It's not uncommon for people dealing with leaks to batch track their communications. They might make a typo in a percentage of emails, or use contractions in some and spell out two full words in others, or even split up double vs triple spacing between sentences. - ThreadSky

noturtlesoup17.bsky.social • 20 days ago

It's not uncommon for people dealing with leaks to batch track their communications. They might make a typo in a percentage of emails, or use contractions in some and spell out two full words in others, or even split up double vs triple spacing between sentences.

Comments

primated.bsky.social•20 days ago

Copy the text of the email. paste it into a text document. Copy that and paste it into word. Anything that's a contraction, spell it out, any thing that could be a contraction, but is not, make it one. Let word fix the other mistakes, then if you want run it through some program like Grammerly.

noturtlesoup17.bsky.social•17 days ago

You still don’t understand, but if this works for you and your sources I’m happy for you.

primated.bsky.social•17 days ago

Whatever...

jgieseke.bsky.social•20 days ago

Cryptology

sockpuppetpundit.bsky.social•19 days ago

Just noticed some awkward sentence spacing in a printout someone posted. It could be because they were copying and pasting and were just sloppy about fixing spaces. You can always copy and paste into a word process and turn on invisible characters.

marbiek.bsky.social•20 days ago

One great example I saw is that you can nearly-invisibly encode all kinds of stuff in a image's Alpha values. Anyone blindly copying the image gets got.

moreogre.bsky.social•20 days ago

I want to know more about this. I'm down to dig, but could you share a starting point perhaps?

marbiek.bsky.social•20 days ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/s/aJDstD84IP is a good explanation

moreogre.bsky.social•20 days ago

Sweet thanks

aenorist.bsky.social•20 days ago

It's trivial to run a little script that randomizes all those variables, or you just throw a blur filter against the images.

rubenkelevra.bsky.social•20 days ago

Blur filter or pixelization filters are surprisingly bad at hiding information. Never ever used them to block something confidential.

rubenkelevra.bsky.social•20 days ago

I always run a random "pixel spread" filter on those parts first, before using pixelization. It appears "normal" to people looking at it, but it completely hides the hidden information from any attempts to deobscure them.

rubenkelevra.bsky.social•20 days ago

Here's the article about that:

https://www.spipm.nl/2030.html

aenorist.bsky.social•20 days ago

"Use a good, non reversible set of tools" would have been the formulation I should have gone with.
Fair point.
Character count makes me lazier than I should probably be.

Generally don't try to obscure or recover information if you are not knowledgeable enough to competently do it.

rubenkelevra.bsky.social•20 days ago

Well, we should recommend blackening/whiting out data instead of using filters on it, as it's easy to understand and use, without this issue.

Understanding which oscuration tools may pose this issue or not is not really straight forward and may change over time.

noturtlesoup17.bsky.social•20 days ago

Godspeed to all your sources.

noturtlesoup17.bsky.social•20 days ago

But also what would be the point of posting a blurred out a screenshot of a word document? Stupid.

aenorist.bsky.social•20 days ago

It's almost as if you can blur to wash out the difference between a space and a double space, or a comma and a full stop, without actually making the text illegible.

I guess simple tracking methods for simple people.

noturtlesoup17.bsky.social•20 days ago

Blurring out all “don’t” and “do not” sounds helpful and smart. All of your sources are so lucky to have someone as intelligent as you running the ship!

heres.bsky.social•20 days ago

Importantly, there can be completely invisible characters that don’t appear as spaces. It’s not always safe to simply copy and paste either.

jensadler.bsky.social•20 days ago

Isn't that why most memes have a misspelling somewhere in the text? so you can keep track of sharing?

mvucdaggie.bsky.social•20 days ago

Glad you’re on Blue Sky!

noturtlesoup17.bsky.social•20 days ago

I have always advocated for NOT sharing screenshots etc for this very reason. This is understood to be the case when people send me stuff, and so it is how I operate unless I am given explicit permission otherwise.

If you wish I had the backing of an institution for verification, me too! Hire me.

therealcatlady.bsky.social•20 days ago

Thank you for this explanation!

therealcatlady.bsky.social•20 days ago

Here's a link to the Commerce form: https://www.reddit.com/r/fednews/comments/1igvfji/deferred_resignation_doc_commerce/

Warning, clicking the link downloads a docx file

noturtlesoup17.bsky.social•19 days ago

See!

nerdykris.bsky.social•20 days ago

And before someone says "Well how can you make hundreds of variations", you don't need to. You just make a few, find out which group leaked, then focus on that group and make a few variations, repeat as needed. You can narrow it down to one person with only a few emails.

sweetreasoner.bsky.social•20 days ago

OH! Now I understand what that post is about!

mach101010.bsky.social•20 days ago

Less if youre really good with tables. People consistently fail to understand just how identifiable and valuable a date stamp is🤷

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply