Canadian election databases use "canary traps"–and they work | Hacker News Reader

Canadian election databases use "canary traps"–and they work

arstechnica.com

52 pointsColinWright12 comments

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.

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

I believe it's confirmed Tesla employed this strategy successfully to id a leaker.

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

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.

it's a leak -- there may not multiple copies.

just whatever the leaker snuck out, or whatever the breacher was able to get off the system / pull through someone else's account. even if it's a hack by the NSA or Russia to help drive separatist movements, every extra download generates more noise and alerts.

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.

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

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.

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

Danielle Smith loves US billionaire money, and/or Russian influence money, and is willing to advance their agenda of an independent Alberta.

AB is basically Snow Texas and has many of the same issues and voter outlooks.

They're REAL MEN and love JESUS and ride in TRUCKS and hate COMMUNISTS and TRUDEAU and don't get no EVIL VACCINES, etc.

Which is to say they absolutely suck up the agit-prop without question.

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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