Dailydave mailing list archives

Applied watermarks explained to moronic profs worldwide.


From: Dave Aitel <dave () immunitysec com>
Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2004 22:51:03 -0500


http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/python-Announce/1967083
Zope security issues. A couple of them look serious. Zope is the web server I'd be running if I had time to manage a real content server, which, from looking at my site, you can tell I don't.

I'd like to quote this text file twice:

http://www.asstr.org/files/Authors/Hephaestus/txt/p1-slut.txt

"""
WARNING: this story contains digital watermarks designed to aid
detection of copyright violations.
"""
"""
He smiled gently.  "When you lie in bed, late at night, and you think
of things which make your whole body tingle, are you thinking about
things which follow the rules, or break them?"

"""

That's right. Even "blackhat" pr0n contains digital watermarks these days. The best way, as various people have attempted to do to me recently, is to not care about your identity being revealed. This is why watermarks are often encoded with things that people implicitly care about, like their name and credit card number, or where their kids go to school. A watermark without an identity attached to it is just a funny joke. Do you have to prove that you own the story, Hephaestrus? Any google search can do that. It would be funnier, but there are Ph.D.s and information security professionals making the exact same mistake and publishing papers and giving courses in steganography and digital watermarking everywhere you look.

My personal current philosophical problem is based around SPIKE. Every time I think I'm going to release 2.9, I find another cool bug to play with. This makes my natural desire to keep my bugs to myself perk up, and I decide not to release it. This has been happening for six months or so. Eventually I guess I'll release it - information does want to be free, after all.

Dave Aitel
Immunity, Inc.


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