Journal of the Commons2 articles

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JoC-2026-012PreprintPosted on clearing Commons scrutiny — round-one review is open.BreakthroughA breakthrough — a new result others can build upon.

Training-Free Archetype Typing of Conspiracy Networks from Call-Detail Records (Sanjaal)

Shashank Taxak · Defense Systems

We study an on-device, training-free classifier that types a multi-suspect call-detail-record (CDR) group by the clandestine-network archetype it most resembles — one of nineteen documented topologies — or as benign. Each archetype is a synthesised neuron: the measured feature-space centroid of canonical exemplars, scored by a uniform-weight Gaussian kernel in standardised space. On a replicated synthetic benchmark (8 runs, seeds disjoint from calibration), 20-class typing reaches 86.3% top-1 accuracy (95% CI 85.8–86.8%), macro-F1 0.856; an open-set abstention gate lifts selective accuracy to 88.5% at 95.0% coverage. The central result is negative and we lead with it: the risk score that separates conspiracies from a trivial benign null at AUC 1.00 separates them from realistic benign-but-busy groups (families, call-centres, rallies, fleets, carpools) at AUC 0.25 — below chance — flagging 83% of lawful cohesive groups. Structure does not encode intent. Accuracy also falls from 83.8% to 33.3% under realistic partial observation, and 20-member mixed conspiracies defeat single-label typing (30% confidence) while still being correctly decomposed. We conclude the engine’s defensible role is a structure-typer and lead-generator for a human analyst, not an autonomous detector. All numbers come from the shipping engine; the benchmark is synthetic (separability + robustness, not field validation). 1.2em

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JoC-2026-011PreprintPosted on clearing Commons scrutiny — round-one review is open.BreakthroughA breakthrough — a new result others can build upon.

Training-Free Cohort-Relative Keystroke-Cadence Verification

Shashank Taxak · Defense Systems

We present a keystroke-cadence verifier for high-assurance login that is synthesised in closed form from enrolment data—no gradient training, no epochs. Each typing sample becomes a fixed-length timing vector; the model z-score-normalises features, removes incoherent enrolment samples, optionally weights features by a multi-class Fisher ratio, forms PCA sub-prototypes, and decides by a cohort-relative weighted-cosine margin gated by a per-user threshold. On the public CMU keystroke benchmark (51 subjects), under a protocol with strictly held-out impostors, the method attains a mean per-subject Equal-Error-Rate of 9.38% (7.78% with Fisher weighting disabled). That is in the same range as the best detector reported by Killourhy and Maxion (9.62%), but we stress this is not a head-to-head comparison: our cohort-relative protocol uses the other enrolled subjects as negative evidence, which their per-subject detectors do not, and the per-subject variance is large ( 8.5%; 95% CI [7.0,11.7]%). A component ablation—reported in full, including a negative result—shows that cohort-relative scoring alone sets a low-false-accept operating point (FAR 0.69% vs 13.3% for an unweighted single-threshold baseline, 19 fewer impostor admissions); per-user adaptive thresholds were measurably inert on this benchmark, and Fisher weighting slightly hurts. Cross-session drift would otherwise make a static operating point reject 40–86% of genuine logins; we close that gap with password-gated continuous learning—a cadence rejection that the password confirms is appended as a new neuron, so the template tracks the user while impostors (who lack the password) can never poison it. Across CMU sessions this halves the fallback rate and halts the drift escalation at no false-accept cost. We are explicit about the remaining limitations: the synthetic study is an internal consistency check rather than independent evidence, and only zero-effort impostors are evaluated.

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