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Cake day: March 9th, 2024

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  • Syn_Attck@lemmy.todaytoScience Memes@mander.xyzElsevier
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    5 months ago

    Unless you know specifically what they’re adding or changing this wouldn’t work. If they have a hidden ‘barcode’ and you add another hidden ‘barcode’ or modify the image in a way to remove some or all of theirs, they’d still be able to read theirs.



  • Syn_Attck@lemmy.todaytoScience Memes@mander.xyzElsevier
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    5 months ago

    This is a great point. Image watermarking steganography is nearly impossible to defeat unless you can obtain multiple copies of the ‘same’ file from multiple users to look for differences. It could be a change of a single 5-15 pixels from one rgb code off.

    rgb(255, 251, 0)

    to

    rgb(255, 252, 0)

    Which would be imperceptable to the human eye. Depending on the number of users it may need to change more or less pixels.

    There is a ton of work in this field and its very interesting, for anyone considering majoring in computer science / information security.

    Another ‘neat’ technology everyone should know about is machine identification codes, or, the tiny secret tracking dots that color printers print on every page to identify the specific make, model, and serial number (I think?) of the printer the page was printed from. I don’t believe B&W printers have tracking dots, which were originally used to track creators of counterfeit currency. EFF has a page of color printers which do not include tracking dots on printed pages. This includes color LaserJets along with InkJets, although I would not be surprised if there was a similar tracking feature in place now or in the future “for safety and privacy reasons,” but none that I am aware of.


  • Syn_Attck@lemmy.todaytoScience Memes@mander.xyzElsevier
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    5 months ago

    Good question. I believe the browser “Print to PDF” function simply saves the loaded PDF to a PDF file locally, so it wouldn’t work (if I’m correct.)

    I’m not an expert in this field, but you can ask on StackExchange or the author of MAT or exiftool. You can also do it yourself (I’ll explain how) by making a PDF with a jpg file with your metadata, opening it and printing to pdf, and then extract the image Do let us know your findings! I’m on a smartphone so can’t do it.

    If you do try it yourself, a note from the linked SE page is that you won’t be able to extract the original file extension (it’s unknown, so you either have to know what it is, or look at the file headers, or try all extensions), so if you use your own .jpg with your own exif data, rename to .jpg when finished (I believe exif is handled differently based on file type.)

    There are multiple tools to add exif data to an image but the exiftool website has some easy examples for our purpose.

    (do this as the first step before adding to the PDF)

    (command line here, but there are exiftool GUIs)

    exiftool -artist=“Phil Harvey” -copyright=“2011 Phil Harvey” YourFile.jpg

    Adds Phil Harvey and the copyright information to the file. If you’re on a smartphone and have the time and really have to know, then hypothetically there should be web-based tools for every step needed. I’m just not familiar with any and it’s possible the web-based tool would remove the metadata when creating or extracting the PDF.


  • Syn_Attck@lemmy.todaytoScience Memes@mander.xyzElsevier
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    5 months ago

    Unfortunately that wouldn’t work as this is information inside the PDF itself so it has nothing to do with the file hash (although that is one way to track.)

    Now that this is known, It’s not enough to remove metadata from the PDF itself. Each image inside a PDF, for example, can contain metadata. I say this because they’re apparently starting a game of whack-a-mole because this won’t stop here.

    There are multiple ways of removing ALL metadata from a PDF, here are most of them.

    It will be slow-ish and probably make the file larger, but if you’re sharing a PDF that only you are supposed to have access to, it’s worth it. MAT or exiftool should work.

    Edit: as spoken about in another comment thread here, there is also pdf/image steganography as a technique they can use.



  • Sucks that I have to preface but people can be jumpy here. This is genuine curiosity, I’m actually asking, because it’s really probably something I should already know. Can you explain the nuance to me please?


    My understanding, speaking mostly of apps/websites, I know jobs can be much different:

    Most places have the first factor as a password.

    First factor (or “login”) = username+password pair.

    For the longest time that was all there was, “your login” was just a login, which meant a username and password combination. Then 2FA/MFA (“2 factor authentication / multi-factor authentication”) came along in the form of username+password combo plus SMS/email/Google Authenticator/Yubikey/etc to verify as the 2nd form of authentication. You can have 3FA 4FA 5FA whatever if you want and if it’s supported by the app/website. So 2FA is MFA, but MFA is not necessarily 2FA.

    I know jobs can be set up a lot differently.





  • I think it’s not humiliating, but if you know someone, you should have some idea what they like/their interests are. Getting a small gift that fits them shows that you spent at least a small amount of time and thoughtfulness picking out or making the gift. If you don’t know the person, sure, cash/gift card.

    Although I think it’s becoming less common to have the space or ‘the time’ (but we could prob all spend 30 mins less each day doing nothing on our phones) so giving physical actual gifts are becoming less common, and also due to the economy the idea of ‘mandatory days of gift giving’ is a bit off-putting. People love getting personalized gifts from people who create things, but far less people today ‘have time’ to learn a hobby where they create things in physical space.

    Less “Fuck you here is $10” and more “Here is $10 as agreed upon by the social contract unwritten by the masses who came before us, I didn’t have any clue what you might like or want and didn’t think to ask.”

    Some people gladly prefer cash/card. I am one of those people. We will make that known well ahead of time.





  • Syn_Attck@lemmy.todaytoScience Memes@mander.xyzAnt smell
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    6 months ago

    Yes it’s a fact that obese people smell worse than fit people, so if it was a marathon runners convention and everyone actually bathed daily, I’m sure going without deodorant wouldn’t be an issue. Too much fucking might be an issue if the majority of the women aren’t on hormonal birth control.

    But I think the issue with anime conventions isn’t lack of deodorant, it’s thinking a shower is something you take every 4-7 days, and ‘eww don’t touch your buttcrack to clean it, that’s nasty!’

    I may get flack from the twox crowd for this comment, but talking to my fiance was like talking to a guy when she got off hormonal birth control. Conversation is just… chill now.

    That’s probably the next big “oops, we fucked up bad the last 50 years, but men’s birth control is hard!”


  • Syn_Attck@lemmy.todaytoScience Memes@mander.xyzAnt smell
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    6 months ago

    Take it or leave it but my advice (sometimes I take it sometimes I’m a hypocrite) but tomorrow never comes. Fuck next month. There is no reason for you to wait to eat less sugar. If it’s a matter of finances, get a head of romaine lettuce and some carrots and much away for a few days. Feel the sugar withdrawal as your body freaks out wondering what has changed and starts realigning those neurons. After a few days of that, a generic slice of sandwich bread will taste like cake. Use that wasted $30 of high sugar snacks and food as motivation to stop eating this poison. If it’s purely a waste issue, find the first homeless person you see and give them a big bag of high sugar food. Even if its frozen meals they’ll give them to their buddies and use the microwaves at a convenience store and eat like kings for day.

    Honestly, a big part of this comment was me talking to myself, but not about sugar. But if it helps you, I’m happy.


  • Syn_Attck@lemmy.todaytoScience Memes@mander.xyzAnt smell
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    6 months ago

    I take testosterone which makes my sense of pheromone smell increase like crazy (not just sweat, I can go into a truck stop late at night and tell if someone was in there somewhere and peed and how hydrated they were, or if someone just had sex in the shower in there… or just an orgasm.)

    Sometimes I’ll walk into our own house bathroom half an hour after my fiance left for work and get an overwhelming woah, she’s definitely on her period right now smell or conversely, “oh yeah, tonight could be a fun night.”

    Our oldest started showering in the mornings before school, and its become a subconscious game (I think, to him) of who can get in the shower first, because I do not want to smell his… shower… my entire shower.

    Humans are capable of absolutely incredible senses when they’re finely tuned. But our senses are so out of whack, literally, in so many different ways we barely have concepts or words for yet. We have known about, as one example, estrogen-raising chemicals being in plastics leeching directly into our bodies and soil and water and food supplies for over 30 years now (BPA), (when estrogen levels rise, testosterone levels lower, and vice versa. same is true for many core bodily systems). Then around 2010 they did a study that found some of these new lightly tested BPA-free alternative plastics released even more estrogen into the system than BPA did. How’s that for a chucklefuck

    Plastics, and then leaded gasoline, and then PFASs shortly after (or before) that… well, when a molecule or series of molecules is found that greatly benefits civilization in some way, people will die. People will sit under oath in front of the supreme court swearing they had no idea how harmful their products were.

    It’s very unfortunate, because the species are being modified in so many unforseen ways. Not just humans. Alex Jones got meme’d so hard for the chemicals are turning the fuckin’ frogs gay!

    I’m not sure what I’m ranting about now. I’m just sad for our species and those species affected by us and unable to do anything about it. It’s never as simple as it’s ALL profits and follow the money! because we’ve been able to make so much progress as humans through the use of breakthrough technologies like PFASs and plastic. But, at what cost? Our current methodology is to let the major corporations sell these new breakthrough molecules far and wide, and then in 5 years or 5 decades we start to see mainstream scientific acceptance that “okay, it’s really bad, we have to do something about this”…

    Sure, though, it did some good in the meantime.