Live data from Hacker News

Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

paulbutler.org

81–90 of 206 posts

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#81
post #71
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lawy…

My friend, you really don't know what you are talking about, and getting all riled up like this is not the right way to learn.

Freely licensing your patents doesn't protect you against patent trolls. I wrote out how patent fights work in another comment, but here it is again.

Company A comes to Company B and says, "Hey! You are infringing on one of my patents!"

Company B says, "oh really? Well let me look through my collection of patents and see if you are infringing on any of mine."

Company A says, "oh, um, nevermind, I think I was mistaken."

Company B says, "yes, that's what I thought"

Now, imagine if Company B had already freely licensed all their patents. That defense wouldn't work.

I agree with you that it's a crappy system, but simply standing with your arms folded and saying, "I'm not playing," isn't going to work.

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#82
post #79
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

See my other comments to you. Sometimes the threat of a good offensive weapon is the best defense. It's kinda like a nuclear arms race

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#83
What's interesting is that even a "view source" shows nothing amiss, and if I do a copy/paste from the debug inspector view of "This sentence has a hidden message󠅟󠅘󠄐󠅝󠅩󠄜󠄐󠅩󠅟󠅥󠄐󠅖󠅟󠅥󠅞󠅔󠄐󠅤󠅘󠅕󠄐󠅘󠅙󠅔󠅔󠅕󠅞󠄐󠅝󠅕󠅣󠅣󠅑󠅗󠅕󠄐󠅙󠅞󠄐󠅤󠅘󠅕󠄐󠅤󠅕󠅨󠅤󠄑." it still shows up....

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#84
post #81
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lawy…

My friend, you really don't know what you are talking about, and getting all riled up like this is not the right way to learn. Freely licensing your patents doesn't protect you against patent trolls. I wrote out how patent fights work in another comment, but here it is again. Company A comes to Company B and says, "Hey! You are infringing on one of my patents!" Company B says, "oh really? Well let me look through my…

Yes, that's the reason for the "except for defensive purposes" part. Quoting from Red Hat's promise:

> Our Promise also does not extend to the actions of a party (including past actions) if at any time the party or its affiliate asserts a patent in proceedings against Red Hat (or its affiliate) or any offering of Red Hat (or its affiliate) (including a cross-claim or counterclaim).

Company B may still consult its portfolio and exercise it against Company A defensively, because Company A revoked its license of Company B's patents by asserting against Company B in the first place.

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#85
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?

No. The author could not be sued for this successfully. All they did was write a blog post about an interesting technique. They could literally read the patent application and write a blog post about that, assuming the methods are the same. What percentage of your actions are based around making the world a better place, instead of personal fulfillment or gain?

consider how far you reach to make the world better.

1) thats really good im gonna, strive to keep it.

2) " " tell all and those who want will build one.

3) " " make lots and give them to everyone.

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#86
For a real-world use case: Sanity used this trick[0] to encode Content Source Maps[1] into the actual text served on a webpage when it is in "preview mode". This allows an editor to easily trace some piece of content back to a potentially deep content structure just by clicking on the text/content in question.

It has it's drawbacks/limitations - eg you want to prevent adding it for things that needs to be parsed/used verbatim, like date/timestamps, urls, "ids" etc - but it's still a pretty fun trick.

[0] https://www.sanity.io/docs/stega

[1] https://github.com/sanity-io/content-source-maps

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#87
post #71
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lawy…

Perhaps you shouldn't hijack every thread about anything and make it about patents.

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#88
The title lis little misleading: "Note that the base character does not need to be an emoji – the treatment of variation selectors is the same with regular characters. It’s just more fun with emoji."

Using this approach with non-emoji characters makes it more stealth and even more disturbing.

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#89
post #84
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend, you really don't know what you are talking about, and getting all riled up like this is not the right way to learn. Freely licensing your patents doesn't protect you against patent trolls. I wrote out how patent fights work in another comment, but here it is again. Company A comes to Company B and says, "Hey! You are infringing on one of my patents!" Company B says, "oh really? Well let me look through my…

Yes, that's the reason for the "except for defensive purposes" part. Quoting from Red Hat's promise: > Our Promise also does not extend to the actions of a party (including past actions) if at any time the party or its affiliate asserts a patent in proceedings against Red Hat (or its affiliate) or any offering of Red Hat (or its affiliate) (including a cross-claim or counterclaim). Company B may still consult its por…

So in other words, Red Hat does not freely license their patents, they say "you are free as long as you don't come after us." Which is exactly the system 99% of companies follow, just more formally stated. Yet you berated the poor guy from Pebble for even obtaining the patent he did??

Re: Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

#90

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!

Just you wait until AI starts calling human output to be slop.
Post reply on HN