zlacker

>>minima+(OP)
All I wanted to do was read the memo and I couldn't find the link. I'm not sure if I missed it or what but this is a common problem I run into on "news" sites. They quote (often out of context) parts of something but give no links to the actual source.

>>chowar+M6
Probably because it was forwarded by email and the leaker's identity and job would be at risk.

>>anigbr+Hf
Redacting is a long accepted practice when revealing information but preserving secrets.

>>daenz+Th
Supposedly so is the practice of using subtle variations in spelling, word choice, word order, spacing, typography, etc. to identify recipients of documents.

>>nitrog+qj
This is exactly what I worked on ~10 years ago at amazon, embedding steganographic information into a certain internal app that reported confidential sales numbers. Ended up catching the person who leaked this: https://techcrunch.com/2011/10/04/leaked-sales-data-puts-kin...

>>oh_sig+rm
Out of curiosity, can you share a ballpark of how many different variations can you generate per, say, paragraph of text?

>>JorgeG+1s
What 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.