Related HN thread regarding a chrome extension to counter this:
Be careful what you copy: Invisibly inserting usernames into text
191–200 of 200 posts
Re: Be careful what you copy: Invisibly inserting usernames into text
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spying is a big problem in Eve. At the most basic level a spy is able to take screenshots and copy/paste text to send back to the entity they're spying for. By watermarking both text and forum backgrounds the data effectively becomes tainted in the sense that the screenshot/text will have unique characteristics that allow the original poster to identify who copied the data in the first place. The whole flow would be:…
Screenshots made in World of Warcraft contain a watermark which contains the account number of the player, as well as other info [1] [2]. This is used to find/combat cheaters (e.g. botters). As for spying, I'm pretty sure this is a problem in high end raiding in WoW. But due to the nature of WoW (not being a king of the hill MMO to rule land) not nearly as much as EVE. Blizzard uses it to combat cheating. [1] http://…
Couldn't someone just black out the watermark?
Re: Be careful what you copy: Invisibly inserting usernames into text
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
You would have to change every word, since any could be a waterprinted synonym. A better way would be to read it, make a summary, then rewrite it from memory and only use the source data to correct factual differences.
You wouldn't necessarily have to change every word; just enough to break the decoding scheme. But even then it's totally random, so the longer the document, the more opportunities to be fingerprinted. It's like the old saying goes, "the police only need to be lucky once, but the criminals need to be lucky all the time." [0] [0] I never bothered looking up where this came from until just now... interestingly it's from…
Your saying illustrates what I'm saying perfectly: if you miss even a single fingerprinted word, it might uniquely identify you. So you need to change every single word, and even that isn't enough in case eg. adjectives were added or omitted.
Re: Be careful what you copy: Invisibly inserting usernames into text
#194const zeroPad = num => ‘00000000’.slice(String(num).length) + num; What a bad way to declare a function. Starting with the word 'function' will make the code much more readable. Arrow functions are supposed to be used as a small callbacks, not to obfuscate the meaning of the code.
I was more confused by the parameter being named 'num' before having the String function called on it and its length taken - when in fact 'num' should be a binary string when it's passed into the function. But maybe I've been spoiled by strong types.
The rightmost num is coerced. And the hole is finished on par.
Re: Be careful what you copy: Invisibly inserting usernames into text
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spying is a big problem in Eve. At the most basic level a spy is able to take screenshots and copy/paste text to send back to the entity they're spying for. By watermarking both text and forum backgrounds the data effectively becomes tainted in the sense that the screenshot/text will have unique characteristics that allow the original poster to identify who copied the data in the first place. The whole flow would be:…
Could "fingerprinting" a screenshot be foiled by running the screenshot through a lossy algorithm? Or doing something like converting to jpg->gif->jpg->gif->png->jpg... a few rounds? Enough to keep the picture viewable, but just barely? Or hell, even simpler; taking a cameraphone picture of the screenshot?
Depends on the type of fingerprinting used. The example I mentioned with the invisible pattern yes but if the fingerprinting is done via other means such as replacing some words on a post with synonyms for each user in such a way that each has a unique combination of words it wouldn't work.
Generally speaking in these scenarios you don't want to grab anything directly from the source, just relay what you saw and write it down in your own words. Even then it has to be handled carefully (how many other people got this information? Are the details I'm seeing slightly incorrect in order to filter out who leaked this?)
Also take into account that you can be caught just by repeated "A/B testing" of sorts: half the population gets informed that at 19:05 some operation is taking place, the other half that the op is taking place at 19:10. The next day they do the same but using different groups, if you have access to the data that is being leaked you can track down who is leaking it like that after a few iterations.
Re: Be careful what you copy: Invisibly inserting usernames into text
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Screenshots made in World of Warcraft contain a watermark which contains the account number of the player, as well as other info [1] [2]. This is used to find/combat cheaters (e.g. botters). As for spying, I'm pretty sure this is a problem in high end raiding in WoW. But due to the nature of WoW (not being a king of the hill MMO to rule land) not nearly as much as EVE. Blizzard uses it to combat cheating. [1] http://…
Couldn't someone just black out the watermark?
In this case not. The watermark is all over the place, viewable when you zoom in. The alternative is to use a 3rd party tool to make screenshots such as Greenshot, ShareX, or Gyazo.
Re: Be careful what you copy: Invisibly inserting usernames into text
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it'd also optionally (default=true) strip text formatting from copy/paste that'd be epic. No more copy-from-browser-then-paste-into-notepad-then-copy-from-notepad-then-paste-into-email-or-chat
What matthberg said. I'm on a Mac and I use shift-cmd-V frequently (more often than cmd-V). Unfortunately, there are a few apps that use cmd-opt-shift-V instead of cmd-shift-V. You can fix most of them using this: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/182970/paste-to-ma... After that, almost everything will use cmd-shift-V. However, Microsoft Word is still broken, apparently because it uses a slightly different c…
Linux.
Re: Be careful what you copy: Invisibly inserting usernames into text
#198How difficult would it be to write a browser extension to either remove all zero-width characters or somehow make it super obvious that they are being used on the page? I just searched for "zero-width" and "zero width" in Chrome and Firefox's extensions stores, but didn't come up with anything.
No need to replace text. Patch all the fonts in your OS to display something instead of zero width. That will work outside the browser also.
There really is no valid use case in Latin script so why is zwsp allowed next to Latin characters?! (Emojis is not a valid use case, and why do they depend on zwsp anyway?)
Re: Be careful what you copy: Invisibly inserting usernames into text
#199I did this (non-publicly) many years ago for my eve online alliance. A substantial problem exists in that forging the identity of _someone else_ is fairly easy in a naive scheme if someone detects these characters. That means you can sow chaos by blaming innocent folks. In practice you'll want to "sign" the inserted data as well. Also because of the overhead here and the fact that you will want the signature to occur…
I dont have access to the paper, but wouldn't unicode normalization (and zero width deletion) effectively remove all watermarking?
Re: Be careful what you copy: Invisibly inserting usernames into text
#200This would be an interesting approach to plagiarism detection; I could see how it would be used for a couple of online courses that I use with my students. Of course its just part of the arms race, though.
i have checked many online tools available for students, for plagiarism detection but i would say that plagiarism checker by prepostseo is one of the best: