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
$
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]
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.
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.)
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.
I’m 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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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")
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.
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.
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:
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 (Jäger 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.
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.
Someone please make a homebrew keg with this!
Or create a Fink/MacPorts port.
Is there a reason to use either of those systems over homebrew? Since homebrew seems to have a lot more community support now.
I could be wrong, but I believe MacPorts has more ports in the default repository at the moment. Not sure about Fink.
But yes, arguably, `brew` is moving forward very quickly.
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]
[1] https://trac.macports.org/wiki/FAQ#ownlibs
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.
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'm a *NIX admin and actually, when it comes to OSX I'd rather go the VM route than homebrew/macports (either way, I don't run OSX daily).
Or chrome extension to autofill forms.
There's a pull request open here: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/pull/26075
If you absolutely can't wait, you can run this to install it:
VoilĂ .
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
You may also enjoy the Faker rubygem, a port of perl's Data::Faker.
I don't get it?
rig is free software to create fake credentials on your local machine without the need of a internet connection to access an online service.
For those who use Arch Linux, It's already available in the AUR.
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/rig/
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.
[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/yaourt
The wonderful thing about fakenamegenerator is the email coming with it. While mailinator is often blocked this one is less so.
Also, for ruby: `gem install faker` [1]
1. https://github.com/stympy/faker
Very useful resource!
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.
Disclaimer: I'm Hispanic.
Yeap, i can confirm. Hispanic surnames are more or less correct, but first names are bizarre.
Indeed. Tried like 15 times and not a single Hispanic first name didn't make me wiggle.
I’m 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.
Same thing for French : I have not heard of anyone named Brigliador in France, or maybe in some medieval poetry.
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.
Also, I don't know any English/Welsh people who drive a 1992 Pontiac Sunbird.
http://www.autotrader.co.uk/used-cars/pontiac/firebird/used-...
You can be the first to own one!
Only a 1995 model though :-)
That's a Firebird, not a Sunbird. http://www.carandclassic.co.uk/car/C258400
That was the first thing I noticed. My random German drives a
1996 Buick Roadmaster
which is about as likely as him riding around on a Unicorn.
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).
The addresses it generates are generally non-existent (if they do exist, it's a coincidence)
Ya, I think the car databases are backwards... I have never seen a Peugeot in America. I'm sure there are some, but I've never seen one.
My Eritrean living in Sweden was 170cm / 5'6" weight 112kg 246lb. Bit unusual but possible I guess.
Random name factoid: In England, J is a valid first name and A is a valid surname. So someone's full name could be J A.
I wonder how many databases would accept that.
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!)
The car generation is really strange. I just generated an occupational therapist aide who drives a 2001 Ariel Atom.
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.
Yeah, I live in Southern California and I've never heard of 99% of these Hispanic first names.
Actually the Arabic one is pretty accurate.
Curious what you find this useful for? Filling out online forms instead making stuff up off the top of your head?
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?"
Same for Polish.
Most of names sound Polish, but I never ever heard of anyone called that name.
Also lastnames seem to be missing Polish characters sometimes
Hispanic here: tried the same thing and had the same reaction. Dampne is not a hispanic name...
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.
Italian names are not realistic.
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.
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")
Well, the site did generate Iva Lavallée as a French female name for me. I had never heard of someone called Iva, but it seems it's been given to exactly 100 persons in France since 1900.
Iva Lavallée sounds like He's gonna swallow it, really.
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.
How very coincidental. This afternoon I was talking to my cofounders about test data generation - and names were one of them.
Here are other resources that we found that were helpful:
- http://www.generatedata.com/
- http://databasetestdata.com
- http://randomuser.me (useful for frontends)
- http://gedis-studio.com/ (not free)
Also, TIL that Hipchat doesn't always pull all the links
"How very coincidental"
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.
I still fall back on http://www.rinkworks.com/namegen/ occasionally.
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:
http://golems.herokuapp.com/person/random.json
If anyone's interested in learning more let me know.
I just generated an icelandic hobbit and it GAVE ME MY OWN NAME! I actually WTFed out loud.
"Privacy concerns on the raise. A hobbit accidentally outed by a web service."
There are no hobbits in Iceland, duuuh!
Elves, on the other hand...
My Hobbit name was from my home town (I'm from a suburb of Palm Springs, not a normal place to randomly generate). What is going on in the Shire?
One of the "hobbit" names it gave me was "Haiduc". I don't think there were ever many hobbits engaged in highway banditry in the Balkans.
While this is very interesting, the profiles may need to be "tweaked" a bit to be realistic. For example, the first profile it generate for me was a:
-Female
-Fitness instructor
-Weighing 205.9 lbs
-Standing 5 feet 1 inch
Individually, any of these things might be ok. Any three could even be possible. All four, however, just doesn't seem to work.
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.
She could be a weightlifting coach.
As an Indian I am a bit sad to see Hobbit, Klingon and Ninja in there but no option for Indian names.
Share the same sentiment.
Selecting "Hobbit" also adjusts the generated height to around 3 feet!
Just as well, probably. If they had Indian, you'd get a Punjabi first name, an Urdu surname, and a 1992 Pontiac Sunbird in your New Delhi driveway.
Salman Rushdie has to get his story ideas from somewhere.
Seems to have been quite an oversight. Hard to see how that happened.
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.
Russian names - Ramiro? Rice?? Nicodemus???
Where the hell did they get those from:)
Suggestion: Have a 'profile basket' so I can recover the birth date the next time a service asks for security questions.
Actually, generating the "first boyfriend" and "my first car color" would be great too.
Actually, what about generating a facebook and linkedin profile for the fake names?
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.
Maybe she has a glandular disorder, or she's a special kind of dietitian who works mainly with sumo wrestlers, or she's 7' tall.
They even support Klingon names! (after a big scandal [1])
[1]: http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/blog/2013/10/response-to-ac...
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!
"Per company policy you have been denied access to the URL: http://fakenamegenerator.com/
Reason: Not allowed to browse Questionable category"
Now I'm REALLY curious!
I imagine the block is in place because spammers and fraudsters might take advantage of it. Still kind of silly though.
There are also faker libraries for various languages, e.g. the famous https://github.com/stympy/faker, https://github.com/fzaninotto/Faker and a little port in Scala (created by me) https://github.com/justwrote/scala-faker
Why are social security numbers generated? That seems necessary for supporting only dubious kinds of behavior.
Aren't SSNs only useful for banking/credit-type services? (Perhaps someone can enlighten me.)
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.
My guess is because they are also geo-dependent. Your fake person gets a valid SSN for where they are from.
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.
Geo-dependent, as in across the otherside of the globe maybe...
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.
Quite useful but the site has ignored about 17.5% of the world population - Indian names are missing.
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 (Jäger is German for Hunter).
Pretty awesome - although I keep on getting Ferraris and type two Diabetes. I guess it goes to show that you really can't have everything.
Surely it shows precisely the opposite! You have a Ferrari AND diabetes! Very lucky indeed!
I wrote a library in JavaScript for the browser and Node.js called Chance to generate user info and other random things:
http://chancejs.com/
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.
The Norwegian name set generates some really strange first names. Plausible surnames though.
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.
I am highly amused that this requires a google+ login. Do they detect their own fake names?
does it? Didn't require anything for me..
It does not require a G+ login for 99% of the features.
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.
Hmm no API available (unlike randomuser). We need automated faking!
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.
You can place bulk orders of up to 50,000: http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/order.php
Brazilian names are perfect! Names, cities, phones, etc, everything so realistic!
As people are complaining of weird spanish, french, italian names, I wonder if the person who did this is brazilian.
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.
Unfortunately the English names don't really work as they haven't taken account of name clustering in Ethnic minorities.
"Mohammed Bennett" is possible but highly unlikely.
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.
It's a pretty old project. I know that it's been used quite successfully plenty of times for social engineering purposes.
Yeah, it is an old project. I would have posted a long time ago if I knew HN didn't know already.
The most useful tool besides this is http://10minutemail.com/
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.
The author must think highly of American women. A random sample showed nearly all of them between 65-69" and over 200lbs.
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)
I thought there were plenty of those available freely.
Are these good enough? :
http://geocoder.ca/?freedata=1
US Zip Codes
File of all US 5-digit ZIP codes. Includes zip, city, state, latitude, longitude, and county (Last Updated: March 30th 2010):
US Zip Codes (41,755)
or
http://sourceforge.net/projects/zips/
Edit: MaxMind recommends this one
http://download.geonames.org/export/zip/
There's also Google's geocoding API.
Still, let's hope the project owners answer you :)
Not exactly.
"ZIP Codes are commercially sensitive... proprietary information"[1]
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6685917
You can download the database that is used to update Wikipedia (bots do that job):
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProjekt_Georefere...
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.
This is interesting, but the names are probably just pulled from US census data. If you want something to generate new names, try
https://elliottslaughter.com/names/rand
which uses (admittedly simple) machine learning algorithms to generate new names.
On first glance, the whole thing looked very shady to me, since the web pages it generates look like this:
BakingBrokers.com
but it seems they are all non-registered domains, so it is indeed not a scam (and Baking is not quite Banking).
Would be a funny trick, though. Get a lot of people to use your identity generator in order to produce some backlinks.
I was wondering about that, especially because of the call out to activate your fake email address.
It uses non-USA cars for the USA. We don't have the Chevrolet Matiz or Holden Senator here.
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.
Noticed it too, and it looks city-street are unique combinations (one street by city).
Fake names, cities, and other in python:
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/fake-factory/
Lithuanian names: http://uza.lt/vardai/
It's more of a fun read than anything useful, really
I've been using this for testing webapps for years
Me too, and when I do I always blindly copy and paste and end up with very fake looking data... Which doesn't matter to me at all!
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.
Well that's creepy: The address of my randomly generated person is 1 block from an place I stayed at (same street name, just one block down).
Go say hi! And deliver a certificate of congratulations for being included in the exclusive fakenamegenerator.com!
Interesting...one of the choices is Eritrean. Small country in East Africa. Names are pretty close to the region as well so I'm surprised.
Russian first names (not Cyrillic) are very strange: "Innocent Korovin" - really? Russian (cyrillic) seem more realistic though.
Emergency care nurse for Champion Auto. Priceless.
Occupation: Funeral attendant
Company: Food Giant
Major issue here is that the site is linking to www.ssnregistry.org which is pretty obviously a honeypot for SSN numbers...
I've used this in the past. Useful tool.
French Canada names are not typical. Here are examples: François Tremblay Marc Gagnon Diane Côté Line Dion
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not. The first three are pretty common French Canadian names. The last one isn't.
Francois Tremblay is the name of a goalie from Baie-Comeau.
Marc Gagnon is the name of an Olympic gold-medal winning speedskater from Chicoutimi.
There are a couple of dozen Diane Cotes from Canada on LinkedIn.
Could need some tweaking with the age. You mostly don't want information for a 60-90 year old person.
So, I need a new dust filter for my Hoover MaxExtract PressurePro model 60 - can you help me with that?
Super useful. Now if it only were to auto-create a G+ profile and scrape to find some profile pics.
For profile pics: http://randomuser.me/
Is this legal? Unless those faces are fictional drawings, using someone else's face for a fake profile seems way over the line.
That was my confusion as well. They are using actual photographs of people for a randomly generate profile!
If it had checkboxes for all of the social networks, free email providers, and so on it would go a long way toward setting up false identities.
If it could comb death certificates for names and demographic data rather than randomly generating it, that would be even better.
You'd probably make a fortune selling SaaS contracts to criminals in Russia and Washington.
I am too afraid to realize I have been created in a random generator to use this service.
This seems like it would be more accurately referred to as a real name generator :)
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.
This has helped me many a time to generate test data-set.
I love it! ;) Just afraid that many trolls will use it...
My favourite was Brandon Bradshaw.
Brazilian names are quite convincing.
Well, Let's celebrate anonymity
People have a UPS tracking number?
The arabic one is pretty accurate.
I love it! Productivity : down.
no , Indian names?
no mclovin ?