Fake Name Generator

[teddyh]

  # aptitude install rig

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
  $

[carlob]

Someone please make a homebrew keg with this!

[yaph]

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

[chx]

The wonderful thing about fakenamegenerator is the email coming with it. While mailinator is often blocked this one is less so.

[mahmoudhossam]

For those who use Arch Linux, It's already available in the AUR.

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/rig/

[christiangenco]

Also, for ruby: `gem install faker` [1]

1. https://github.com/stympy/faker

[rfnslyr]

I don't get it?

[qnk]

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.

[eterm]

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.

[jaimebuelta]

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)

[galapago]

Yeap, i can confirm. Hispanic surnames are more or less correct, but first names are bizarre.

[chevreuil]

Same thing for French : I have not heard of anyone named Brigliador in France, or maybe in some medieval poetry.

[ward]

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.

[gus_massa]

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.

[pisarzp]

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

[ilbe]

Curious what you find this useful for? Filling out online forms instead making stuff up off the top of your head?

[hgsigala]

Hispanic here: tried the same thing and had the same reaction. Dampne is not a hispanic name...

[antirez]

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.

[nollidge]

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.

[jaimebuelta]

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

[kapkapkap]

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")

[chewxy]

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

[femto113]

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.

[CatsoCatsoCatso]

"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.

[jlees]

I still fall back on http://www.rinkworks.com/namegen/ occasionally.

[adnam]

I just generated an icelandic hobbit and it GAVE ME MY OWN NAME! I actually WTFed out loud.

[praptak]

"Privacy concerns on the raise. A hobbit accidentally outed by a web service."

[Gormo]

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.

[klausjensen]

There are no hobbits in Iceland, duuuh!

Elves, on the other hand...

[the_watcher]

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?

[Tarential]

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.

[peterwwillis]

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.

[jlees]

She could be a weightlifting coach.

[pavanky]

As an Indian I am a bit sad to see Hobbit, Klingon and Ninja in there but no option for Indian names.

[11001]

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.

[aragot]

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?

[joeframbach]

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.

[evan_]

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.

[galapago]

They even support Klingon names! (after a big scandal [1])

[1]: http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/blog/2013/10/response-to-ac...

[mdemare]

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!

[linuxlizard]

"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!

[justwrote]

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

[possibilistic]

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.)

[belorn]

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.

[ankitoberoi]

Quite useful but the site has ignored about 17.5% of the world population - Indian names are missing.

[GyrosOfWar]

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).

[zman0225]

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.

[victorquinn]

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.

[werid]

The Norwegian name set generates some really strange first names. Plausible surnames though.

[dagurp]

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.