4 ms·

Printing and scanning would defeat fingerprint in the form of invisible Unicode whitespace and combining characters. Retyping everything would be good.

ricardobeat 10y ago
How about maybe using a computer to extract all non-ASCII characters and output plain text instead of retyping everything?
caseysoftware 10y ago
No. No. NO. That is only one type of fingerprinting used. The actual process is inserting typos and slightly different phrasing in various places. So if someone leaks the entire document or copy/pastes from it or takes a picture or whatever, it's trackable. And yes, I worked in that space for quite a while.
- mrskeltal 10y ago
  And how do you counter that?
- willvarfar 10y ago
  Connect to google translate over tor and get them to translate it french and back again perhaps?
  - ComodoHacker 10y ago
    Then your evidence translates into gossip.
  - j2kun 10y ago
    This strikes me as a clever idea :)
  - jerf 10y ago
    Some stuff will survive that, like a proper noun that doesn't translate in either direction and is given a characteristic misspelling, possibly combined with other hints. Sentence order will survive too, as well as higher-level structure. There are so many places in a document that is several dozen kilobytes large to hide bits that it probably impossible to ever be sure you've scrubbed them. Especially since it won't take that many bits to identify the source. Hiding the bits doesn't even have to be done via clever textual manipulation; it is a standard part of the intelligence game to make up entire facts with no basis in reality and then see where they leak out, then trace back. No amount of cleverness will save you from that.
- stuckagain 10y ago
  The main thing is to realize that a communication may have been crafted to identify its recipient, and to take precautions against that.
UnoriginalGuy 10y ago
There are technologies which are designed to survive print & scan. Specifically microdots[0]. Retyping is pretty good unless they sent everyone a slightly different version of the document or you retyped information which could identify you. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_steganography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_steganography

ricardobeat 10y ago

How about maybe using a computer to extract all non-ASCII characters and output plain text instead of retyping everything?

caseysoftware 10y ago

No. No. NO. That is only one type of fingerprinting used. The actual process is inserting typos and slightly different phrasing in various places. So if someone leaks the entire document or copy/pastes from it or takes a picture or whatever, it's trackable. And yes, I worked in that space for quite a while.

mrskeltal 10y ago
And how do you counter that?
willvarfar 10y ago
Connect to google translate over tor and get them to translate it french and back again perhaps?
- ComodoHacker 10y ago
  Then your evidence translates into gossip.
- j2kun 10y ago
  This strikes me as a clever idea :)
- jerf 10y ago
  Some stuff will survive that, like a proper noun that doesn't translate in either direction and is given a characteristic misspelling, possibly combined with other hints. Sentence order will survive too, as well as higher-level structure. There are so many places in a document that is several dozen kilobytes large to hide bits that it probably impossible to ever be sure you've scrubbed them. Especially since it won't take that many bits to identify the source. Hiding the bits doesn't even have to be done via clever textual manipulation; it is a standard part of the intelligence game to make up entire facts with no basis in reality and then see where they leak out, then trace back. No amount of cleverness will save you from that.
stuckagain 10y ago
The main thing is to realize that a communication may have been crafted to identify its recipient, and to take precautions against that.

UnoriginalGuy 10y ago

There are technologies which are designed to survive print & scan. Specifically microdots[0]. Retyping is pretty good unless they sent everyone a slightly different version of the document or you retyped information which could identify you. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_steganography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_steganography