Injecting hidden GUIDs into local files without explicit user consent is a massive privacy overreach. It makes you wonder what other local tools are silently tagging user generated content.
Haven’t printers done the same thing for decades?
MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID
381–390 of 467 posts
Re: MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
Conversion from jpg to bmp to jpg is a lossy process, so it may obscure the watermarked pixels.
Sounds better to do postprocess filtering explicitly? For example, adding random noise with amplitude 1/255 (which should be as invisible as the watermark), followed by a smart blur that blurs more in directions where the colors are more similar (making the blur less obvious to humans). But this is all moot really, if MS Paint is watermarking shit, it’s better to just use something else. Nothing from Microsoft is tru…
or maybe add 3 lsb noise, then let local diffusion model denoise the image. (is there something like convolutional diffusion denoiser?)
Re: MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ummmmmmmm. No. Inserting a tracker that can personally identify me without my explicit opt-in consent is a GDPR breach. I'm surprised you do not not this.
So you will defeat chat control by sitting there going “but you don’t have muh gdpr consent for that!”? The whole EU vision is they know what the little people do all the time, think all the time, and spend their money on all the time. For the children, obviously.
If you think "chat control" is going to pass, I've a bridge to sell you.
In the meantime, the GDPR is your friend. The amount of FUD spread about it on here by those working in Adtech (and whose very salaries are dependent on invading peoples privacy) is insane.
Re: MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
The question is whether LLM providers are going to do this. Anthropic currently says they don’t, but it’s impossible to verify: > Watermarking carries no identifying information and can’t be traced to a specific person, organization, or chat; https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-text-watermark
Probably just means they haven't (yet) figured out how to do the watermarking carrying enough bits of data to encode a GUID.
It could also mean they are lying. It could be they are being forced to downplay how good the watermarking is because gov agencies want that tool available to them without people knowing about it. We'll have to wait for the next Snowden to find out.
Re: MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not that I love Microsoft, but they would get a lot of heat if they let anybody generate harmful content as well. They can't win on that topic. Now I would not want to appear to defend the mess they've created out of windows, that's not the point.
They have only themselves to blame for this. They've spent decades developing technology to spy on and micro-regulate what their captive customers can do with their property. Now that they have this technology, it's only logical that they be held responsible for misuse. The only (and inevitable) solution at this point is for big tech to get micro-regulated like the banking industry. The same mindless greed that drove…
Be careful what you wish for. I'm sure Microsoft and Google would love the kind of regulation we apply to big banks. It has become a moat that makes it impossible for other (snaller/foreign) financial institutions to compete because they don't have massive specialized regulatory departments.
The more complex the rules become, the more difficult it will be for alternative providers to exist, unless they have explicit carve outs. So far, with age verification and user id laws, there doesn't seem to be much appetite from politicians to create exceptions for open source and smaller projects. By comparison, in the US the regional banks have special exemptions for many of the really onerous regs, which is why they are still a bunch of them.
Re: MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID
#386My goodness, this has nothing to do with AI problems. I don't understand that people still buy an OS from a company that actively hates it's customers. The amount of things they pull should not even be succesful on a OS you get paid FOR to use.
Its not that it hates its customers , as much as it it a USA-based company that is run under the rules made by the administration.
Not that much different from running Red Star OS from North Korea, actually.
Re: MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you will defeat chat control by sitting there going “but you don’t have muh gdpr consent for that!”? The whole EU vision is they know what the little people do all the time, think all the time, and spend their money on all the time. For the children, obviously.
If you think "chat control" is going to pass, I've a bridge to sell you. In the meantime, the GDPR is your friend. The amount of FUD spread about it on here by those working in Adtech (and whose very salaries are dependent on invading peoples privacy) is insane.
> If you think "chat control" is going to pass, I've a bridge to sell you.
I genuinely wish you were right, but you are so naive it is frightening.
> The amount of FUD spread about it on here by those working in Adtech
You are confused. You are arguing with people that want to protect privacy. The EU demonstrably is not doing that, as WhatsApp gets ever more de facto mandated by the day.
Re: MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
We gotta stop normalizing that. Why do you need my address to receive my money? My birth date? Even in places with strong privacy regulations requiring businesses not to collect data they don’t need, businesses apparently get away with asking this.
The problem is CC processors. You can get away as a merchant with just a number and expiration date, that's the minimum you need to process a CC payment, but you pay exorbitantly higher fees. The more details you collect and pass on, the lower your processor's risk fee will be because the more info, the more likely it is that the customer is actually the cardholder and not using fraudulently obtained data. And as soo…
Right, but they’re avoiding that risk by passing on a risk to the customer, that their PII will be mishandled.
Because handling that PII is not only cheap, it’s profitable!
Re: MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID
#389Re: MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID
#390It'll literally be like printers "cannot print this black/white document, low on cyan". "Cannot run local AI model, no network connection". The more you think about it, the more it really is the same: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots?useskin=...
Except once printed its at least hard to remove the dots. Image based watermarks are trivial to destroy if you know they are there.
tbh so is circumventing those dots.
It doesn't make it any better