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MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID

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Re: MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID

#241

Post by jamesfinlayson »

travoc wrote: post #239
SilasX wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even Notepad isn’t a dumb app anymore! They made breaking changes after 40 years so it has autocorrect, rich text, and Copilot. If I wanted all of that, I would have used a different app!

It automatically saves and reopens whatever you previously pasted in there. Quite a shock the first few times it happens. It's not a safe temporary holding area anymore.

Yeah I switched to Windows 11 recently and was a little annoyed by that - Notepad was always a place to paste formatted junk to get the plaintext - I don't need anything persisted.

Re: MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID

#242

Post by Terr_ »

deltoidmaximus wrote: post #121
dotancohen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not every generative AI model will watermark. Especially not adversarial and disinformation models.

It actually might make the new horrible world even worse. Imagine the populace getting used to a AI image detector flagging things as fake using this fairly easily defeated GUID marker system. Most people are just making memes or cat videos and don't even try to remove this so eventually the populace starts to believe these things actually work. Now some one slightly more sophisticated starts creating deepfakes of a…

> the populace starts to believe

US Social Security Numbers are a useful analogy: The designers knew they weren't something anyone could securely depend on, and told people not to do it... but companies did it anyway, for their own convenience and cheap security-theater. Ultimately a lot of individual victims suffered for it.

It would have almost been better if one big incident blew the "knowing an SSN means something" myth apart early on.

Re: MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID

#243

Post by dbmnt »

hiccuphippo wrote: post #167
weberer wrote: post #24

The AI aspect of this is a red herring. The real problem is that they're secretly adding in a unique identifier into every image you create. If somebody does not like your meme, they can just send a copyright subpoena to Microsoft to instantly get your full name, address, email, phone number, and any other data associated with your Microsoft account. Just like age verification, this is another weapon in the war again…

Can this also be weaponized? Get an innocuous image from someone you don't like, grab their GUID, add it to another image, sent it to the thin skinned politician in power.

No, because the GU in GUID stands for globally unique. Adding it to a second image would cause a detectable collision.

Also, C2PA, another technology mentioned in the article, means tampering is easily detected.

Re: MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID

#244

Post by mook »

SilasX wrote: post #189
clickety_clack wrote: post #179

I admit it’s a while since I’ve used windows, but it’s such a shock to hear that MS Paint isn’t just a point and click pixel coloring app anymore. It seems like they could have left it as a pure “paint” app and added the fancy stuff to some new image editor or something. I guess they’ve optimized their workforce to just keep making changes so they get promoted rather than just creating really good software.

Even Notepad isn’t a dumb app anymore! They made breaking changes after 40 years so it has autocorrect, rich text, and Copilot. If I wanted all of that, I would have used a different app!

Yeah, I've been working around that for now by uninstalling notepad. Which actually uninstalls the store app, which in turn exposes the actual notepad executable that ships with Windows. Really confusing, and will probably break in some future version of Windows.

I don't understand why they didn't just stuff all the AI things and new features in Write, where it belongs…

Re: MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID

#245

Post by makeitdouble »

brian-armstrong wrote: post #210
qu4z-2 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't so much mind about Paint, but modern Notepad is completely unusable. We had "Notepad but with Rich Text formatting" -- it was called WordPad and no-one used it so they eventually deleted it.

The people who still use Windows yet complain about this are quite confusing to me. There's been every indication that it will keep going like this for years now, and the cost of switching is just not that high. If you're still riding that train it's time to just embrace it.

> the cost of switching is just not that high.

For you. I mean, obviously it's still high enough that they're not switching. Beside the point, I'm bouncing between the different OSes at home and work, and honestly they're all deeply broken in different ways that require significant effort to make the best of it. I get people hate ads, so Windows is at the bottom of the list, but honestly I could care less for that additional 2 min of initial tweak when I'm spending half a day doing the setup anyway.

On Notepad stopping being raw text only, the main issue to me would be the safety it provided. Being first party meant never having to care about security (e.g. the company getting bought by a random malware vendor) or availability.

Re: MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID

#246

Post by Rohansi »

jamesfinlayson wrote: post #241
travoc wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It automatically saves and reopens whatever you previously pasted in there. Quite a shock the first few times it happens. It's not a safe temporary holding area anymore.

Yeah I switched to Windows 11 recently and was a little annoyed by that - Notepad was always a place to paste formatted junk to get the plaintext - I don't need anything persisted.

They also added a settings menu where you can go and turn all of the things you don't like off, including that.

Re: MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID

#247

Post by Terr_ »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #233
varispeed wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and then in few years a new mono-mustachioed or mono-browed leader will emerge who declares memes a blasphemy punishable by death and will call up all the telemetry gathered to punish all involved.

You know a certain dictator denies access to the country they control based on whether visitors "like" them? They use a private militia, funded by stealing from taxpayers, in contravention to that country's laws, to target citizens who are not supporters of them. Some of those citizens get shipped abroad to foreign prisons by these militia. Others get shot in summary executions in the streets - the controlling regime…

I had assumed parent-poster was making a sincere but humorous point, as opposed to sarcastically dismissing the risks of a change in management, but I suppose it's ambiguous.

Re: MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID

#249

Post by dismalaf »

frig57 wrote: post #145
saejox wrote: post #104

These days i cant recommend Windows to anybody. Even gamers should move to linux. Some say "i do nothing illegal" "have nothing to hide". You dont do anything illegal in your point of view. AI tracking you might think otherwise. A sudden knock on your door might happen because of an ambigious search/propmt.

Anyone got tips or guides to starting a linux OS that protects privacy without sacrificing utility? Considering putting linux on a 2nd PC

Pretty much all of them. None require online accounts or anything like that. Browser choice is probably more important.

For something that just works I recommend Fedora or Ubuntu. It's what I'd put on my mom or wife's PC.

Currently using Omarchy on my laptop though which is a tad more exotic, it's Arch + Hyprland and is pretty polished for that stack (at least the current version, 4.0) but still a tiny bit of jank.

Re: MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID

#250

Post by titzer »

SilasX wrote: post #189
clickety_clack wrote: post #179

I admit it’s a while since I’ve used windows, but it’s such a shock to hear that MS Paint isn’t just a point and click pixel coloring app anymore. It seems like they could have left it as a pure “paint” app and added the fancy stuff to some new image editor or something. I guess they’ve optimized their workforce to just keep making changes so they get promoted rather than just creating really good software.

Even Notepad isn’t a dumb app anymore! They made breaking changes after 40 years so it has autocorrect, rich text, and Copilot. If I wanted all of that, I would have used a different app!

I don't use Windows, but I have to say that TextEdit on the Mac is absolute crap. Literally every default is wrong. Text is too small, looks like crap, cut-and-paste always brings absolutely crappy styling with it, its autocomplete and autocorrect is bad and wrong and annoying. No one at Apple uses this application with any regularity and it shows.
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