
Fake Name Generator - galapago
http://fakenamegenerator.com
======
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!

~~~
verandaguy
Or create a Fink/MacPorts port.

~~~
SmileyKeith
Is there a reason to use either of those systems over homebrew? Since homebrew
seems to have a lot more community support now.

~~~
_delirium
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.

~~~
JonnieCache
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.)

~~~
lae
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).

------
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.

~~~
warbastard
Also, I don't know any English/Welsh people who drive a 1992 Pontiac Sunbird.

~~~
CWuestefeld
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).

~~~
dubfan
The addresses it generates are generally non-existent (if they do exist, it's
a coincidence)

------
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.

~~~
zeidrich
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.

------
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://www.generatedata.com/)

\- [http://databasetestdata.com](http://databasetestdata.com)

\- [http://randomuser.me](http://randomuser.me) (useful for frontends)

\- [http://gedis-studio.com/](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](http://golems.herokuapp.com/person/random.json)

If anyone's interested in learning more let me know.

------
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."

------
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.

~~~
qbrass
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.

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

~~~
tragic
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.

~~~
mturmon
Salman Rushdie has to get his story ideas from somewhere.

------
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.

~~~
mynegation
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.

~~~
shitgoose
Russian names - Ramiro? Rice?? Nicodemus???

Where the hell did they get those from:)

------
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...](http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/blog/2013/10/response-to-accusations-
of-discrimination/)

------
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/](http://fakenamegenerator.com/)

Reason: Not allowed to browse Questionable category"

Now I'm REALLY curious!

~~~
meowface
I imagine the block is in place because spammers and fraudsters might take
advantage of it. Still kind of silly though.

------
justwrote
There are also faker libraries for various languages, e.g. the famous
[https://github.com/stympy/faker](https://github.com/stympy/faker),
[https://github.com/fzaninotto/Faker](https://github.com/fzaninotto/Faker) and
a little port in Scala (created by me) [https://github.com/justwrote/scala-
faker](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.)

~~~
mbrameld
My guess is because they are also geo-dependent. Your fake person gets a valid
SSN for where they are from.

~~~
jtheory
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.

~~~
kamjam
Geo-dependent, as in across the otherside of the globe maybe...

~~~
jtheory
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.

------
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.

~~~
72deluxe
Surely it shows precisely the opposite! You have a Ferrari AND diabetes! Very
lucky indeed!

------
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/](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.

------
lmm
I am highly amused that this requires a google+ login. Do they detect their
own fake names?

~~~
aestra
It does not require a G+ login for 99% of the features.

------
tommis
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)

------
seanhandley
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.

------
easy_rider
Hmm no API available (unlike randomuser). We need automated faking!

~~~
axefrog
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.

~~~
nandhp
You can place bulk orders of up to 50,000:
[http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/order.php](http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/order.php)

------
soneca
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.

~~~
aylons
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.

------
bencollier49
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.

------
allochthon
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.

------
xioxox
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.

------
vezzy-fnord
It's a pretty old project. I know that it's been used quite successfully
plenty of times for social engineering purposes.

~~~
deadfall
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/](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.

------
sparkyrizzo
The author must think highly of American women. A random sample showed nearly
all of them between 65-69" and over 200lbs.

------
kriro
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)

~~~
GFischer
I thought there were plenty of those available freely.

Are these good enough? :

[http://geocoder.ca/?freedata=1](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/](http://sourceforge.net/projects/zips/)

Edit: MaxMind recommends this one

[http://download.geonames.org/export/zip/](http://download.geonames.org/export/zip/)

There's also Google's geocoding API.

Still, let's hope the project owners answer you :)

~~~
FootballMuse
Not exactly.

"ZIP Codes are commercially sensitive... proprietary information"[1]

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6685917](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6685917)

------
eslaught
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](https://elliottslaughter.com/names/rand)

which uses (admittedly simple) machine learning algorithms to generate new
names.

------
sentenza
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.

~~~
the_watcher
I was wondering about that, especially because of the call out to activate
your fake email address.

------
blt
It uses non-USA cars for the USA. We don't have the Chevrolet Matiz or Holden
Senator here.

------
milkers
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.

------
raphinou
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.

~~~
Guillaume86
Noticed it too, and it looks city-street are unique combinations (one street
by city).

------
webjunkie
Fake names, cities, and other in python:

[https://pypi.python.org/pypi/fake-
factory/](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/fake-factory/)

------
croisillon
Lithuanian names: [http://uza.lt/vardai/](http://uza.lt/vardai/)

It's more of a fun read than anything useful, really

------
incidence
I've been using this for testing webapps for years

~~~
aestra
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!

~~~
lucb1e
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.

------
vxNsr
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).

~~~
badusername
Go say hi! And deliver a certificate of congratulations for being included in
the exclusive fakenamegenerator.com!

------
bhaile
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.

------
optymizer1
Russian first names (not Cyrillic) are very strange: "Innocent Korovin" \-
really? Russian (cyrillic) seem more realistic though.

------
delinka
Emergency care nurse for Champion Auto. Priceless.

~~~
thevdude
Occupation: Funeral attendant

Company: Food Giant

------
fapi1974
Major issue here is that the site is linking to www.ssnregistry.org which is
pretty obviously a honeypot for SSN numbers...

------
dangayle
I've used this in the past. Useful tool.

------
pierlux
French Canada names are not typical. Here are examples: François Tremblay Marc
Gagnon Diane Côté Line Dion

~~~
CanSpice
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.

------
eXpl0it3r
Could need some tweaking with the age. You mostly don't want information for a
60-90 year old person.

------
return0
So, I need a new dust filter for my Hoover MaxExtract PressurePro model 60 -
can you help me with that?

------
midas007
Super useful. Now if it only were to auto-create a G+ profile and scrape to
find some profile pics.

~~~
kjannis
For profile pics: [http://randomuser.me/](http://randomuser.me/)

~~~
candybar
Is this legal? Unless those faces are fictional drawings, using someone else's
face for a fake profile seems way over the line.

~~~
piyush_soni
That was my confusion as well. They are using actual photographs of people for
a randomly generate profile!

------
cellover
I am too afraid to realize I have been created in a random generator to use
this service.

------
codezero
This seems like it would be more accurately referred to as a real name
generator :)

------
mattdennewitz
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.

------
darklrd
This has helped me many a time to generate test data-set.

------
jber
I love it! ;) Just afraid that many trolls will use it...

------
NAFV_P
My favourite was _Brandon Bradshaw_.

------
gilney
Brazilian names are quite convincing.

------
devinder
Well, Let's celebrate anonymity

------
JSadowski
People have a UPS tracking number?

------
nayefc
The arabic one is pretty accurate.

------
nkg
I love it! Productivity : down.

------
thisisnotclear
no , Indian names?

------
Papirola
no mclovin ?

