Canadian election databases use "canary traps"

This reminds me of some ways Microsoft used to try catching/dissuading leakers. If someone could find a source for these..

The Xbox 360's dashboard used to have 'aesthetic' rings that actually encoded your serial number, so they could catch leakers

I think I remember hearing somewhere (maybe Dave's Garage) about beta builds of Windows using intricate patterns as wallpapers to trick people into thinking it was also a leak prevention measure.

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morkalork a day ago | parent [-]

The wildest one I remember is emails with different whitespace encoded characters that Id the recipient. No idea if true tho

	▲	pastrami_panda a day ago \| parent [-]
		I believe it's confirmed Tesla employed this strategy successfully to id a leaker.

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rdevilla a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As the article states, it's an older practice so this maybe goes without saying - canary traps are also useful for tracking the flow of information throughout a population.

A well crafted, bespoke whisper passed into one ear that returns to you from another direction is a very strong signal.

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dataflow a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How do you prevent this from being trivially defeated by getting multiple copies of the list and intersecting them?

	▲	stubish a day ago \| parent [-]
		Keeping quiet about it. You are only hearing about it now because it is part of a court case. Now they will need 1000 canary entries, and each list skipping just one, so abusers will miss the remaining canaries if they have just a few copies of the list.

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JumpCrisscross a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Does anyone have a link to a knowledgeable summary of the political situation in Edmonton?

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tamimio a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Easily defeated by reversing the process, just feed that document into an AI to summarize it and don’t quote literally. If it’s something like voter’s list, just add your own bogus entries on top of it.

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ohnei 20 hours ago | parent [-]

What would adding your own canaries achieve? They know the channel that is leaking from any canary you can't remove.

	▲	tamimio 19 hours ago \| parent [-]
		To dilute the list and add more to confusion, court hardly will accept it, in this case, they won’t be able to shut it down since it has other bogus entries.

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aaron695 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]