(xusheng.dev)
Printing (even text) is also a risk: It's very likely your printer is secretly adding marks to the page that contain its serial number and the current timestamp. [0]
Meanwhile Microsoft (and Apple) have "telemetry" harvesting those serial numbers of all internal and external devices you've ever had connected or reachable. Then they link them to your MS/Apple account, IP addresses, and the extended social-graph of all computers that were ever in the same room or shared the same bluetooth speaker.
In short, your "anonymous" flyer critiquing The Regime and depicting Dear Leader as a clown could lead thugs straight to your door. Or to the door of whomever you're staying with.
It's most likely how the FBI caught NSA leaker Reality Winner:
> Both journalists and security experts have suggested that The Intercept's handling of the documents, which included publishing the documents unredacted and including the printer tracking dots, was used to identify Winner as the leaker.
Obviously Paint could have been watermarking prior to AI though, but this specific AI watermarking appears to be only that.
Why not just mod the app to not call this API?
*with the help of AI*. Does in fact make a difference.
Do not tell Microsoft where you sleep. IANAL but they are not a government or financial institution and do not have a right to that information.
Make sure you register mailing addresses with your credit card institutions in addition to your residential addresses, and make your mailing address your billing address so that you aren't forced to tell a thousand businesses like Microsoft where you sleep.
While it's definitely a dark pattern that I 100% do not agree with, Pro editions still allow you to do a local account. No need for the oobe /bypass command, still can be done through the OOBE GUI setup by selecting a Work/School account option then selecting Sign in options to then specify a local account to create.
It takes zero effort to bypass that with Rufus, if you set up your own pc.
Sorry for a dumb question but what would one use as a mailing address? Rent a PO box, or use a mail forwarding service, something like that?
Besides privacy against leaking your sleeping-address to businesses, they're also convenient for avoiding package theft if that's a problem in your area, and receiving/forwarding mail if you travel a lot for extended periods of time.
I'd recommend against PO boxes because (1) they get rejected by some services (2) UPS and FedEx won't deliver to them.
Because these businesses have to register as CMRAs and you have to sign a notarized form for them to legally receive mail for you, some services will still detect it and not let you use the address, but my experience for the most part has been that most US financial institutions let you enter a "residential/legal address" (no CMRAs allowed) and a "mailing address" (CMRAs allowed) separately, and the mailing address usually becomes your billing address.
They will move faster to track each and every one of you, all the while shoving ads and garbage down each of your respective machines... and you all pay for it?!
All these fixes and repairs ignore the fact that abusing people pays. Surveillance capitalism pays, and provides a revenue stream for Microsoft to further exploit.
The only way to win is not to play.
No it's not. Sign up for a virtual mailbox for $15-$25/month.
> A scalable solution would be to make this sort of thing illegal.
I'm posting this in the genuine interest of people being able to maintain anonymity from data leaks, privacy leaks, and in general not needing to tell businesses more personal information than is necessary to render services. This is in a country that has no protection of personal safety whatsoever, and any business data leak could mean life or death to average citizens who are being threatened by criminals, stalkers, and more.
It seems every time I post something of this flavor the same handful of you come out of the woods and want to make privacy illegal, and I'm not sure who you are trying to support.
Did you notice that it's an affordability crisis out there? An absolutely enormous number of people are skipping bills, taking on credit, and using predatory lenders to make end meets, and your recommendation is to add another fee on top of things.
It's not practical or useful guidance for the vast majority of people. I strongly agree with supporting privacy, but this sort of behaviour (adding trackers, etc) to normal functions without a full disclosure and opt-out mechanism must be made illegal, otherwise we are just creating markets for "privacy preserving" technologies that are increasingly less likely to actually be effective for that purpose but sure do put on a good theatre of seeming that way.
or make it illegal to ask for address, etc. definitely a little more effective than mailboxes
I fully agree that businesses should not be asking for addresses. Non-financial businesses don't need to KYC in the first place, and financial institutions can KYC without needing to know where you sleep.
I got triggered because people seem to always want to come out of the woods and say "addresses should be public record" or things of that sort and I vehemently disagree in the interest of privacy, in a country where a stalker can just look you up, terrorize you, and the police will do nothing about it.
As soon as you purchase something from Microsoft - e.g. your Office 365 subscription - they have at the very least your billing address on file for the credit card.
Ain't nobody anon anymore thanks to the image recording GPS radio in the pocket.
At best they'd just disable it for EU... assuming they didn't successfully argue "it was in the ToS ..."
so unless you want to draw a distinction between 'user' and 'machine' , yeah it is for identifying users.
to believe otherwise, especially with Microsoft involved, would be incredibly naive to their history.
Microsoft GDID telemetry includes full browsing and gaming history https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48787239
"I haven’t read enough to understand". Oh, now I know the answer to my question
Personally I think there is a good argument for being able to distinguish AI generated image and video...
Neat but that's not what's being built here. What's being built is "we can trace back this content to who made it" which is bad. Doesn't matter if today that it's limited to AI generated content. Won't be tomorrow. Your devices should not act against your best interests. No cop in my pocket please.
Obvious next step is to explore if you can replace watermarker.dll with a (signed) no-op shim or MITM the API call to at least use your own (nil?) GUID that isn't linked to your device/account.
In case it's not obvious, my bigger concern isn't "this image can be identified to have been generated with/by AI" so much as it is "digital yellow printer dots have been forced upon us, except they can identify and retrieve the exact user/device/time/place/document/etc", completely destroying any and all illusions of privacy left.
But if it's only on ai generation and not on all images it seems easy enough to work around that part? Still better than printers doing it no matter what you're printing.
convert file.jpg file.bmp; convert file.bmp file.jpg
Took me a moment to realize you're saying someone else generated it, rather than you did.
This seems incorrect to me. Are you basing that on the use of bullet points?
Everything is spying on us now. Literally everything. I recently downgraded my MacBook M1 to Sonoma to avoid all this AI privacy invading BS.
A few months back, MS incorrectly tried to stamp a Copilot "watermark" (just an auto-added note) to any and all Azure DevOps commits, regardless of whether an LLM was actually involved. They removed it after a lot of github issues were submitted to the source of the issue which was a VS Code Copilot extension.
MS has been very sloppy in their implementations. I would recommend against using Paint or any other LLM enabled app they use as a result. Things may be getting incorrectly stamped.
Virtually all commercial printers embed an invisible identifier on every page printed.
I wonder whether Arthur Conan Doyle had the idea before the police started using typewriter typeface wear and tear for forensics.
Whether it applies to non-AI generated images is a question for the reverse engineers (or ironically, a suitable AI). My bet is on "no".
Of course, the pre-AI versions of paint and notepad can still be installed with a bit of trickery, and it's worth it just for the UX.
There is no reason to assign a GGUID except to identify the person, not that the photo is generated. This is nothing more than surveillance.
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.
I hate how pervasive this argument is. I'm so tired. Sometimes I wish they'd get the total panopticon they want so much. I'm sure the government will be able to find some crimes to hang them with.
"That's not up to you."
When people claim they have nothing to hide, always point out that's not up to their determination. That freaks them out, it disarms their shrink-from-confrontation move.
And you can point it out super fast, in a plain six word statement. No need to launch into a deep discussion unless prompted.
Alternatively, simply respond with: yes you do. When they reply: "what?" - "every single thing you have ever done wrong across your entire life." Everybody has done something they would prefer to keep hidden, the cowards just lie about it.
People are entitled to privacy because they enjoy it. No further justification is needed.
"I need it to work on a random Thursday, not wait for fsck after ever reboot"
https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1cvwo93/arch_run...
If you're not familiar with linux and/or don't want to deal with trivial issues periodically, don't hang out at the bleeding edge. There are plenty of boring and/or beginner friendly choices out there.
I'm not saying linux is perfect, but your conclusions in this instance appear to be uninformed rather than supported by the facts.
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=218770
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-f2fs-devel/20240409203411.1885...
https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/2511.2/07280.html
https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/2511.2/07260.html
https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1226043
https://lists.opensuse.org/archives/list/bugs@lists.opensuse...
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/systemd/+bug/15478...
Considering putting linux on a 2nd PC
If you're reasonably technical, you can make nearly any use-case work on nearly any distro, but if you have choice paralysis, my top recommendations would be CachyOS if you plan to play games, and Mint otherwise.
Personally I'm happy with EndeavourOS. I picked it to find a general purpose distro similar to the Steam Deck (KDE and arch based) but with a more user-friendly installer.
this also reminds me of what got me hooked on CS in the first place: a simple java steganography app in cmsc150
It's possible a very bad curator with a terrible taste in art might select slop to display, but I was refering to "fine art" or at least finer art that is digital.
Now some one slightly more sophisticated starts creating deepfakes of a woman and uploading them or fabricating video of an political event without this marker. The subject protests it's fake and AI generated but a loud majority of ignorants feed it into Microsoft AI detector and call you a liar and say it's confirmed real. Most people don't know any better and eat it up because a computer said so.
Edit: Actually trivial to test, just save an image of all black and see if it suddenly has other values on save.
Did it?
Some proof: https://verify.contentauthenticity.org/?source=https://retr0...
I could also paste a privkey + cert chain in here but el goog's lawyers might not like that.
Being signed with something just means that whoever has that key could've done that. That might be the owner of a specific camera, but it might also be the camera manufacturer, anyone else in the supply chain, or anyone who dumped the key.
Imagine fake evidence signed with the same key as your camera uses being used in court against you. And the court believes it because it has this signature attached and those computers are very secure and all.
Exactly that will happen. Not widespread, of course, but it will.
But what you're talking about is the generative aspect of these photos likely expanding over time. We're seeing that today with the ultra zoom features on some cameras regenerating objects (and especially text). Without the user doing anything the phone will generatively fill in detail, most worryingly text and people. Then there's the Samsung moon issue - taking a photo of a pixelated printout of the moon caused Samsung phones to generate a new image of the moon.
Nobody knows how to make a camera that can distinguish honest vs deceptive photons.
People take RAW photos. Load it up in a RAW editing tool. Manipulate it. Then load it in Gimp. Manipulate some more.
Will the final result have the signature?
And if it does, what use would it be?
Each piece of software in the chain must use TPM-like technologies (yes, even GIMP) to make sure it's running a "legitimate" build of the software, on "legitimate" hardware, and re-sign the file at each step along the way (using keys provisioned during some flavour of remote attestation flow, or using a RA-authenticated remote-signing oracle).
The final file embeds every preceding manifest, so you can "verify" all the way back to the original.
If this all sounds patently unworkable, that's because it is.
I suppose a dedicated fraudster could still stage an appropriate scene. An appropriately lit matte image might even suffice.
If we as a society deemed it necessary, the camera manufacturer could also provide a list of keys for devices they have manufactured. And an image/key could be provided, and the manufacturer could verify the authenticity that way.
The TPM signing could be tied into the sensor hardware itself, making it difficult, but not impossible, to sign arbitrary images with the TPM.
If I need to reset TPM, how do I reclaim photos I took previously?
If a key was reset, a revocation of the original key could be issued, showing that the key was associated with the device for this particular time span. And then the new key registered.
This is ripe for abuse though, so resetting a TPM might not be accepted for this use case. I'm not certain in which case you'd want to reset a TPM for this use case though. Unless you took enough photos with the device to risk a birthday attack if you were using something like ECDSA.
No. You'd only ever be able to show that key material belonging to $specific_camera was used to sign/mark the image.
Was the camera manufacturer breached? Did somebody on the factory floor steal some keys during the provisioning step? Or did somebody build their own photo-sensor simulator and plug _that_ in to the camera's motherboard to feed it a "real" image? Before going _that_ far, just point the unmodified camera at a sufficiently high resolution display...
"I think it would be nice if all typewriters had their unique fine-detail type artifacts registered with the government. You could tell exactly who authored a given document."
I think it would be nice if you took these ideas back to Stalinist Russia where they belong.
Shipping the watermark generator on user's machine would make it very easy for someone motivated to find how it works and write a "watermark remover".
