RIG (Random Identity Generator) is a free replacement for a shareware
program out there called 'fake'. It generates random, yet real-looking,
personal data. It is useful if you need to feed a name to a Web site,
BBS, or real person, and are too lazy to think of one yourself. Also,
if the Web site/BBS/person you are giving the information to tries to
cross-check the city, state, zip, or area code, it will check out.
$ rig
Adolph Cline
739 Anton Dr
Mentor, OH 44060
(216) xxx-xxxx
$
Once you start piling up some dependencies (vs. self-constained apps), I found homebrew more of a mess, while MacPorts more or less worked as I'd expect. The thing that drove me off Homebrew was dependency-hell with different versions of Python packages, while MacPorts pulled in the right versions of all the dependencies (it can even handle needing multiple versions of NLTK/SciPy/etc. installed in parallel, if different ports depend on them). This is perhaps the flipside of the reason many people prefer Homebrew: it tends to build against the base OSX stuff, while MacPorts tends to pull in its own parallel world of dependencies. IME the latter works more reliably, though it takes up more diskspace.
But, Debian's package management works better than either of them, so I've sort of been moving towards doing any kind of unixy work in a VM and treating OSX as just a desktop.
It's possible to end up in a different circle of dependency hell with macports, where it insists on installing 10 different versions of everything at great length, when you already had a perfectly good one. If I'm not a python or perl developer, I don't want to compile many different point releases of those language ecosystems just to run some little utility scripts. And then of course everything is connected to everything else, so you can end up trying to solve graph theory problems when you're meant to be working.
Battle-hardened *NIX admins rightfully laugh at this attitude, but for a lot of web developers who use their laptops as a "sharp tool" and do all the heavy lifting in linux vservers, it makes sense to have a slightly laxer approach to package management.
(and then there's the increasingly common cases of build scripts just being broken on macports, because it receives less and less community attention now. this can combine with the above dependency graph problems to produce situations where it's easier to just nuke /opt/local and start again.)
I used all three at one point in time. What I love about homebrew is that the tedious work of maintaining a sane package repository is distributed over many shoulders (3429 at the moment) - and those who contribute most of the time do really care about the packages they are watching over.
I haven't found an easy way to add/update packages to finc or macports, but I could contribute to homebrew within 5 minutes.
I wish we would see more work distribution patterns like this in fields outside code/programming.
MacPorts is full of useless junk. MacPorts will install a new sandboxed python, ruby, perl, etc when just want to get wget (the built in versions are fine!). The libraries are all broken out where brew keeps them simple and a lot of the packages are old silly packages that no one on the Mac really cares about (every single GNOME library for example).
brew isn't just moving forward quickly, it has really just out right replaced MacPorts and anyone still using MacPorts is living in 2007.
MacPorts does not use system libraries for good reasons:
"There are several reasons why MacPorts uses its own libraries. It makes ports more consistent across different versions of Mac OS X. For example, if we can rely on openssl 1.0.0 from MacPorts, we don't have to test every port that needs ssl for every available openssl installation. Apple's software tends to break from time to time (e.g. openssl refuses to build with an old zlib, but for awhile Apple shipped the old headers of the vulnerable zlib version). Even if Apple's versions aren't broken, they're rarely up-to-date. Apple has a habit of not updating the libraries in Mac OS X until absolutely necessitated by a security vulnerability." [1]
rig obviously supports only a handful of fields, if you need something in between rig and Fake Name Generator, picka may be an option https://github.com/antlong/picka
And if you're tired of manually dealing with AUR packages (or just lazy) you might want to look into yaourt [1]. It uses the same syntax as pacman but also searches and installs from AUR.
I'm curious though, where did you get your Hispanic names from? Seems like they come from a database of funny, weird and probably offensive names. No one is called like that in Spanish-speaking countries, and yes, I know the names are supposed to be fake, but just comparing the Hispanic with the American ones, you can tell there's a big difference.
Whether or not is intentional, it could be even more helpful if you use "normal" names.
The England/Wales names are weird too, lots of unusual first names.
Also, Wales seems way over-represented. It has a population that's tiny compared to England, but half the names generated seem to be Welsh names such as Cerys.
The first thing I noticed was that the vehicle field doesn't seem to be sensitive to the products available domestically for the person's address. And for bonus points, it could even consider demographics of the address versus price of the car (I got a Bentley while living in the middle of nowhere in the rust belt, which seems a bit suspicious).
I've got a colleague who's legal first name is "G". He's listed as "Gee" in about 50% of the places he needs to register (including some important places where there might be future legal ramifications of not using his proper legal name - I'm looking at _you_ Crazy Domains web/database programmer!)
Same for French names. Last names are okay, but first names aren't French at all for most of them.
I think maybe you had a list of all possible names, but you didn't take into account that some of them are more frequent than others ?
I tried the generator with gender:random; nameSet:England+Wales; country:UK.
All but one of the names is a forename of someone I know - that name is Scarlet and it appeared twice in my sample of 20. Only one of the names was 'foreign' though. In my area there would be several Asian names in that sample.
Yes, I was about to say the same. I tried a few "Hispanic" names and they looked absolutely weird.
On the other hand the notion of a "reasonable" Hispanic name can be quite broad. Names in Spain can be very different from names in Argentina (where Italian surnames are quite common) or from US (when it's not uncommon to have an English name with a Spanish last name)
Not sure about that, but other name set can have the same problems if they try to cover a language shared by lots of people (like Arabic)
Yeah I think that trying the bunch all Hispanic names under the same category is part of the problem. There is 400 million native speakers and they are spread over multiple continents, countries and cultures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map-Hispanophone_World.png
No surprise that names will widely vary from one place to the other.
Same in Dutch-Belgium setting. None of the names sounded realistic and when van de/van der or variants were used it was always in lowercase which is a thing from the Netherlands. In Belgium it'll be in capital letters.
Iβm from Argentina and also find that the names are very unusual. The usual names vary a lot by country, but I could not even recognize a most of them, and I had to retry about 10 times to get a realistic name.
If you are curious, you should always look at the FAQ first :). http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/faq.php . Look at the section: "What can I use the Fake Name Generator identities for?"
Try #1: "Dante Marcelo". Dante is a very strange name for an italian, I guess it is used in the US. Marcelo lacks an "l" (it is Marcello) so it sounds Spanish instead.
Try #2: "Berto Trentino". Trentino is realistic but Berto sounds a lot like an abbreviation of "Alberto", so not a real name even if I guess there are people actually named "Berto".
Try #3: "Pupetta Rizzo". Can't imagine somebody called "Pupetta", it is something you say to small children as "Little Doll" or alike.
My guess is that it's just randomly selecting from a list of names with equal probability, rather than weighting them based on how common they are. So all of these long-tail names are coming up way more often than you'd find in a phone book.
Yeah, similar is when you get names from Canada and look at the cities.
The first one I get is from Weagamow, ON, which is a North Caribou Lake Indian reservation, with like 900 people in it.
The second I get is from Cornwall, ON, a small city of 45k people, the next is from Orangeville, ON another town of 30k people. Then Wawa, ON, a town of 3k people.
Meanwhile, Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal are all unrepresented.
I just got a person from Byemoor Alberta, a hamlet of 35 people. It says she lives on 1304, 90th Ave, but there's a 1 Ave, a 2 Ave, a 1 St, and a 1 St North. Definitely no 90th Ave.
Hey! I actually know a "Dante Marcelo"! (but both as given names, he's known as Marcelo). But he's from Argentina (where Marcelo is a relatively common name), not from Italy
I think its fair to say that scenarios where a service cancels a user account because his/her name was not "realistic sounding" are few and far between. (Assuming you're not entering names like "Doorknob Toothbrush")
Interesting to see this come up. A couple years ago I started and then mothballed a system for generating realistic fake people (which I called golems) using deterministic and reversible algorithms instead of random numbers (it has a bunch of advantages). Got to love heroku's free tier, cause it's actually still on line:
Colour me surprised too. Just 5 minutes ago I was searching for a false name generator. My heart leapt with fright on seeing my recent history at the top of HN.
The occupations do seem the most likely to cause suspicion. Some of them are trades where you have to be licensed or registered to have that occupation, so a quick search would prove the person does not exist, or at least is lying about their job.
Then there's the automobile, which could also raise red flags. A Fiat Tempra driven in the USA would probably be suspicious to anyone who knows that Fiats probably weren't sold in the US in 1994, for example. And it might be weird for a clerk to be driving a 2010 Infinity...
Back in the BBS days there used to be programs written to auto-generate identities in bulk, for reasons i'm not aware of. They were designed to minimize scrutiny because there might be humans actually looking at the data you used, since there was less automation in terms of processing accounts back then.
I'm not sure why National Auto Parts would needs a Perianesthesia nurse who runs a website called SuicideLaws.com, but they seem to be paying him well enough to drive 1992 Ferrari 512 TR.
At least with Russian names, the algorithm seems to apply a uniform probability distribution over all names in its database. It results in way too many extremely rare names. In other words, a batch of Russian names generated using this program would not look statistically realistic.
Yes, a lot of archaic names which are very rare. Also, Russia is multinational country, so Russian (as in ethnicity) and Russian (as in nationality/citizenship) names are different things. A lot of names (but not family names) are actually Tatar, Armenian etc. A combination of that name with typical Russian family name is not unheard of, but pretty rare to attract the attention which is the last thing you want if you use fake name for any serious purpose.
First was a female dietitian, 5'7" and pushing 200lbs. Sounds like a great dietitian.
Next one had a hometown right down the road from me. Cool. She's 53 years old but her SSN starts with 180. PA's SSN range is 159 to 211, and everyone else my age has SSNs starting with 178. SSNs are assigned in-order. See the problem? Her SSN ought to be in the 160s I reckon.
Next was a 70-y/o timber and logging worker. I don't believe it.
Hmm, in my experience, 85 yo Dutch women are unlikely to drive a Mazda Miata. Although maybe mine examiners are more thrill-seeking than the average 85 yo. Fun!
I can think of several good reason, but the two main ones are: Testing and to use at registration-burden websites that collects personal information as their business model.
Eh, SSNs aren't linked to location in any usable way. Obviously your SSN will not change when you move cross-country (so they're not linked to current address), and I think they're only based on the mailing address entered when the card was applied for, which may not even be where you were born.
Nope; I moved out of the US 8 years ago and my SSN remains the same. My daughters both have US SSNs and they've never lived there; the younger one hasn't even visited the US once yet. If they do live there someday, they'll still have the same SSNs.
The German names are all rather convincing, except for the sometimes lacking umlauts. (interestingly, only in the surnames) No one is called Jager here, unless they anglicized their name for some reason (JΓ€ger is German for Hunter).
I don't have as much internationalization, and it doesn't generate a full user like that (it's in my todo) but perhaps it would be helpful for anyone looking for this kind of stuff.
Same with Icelandic names. Also, the GPS coordinates were often out at sea or on a mountain. Using openStreetMap it should be easy to generate more plausible coordinates.
Finnish names were very good. Only thing that was a little off was the car models, which seemed very US centric. Car models have lot of regional variants (big differences in naming US vs EU vs Asia)
A lot of the vehicles make/models are not typical cars you'd see on British roads i.e. the marketing name is for another country, even if the vehicle itself is largely the same.
My thoughts exactly. After seeing the names it generated, along with the the addresses and so forth, I immediately started looking for the link to buy or download the code, database or whatever was on offer. To my disappointment, there was nothing available.
The names are indeed realistic, but some details are not.
First are cars: most tests I made produced cars that are not sold in Brazil, althought some did.
The lack of apartment or similar data in most addresses will not raise suspicion in the US, where most people live at houses, but it will surely jump to the attention of anyone looking at the database in Brazil. Not to say, it won't test most DBs properly as we commonly store apartment numbers in a dedicated column.
The English name of the companies also won't help.
The fascinating thing about fake names is that they often seem to be a little off, somehow, even when they draw from real names. Hard to put my finger on it.
I don't need this website. I can go through the thousands of pages of wiki spam I've been hit with. I don't know why they think my wiki would have pages describing random teenagers from Germany who enjoy horseriding in their spare time and were medical equipment mechanics. Presumably these spammers must be using a similar database to this website.
The lack of unemployed people generated seems a bit unlike real life, however.
Edit: Doing a HN search this was posted about a year ago. That is why I probably didn't post it. Should we start submitting reposts of old stuff? I probably missed "cool tools" from years ago.
I wonder what database they are using for the ZIP codes. I tried googling around a bit and only found a bunch of "pay X$ to get all US ZIP codes". I'm pretty sure I've found these before for an ERP project I worked for...maybe the CIA? database (I distinctly remember they had some pretty good stuff)
3.54 million entries in 273 languages with Cities, GPS coordinates, ZIP codes, and a lot of more - all free and up-to-date. It's a project of German Wikipedia, but the website is in English and the data is used by all Wikipedia instances.
I have used a similar service while preparing a lab assignment for a CS course this semester in my uni. But this one, whooa, just generate random users for your newest service and maybe with a little AI you can overcome the famous coldstart problem.
There's a problem with Belgium: it generates street names in flemish for cities in the french speaking part of the country. Makes it obvious the address is fake.
Don't know where you live, but the Dutch government publishes spreadsheets with testdata. It contains names, middle names, addresses, domestic and foreign names, etc. No need to generate your own. I haven't had to use it yet and I didn't have a very good look, but I'd think it contains all sorts of exceptional cases which your system needs to handle. If it successfully processes that spreadsheet, it probably handles anything.
i'm only modestly talented when it comes to design and layout, but i feel strongly enough about this to make a suggestion: cover this thing in more ads.
