even one other method. For the most part, I find that secret alts can’t keep quiet about their secret. People who’ve banned from a place usually tend to brag to friends about how they’re suddenly “in”. Those friends, who for some reason or another love the place more than the alt, and will often rat them out. Personally, on it’s own that’s not reason enough to ban a suspected alt, but it does bring them to my attention. From there I watch for the wrist and tells.
Just about everyone i know who is a serious Second Life uses an alt or a few. Either for inventory storage, the ability to stay anonymous, or even the ability to cheat on a spouse or partner anonymously — just about everyone uses one.
I have one who I am very public with that allows me to keep the blogging side of me “business”. Everyone knows, its in my profile and on my web site and no secret.
Here are some of my views on alts:
First, anyone who attempts to find out if their partner is cheating on them, either by outing their alt, or trying to seduce their partner with an alt (yes, as ridiculous as this sounds, is done quite a bit) really needs to find something better to do with their spare time. Second Life is not real life, and trying to apply the same rules when it comes to monogamy is something that does not make much sense. If you think your partner is cheating on you, and are wasting the time to uncover them, you have some issues to address.
Everyone must accept the fact that some people, especially active bloggers and business people, need an anonymous log in now and then.
Third, it is an illegal activity in Second Life to try to uncover IP addresses. For good reason too. Privacy must be protected.
I agree, alts do tend to slip up, simply because it becomes more of a game. And the penalty of being unmasked as an alt is not exactly that great.
But honestly, people need to find something else to do with their Second Life other than spend time trying to uncover someones multiple identity.
I agree with that for the most part. I have an av for playing and an av for working, whom I generally call “co-mains”, and I’m in no way secretive about their identity (I attempted to be in the past, and that lead to a big old cock-up, so I try not to do that anymore).
I agree that if one’s use of an alt is in no way malicious, there’s no reason not to take them at face value.
If, however, an alt is used maliciously, such as to stalk someone who has cut off all known contact with them, I don’t believe it necessary to OUT the IP address but I do think it very useful to KNOW the IP address (which I do via blog posts, rather than via SL activity). It’s saved me a world of headaches, because by knowing my stalker’s IP address I can also recognize others from the same geographic area, and combined with “wrist” it makes it much easier to spot them and then shut them off.
Something I’ve noticed about alts is that they tend to frequent the same haunts as the main. Similar (sometimes even identical) groups, for example.
I have actually various alts for making movies and pictures: each has a designated role. I also have two main avatars often online..as they work together.. one being the camera and the other making the scenes.
The blog starts with the general idea how to detect alts and then the idea of malicious alts slips in at some point. It almost seems as if having an alt is malicious in itself and the two meanings are interchangeable. And I notice that such is the case in Second Life: having an alt requires an explanation or a reason.
To me it seems rather pointless to spent time on detecting alts and once one travels down that road, paranoia will set in. If someone has an alt to cheat or lure you into a trap or grieving you.. you can talk to them or, if that doesn’t work or seems pointless, ban them just like you would do with any avatar that misbehaves.
And even if you know that someone is using an alt then what is it that you are going to do? Try to find out all the other avatars and ban them as well? Or ask linden to have the person banned based on a registered identity?
Seems quite fruitless.
Once you feel the need to detect someone you know for using an alt you might put the question to yourself: what am i doing? Or: don’t i have something else to do?
However, i do sometime feel I that some people shouldn’t abuse the anonimity that second life provides to misbehave. But some do that regardless of having an alt or not.
I had real problems in new babbage as several people believed that i was an alt of someone they kicked out, trying to sneak back into their community. People started openly calling me by that persons name.
I`m sure there are still people out there who think this is the case and there is nothing i can do to convince them otherwise. It’s very upsetting.
This is the flip side of the freedom that is internet anonymity. Once someone believes something of you, whether it is true or not, there’s not much you can do to prove them wrong. I blogged about this, at http://acrossthegridwithlindal.blogspot.com/2012/08/trust-distrust.html
Wasn’t there an alt detector that would monitor the behavior of the avatar (things like movement patterns, timing between messages and length of them etc) ?
I have an alt – there, I’ve said it. But what I use her for is to test things on my sim as a non-owner, since owners sometimes get a different menu from items than a non-owner. I also have a non-human alt used strictly for RP or occasional play with friends (it’s a large dragon that can give rides).
I expect most sim owners have an alt just so they can see the sim through the eyes of a visitor, and to make sure things are working like they should. I make no secret of my alt being an alt, and most of my friends know who she is, so alts in and of themselves are not a bad thing.
I have encountered alts who are there for various not so pleasant reasons as well, as have we all. But as said in the original post, they almost always give themselves away in some manor. During the days of Red Zone I was ejected from a place once I had never been before because I was tagged as an alt when I was in my main avi. I can only imagine it found another IP address the same as mine or similar. I use a cable modem and know for a fact the address changes, so obviously checking IP addresses is a waste of time.
Another method of identifying a potential alt is to examine the profile “picks” and status stream updates of both avatars and look for common slurl locations. Many times you’ll find that a person will put up a “pick” about someone or something from their own parcel and the pick will automatically reflect their location. They’ll do it from both their main and their alt so the location will be almost identical.
If you find a couple that overlap, try TPing to that location and check out the properties of the parcel. You might find that only certain people have access to the parcel or that it is owned by a specific group. Although groups can be hidden from ones profile, if the group is open enrollment you can join and often see who the other members are. This “reveal other members” function can be turned off, but often people don’t do it. A main will almost always give an alt a higher role in a group so that the alt will have similar powers to the main.
“most people using alts for malicious purposes just really aren’t all that smart” Hit the nail on the head. Many times I have just used google to identify who’s alt is who, because what fun is griefing if you can’t brag about it. Sometimes alts are documented by someone else, yet they continue to try and use them anyway. There is a large community of SL invested people (shop owners/sim owners) on Plurk that share information so that disruptive alts will find themselves banned from dozens of popular locations before ever coming to them.