5 ms·
Out of curiosity, can you share a ballpark of how many different variations can you generate per, say, paragraph of text?
by JorgeGT 7y ago
Out of curiosity, can you share a ballpark of how many different variations can you generate per, say, paragraph of text?
- throwanem 7y agoIf you choose N words to alternate with one synonym each, you can make 2^n unique versions.
- JorgeGT 7y agoOh, I was thinking in more subtle things such as spacing, punctuation, sizing, kerning, etc.
- throwanem 7y agoIdeally you don't want to count on a screenshot being published.
- londons_explore 7y agoFor numbers like this, you can add a small amount of random variation to each number, and then save whatever variations you used to a database whenever someone views the stats. Now when a leak happens of a specific number, you just check the logs to see who saw those exact numbers.
- oh_sigh 7y agoWhat I worked on was more like a spreadsheet, so I didn't use any of the text-oriented steganographic techniques like replacing words with synonyms, etc. I was able to develop enough variations that vastly outnumbered our users though, so even with just a portion of a screenshot, you could fairly easily figure out where it came from. Just looking at possible CSS rules and you can see where the variations come into play - cell width, border width and styles, font color(e.g. the specific green or red that represents gain/loss), kerning, column placement , etc. On top of that, I only fudged with display elements - the numbers were never changed. However, the numbers were updated on a near-continuous basis by ingesting various logs, so any column that was live(year/month-to-date, etc) would have only a very small time range where that number could have been displayed to the user.