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Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

paulbutler.org

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Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#61

Post by Etheryte »

HeikoBehrens wrote: post #14

FWIW, we considered this technique back at Pebble to make notifications more actionable and even filed a patent for that (sorry!) https://patents.justia.com/patent/9411785 Back then on iOS via ANCS, the watches wouldn't receive much more than the textual payload you'd see on the phone. We envisioned to be working with partners such as WhatsApp et al. to encode deep links/message ids into the message so one could resp…

Hopefully a wholly undefendable patent, you're essentially trying to patent the Unicode spec. The rest of it is perform an action in response to a text message which clearly isn't novel.

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#62

Post by shermantanktop »

ooterness wrote: post #46
coldpie wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So whoever now owns that patent (Google? maybe some patent troll picked it up?) could, in theory, sue the author of this article for patent infringement, right? Even though they invented it independently and never once used or looked at your patent. Do you think you made the world a better place or a worse place by filing that patent?

As a wise man once said: "Don't hate the player, hate the game."

Where’d the game come from? Hint: the players.

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#63

Post by krupan »

palata wrote: post #47
HeikoBehrens wrote: post #14

FWIW, we considered this technique back at Pebble to make notifications more actionable and even filed a patent for that (sorry!) https://patents.justia.com/patent/9411785 Back then on iOS via ANCS, the watches wouldn't receive much more than the textual payload you'd see on the phone. We envisioned to be working with partners such as WhatsApp et al. to encode deep links/message ids into the message so one could resp…

Respectfully: how the hell would that be a valid patent? Feels like patenting the idea of writing text in white on white on a Word document such that you don't lose it but it doesn't get printed. It's just insane to ever call that "an invention".

Patents are part of the game you have to play, like it or not. If you don't patent your inventions somebody else will and they will come after you with their lawyers. Patents are used defensively far more often than they are used offensively in these stupid "Intellectual Property" battles.

Because of this, there is absolutely no point in shaming someone for patenting a thing, especially when they are apologetic about it like parent is, and most especially when they are not threatening to weaponize the patent themselves.

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#64

Post by krupan »

coldpie wrote: post #21
HeikoBehrens wrote: post #14

FWIW, we considered this technique back at Pebble to make notifications more actionable and even filed a patent for that (sorry!) https://patents.justia.com/patent/9411785 Back then on iOS via ANCS, the watches wouldn't receive much more than the textual payload you'd see on the phone. We envisioned to be working with partners such as WhatsApp et al. to encode deep links/message ids into the message so one could resp…

So whoever now owns that patent (Google? maybe some patent troll picked it up?) could, in theory, sue the author of this article for patent infringement, right? Even though they invented it independently and never once used or looked at your patent. Do you think you made the world a better place or a worse place by filing that patent?

Please see my comment about about the sad necessity for patents

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43026595

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#65

Post by tyho »

pava0 wrote: post #30
tyho wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are way better ways to watermark LLM output. It's easy to make it undetectable, which this is'nt.

For example?

A crude way: To watermark: First establish a keyed DRBG. For every nth token prediction: read a bit from the DRBG for every possible token to label them red/black. before selecting the next token, set the logit for black tokens to -Inf, this ensures a red token will be selected.

To detect: Establish the same DRBG. Tokenize, for each nth token, determine the red set of tokens in that position. If you only see red tokens in lots of positions, then you can be confident the content is watermarked with your key.

This would probably take a bit of fiddling to work well, but would be pretty much undetectable. Conceptually it's forcing the LLM to use a "flagged" synonym at key positions. A more sophisticated version of a shiboleth.

In practice you might chose to instead watermark all tokens, less heavy handedly (nudge logits, rather than override), and use highly robust error correcting codes.

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#66

Post by krupan »

shermantanktop wrote: post #62
ooterness wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a wise man once said: "Don't hate the player, hate the game."

Where’d the game come from? Hint: the players.

First of all, it's not just a game, it's an outright battle to the death (of your company). Sure, you can choose not to wield patents, even in self defense, but good luck with that.

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#67

Post by neilv »

rwmj wrote: post #56
palata wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully: how the hell would that be a valid patent? Feels like patenting the idea of writing text in white on white on a Word document such that you don't lose it but it doesn't get printed. It's just insane to ever call that "an invention".

Companies acquire indefensible patents all the time. They are used in bulk to threaten smaller competitors ("we've got 500 patents in this field, better not bring your product to market"). This is one reason why patents can be terrible for competition.

About 25 years ago, this was explained to me as "sword patents and shield patents".

Sure, some can use patents as swords, to suppress legitimate competition, or to extract undue rents. But you can also use patents as shields, to protect in various ways against those swords.

If I ran a BigTech (like the original warm-fuzzy Google reputation), I'd be registering any plausible patents, and have lawyers figure out how to freely license-out the ones that weren't key secret sauce, under terms that figuratively poisoned anyone doing illegitimate sword patents.

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#68

Post by krupan »

RIMR wrote: post #57
delian66 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think your comment made the world, and HN specifically a better place?

Yes, calling out unethical practices makes the world a better place by discouraging unethical practices.

Berating people for filing patents in self defense is not how we fix this problem. The government put these rules in place. Businesses have to at least accumulate patents to use defensively (you found a patent of yours that you think I'm violating? Well let me do a quick search through the patents I have...what's that? Nevermind, I'm not actually infringing your patent? Good, that's what I thought.)

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#69

Post by [deleted] »

krupan wrote: post #64
coldpie wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So whoever now owns that patent (Google? maybe some patent troll picked it up?) could, in theory, sue the author of this article for patent infringement, right? Even though they invented it independently and never once used or looked at your patent. Do you think you made the world a better place or a worse place by filing that patent?

Please see my comment about about the sad necessity for patents https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43026595

[deleted]

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#70

Post by bmicraft »

cscheid wrote: post #10
nzach wrote: post #4

so.... in theory you should be able to create several visually identical links that give access to different resources? I've always assumed links without any tracking information (unique hash, query params, etc) were safe to click(with regards to my privacy). but if this works for links I may need to revise my strategy regarding how to approach links sent to me.

My understanding is that "weird" unicode code points become https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode . I used the 󠅘󠅕󠅜󠅜󠅟 (copy-pasted from the post, presumably with the payload in it) to type a fake domain into Chrome, and the Punycode I got appeared to not have any of the encoding bits. However, I then pasted the emoji into the _query_ part of a URL. I pointed it to my own website, and sure enough, I can definitel…

domains get "punycode" encoded, urls get "url encoded"[1], which should make unicode characters stand out. That being said, browsers do accept some non-ascii characters in urls and convert them automatially, so theoretically you could put "invalid" characters into a link and have the browser convert it only after clicking. That might be a viable strategy.

[1] https://www.w3schools.com/tags//ref_urlencode.asp

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