Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

paulbutler.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 206 posts

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#71

Post by coldpie »

krupan wrote: post #63
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".

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…

No, I don't buy it. If the patents are publicly and perpetually freely licensed except for defensive-only purposes, then sure, they're not unethical. Red Hat's patent promise ( https://www.redhat.com/en/about/patent-promise ) is one example. If patents were actually intended for defensive purposes only, then this would be an easy and uncontroversial thing to do. However, in practice this is vanishingly rare, and lawyers fight against it tooth & nail. This tells you that the companies do not actually file them for defensive-only purposes, unlike what you claim.

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#72

Post by layer8 »

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.

URIs with non-ASCII characters are technically invalid. Browsers and the like should (but likely don’t all do) percent-encode any invalid characters for display if they accept such invalid URIs.

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#73

Post by krupan »

RealityVoid wrote: post #36
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?

_Can_ they sue them for patent infringement? They just described a technique (that you can see in the patent filing anyway) and not selling a product based on it. I think there's nothing to sue here. I'm curious is my understanding of this is correct.

One of the benefits of the patent system (that now seems to be far outweighed by negatives) is that patents are public information. Your invention is documented for all to see. I don't think that someone writing about public information is a punishable office, but IANAL

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#74

Post by giancarlostoro »

kevinsync wrote: post #23

StegCloak [0] is in the same ballpark and takes this idea a step further by encrypting the hidden payload via AES-256-CTR -- pretty neat little trick [0] https://github.com/KuroLabs/stegcloak

There's a Better Discord plugin that I think uses this or something similar, so you could send completely encrypted messages, that look like nothing to everyone else. You'd need to share a password secret for them to decode it though.

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#75

Post by jrootabega »

remram wrote: post #37

I'm not too surprised by this, but I'm annoyed that no amount of configuration made those bytes visible again in my editor. Only using hexdump revealed them.

Here's a POC that works in emacs. Doesn't cover all of the relevant characters, but:

  (setq   ;;some other invisible or interesting characters
          unicode-zero-width-space ?\u200b
          unicode-zero-width-non-joiner ?\u200c
          unicode-zero-width-joiner ?\u200d
          unicode-zero-width-nbsp ?\ufeff
          unicode-narrow-nbsp ?\u202f
          unicode-word-joiner ?\u2060
          unicode-grapheme-joiner ?\u034f
          unicode-no-break-space ?\u00a0
          unicode-combining-long-stroke ?\u0336
          ;;variation selector examples
          unicode-vs-fe00 ?\ufe00
          unicode-vs-fe0f ?\ufe0f
          unicode-vs-e0100 ?\xe0100)


    (defun show-glyphless-as-hex (char)
      (let ((original (elt glyphless-char-display char)))
        (aset glyphless-char-display char 'hex-code)
        original)) ;;so you can see what you just replaced


    (progn
      (show-glyphless-as-hex unicode-zero-width-space)
      (show-glyphless-as-hex unicode-zero-width-non-joiner)
      (show-glyphless-as-hex unicode-zero-width-joiner)
      (show-glyphless-as-hex unicode-zero-width-nbsp)
      (show-glyphless-as-hex unicode-word-joiner)
      (show-glyphless-as-hex unicode-grapheme-joiner)
      (show-glyphless-as-hex unicode-narrow-nbsp)
      (show-glyphless-as-hex unicode-no-break-space)
      ;;these may already be visible if the current conditions don't support them
      ;;but we'll force them
      (show-glyphless-as-hex unicode-vs-fe00)
      (show-glyphless-as-hex unicode-vs-fe0f)
      (show-glyphless-as-hex unicode-vs-e0100))

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#76

Post by krupan »

nerder92 wrote: post #5

Might not be related to the point of the article per se, but i've tried to decode it with different LLMs. To benchmark their reasoning capabilities. - 4o: Failed completely - o1: Overthinks it for a while and come up with the wrong answer - o3-mini-high: Get's closer to the result at first try, needs a second prompt to adjust the approach - r1: nails it at first try 󠅖󠅥󠅓󠅛󠅙󠅞󠅗󠄐󠅙󠅝󠅠󠅢󠅕󠅣󠅣󠅙󠅦󠅕 The prompt I'v…

There's no way an LLM is decoding this. It's just giving you a statistically likely response to the request, "guess my secret message." It's not a big surprise that it guessed "Hello" or "Hello, world"

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#78

Post by HanClinto »

Even more than just simply watermarking LLM output, it seems like this could be a neat way to package logprobs data.

Basically, include probability information about every token generated to give a bit of transparency to the generation process. It's part of the OpenAI api spec, and many other engines (such as llama.cpp) support providing this information. Normally it's attached as a separate field, but there are neat ways to visualize it (such as mikupad [0]).

Probably a bad idea, but this still tickles my brain.

* [0]: https://github.com/lmg-anon/mikupad

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#79

Post by coldpie »

krupan wrote: post #66
shermantanktop wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can also choose to legally declare that your patents may only be used for defensive purposes. But no one ever does this, because they do not actually intend to use them only for defensive purposes. This is a bogus defense of software patents.

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#80

Post by zos_kia »

vessenes wrote: post #32

I love the idea of using this for LLM output watermarking. It hits the sweet spot - will catch 99% of slop generators with no fuss, since they only copy and paste anyway, almost no impact on other core use cases. I wonder how much you’d embed with each letter or token that’s output - userid, prompt ref, date, token number? I also wonder how this is interpreted in a terminal. Really cool!

With the amount of pre processing that is done before integrating stuff in a dataset I'd be surprised if those kinds of shenanigans even worked
Post reply on HN