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  # 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
  $
Someone please make a homebrew keg with this!
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
The wonderful thing about fakenamegenerator is the email coming with it. While mailinator is often blocked this one is less so.
For those who use Arch Linux, It's already available in the AUR.

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

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

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

I don't get it?
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.

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.

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)

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

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

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

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

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!

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.)

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

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.
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)
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.

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.
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