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Posted by ComputerGuru 7 hours ago

MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID(xusheng.dev)
469 points | 181 commentspage 2
cupantae 4 hours ago|
As a linux fan I just love all these changes Microsoft have been introducing
red_admiral 5 hours ago||
Misleading title: the watermark applies to AI generated/edited images. That includes local models.

Whether it applies to non-AI generated images is a question for the reverse engineers (or ironically, a suitable AI). My bet is on "no".

Of course, the pre-AI versions of paint and notepad can still be installed with a bit of trickery, and it's worth it just for the UX.

SV_BubbleTime 4 hours ago|
Don’t care.

There is no reason to assign a GGUID except to identify the person, not that the photo is generated. This is nothing more than surveillance.

petjuh 5 hours ago||
This reminds me that in the USSR they had typewriters that added an identifier somehow that could be traced back to that particular typewriter (and who it was sold to)
kvuj 5 hours ago||
You have no idea how deep this rabbit hole goes. Search for EFF printers secret tracking.

Virtually all commercial printers embed an invisible identifier on every page printed.

imhoguy 3 hours ago|||
Now I need to see if agentic reverse engineering of printer firmware can actually remove that "feature" for good.
kube-system 2 hours ago||||
Virtually all color laser printers and copiers.
esafak 5 hours ago|||
It was about money anti-counterfeiting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots

SV_BubbleTime 4 hours ago||
There is always a legit reason. It’s just never the only reason.
srean 5 hours ago|||
Not only USSR.

I wonder whether Arthur Conan Doyle had the idea before the police started using typewriter typeface wear and tear for forensics.

testing22321 4 hours ago||
Sure, try to scan, photocopy, edit in photoshop or print US money today.
claiir 2 hours ago||
Kind of sad how all these technical blogs just reek of Claude text these days. Hard read when it’s obviously padded by an LLM…
luciana1u 5 hours ago||
the GUID is the giveaway that it's not about protecting artists, it's about being able to prove provenance later. nobody embeds a unique id in a local file for the user's benefit.
saejox 4 hours ago||
These days i cant recommend Windows to anybody. Even gamers should move to linux.

Some say "i do nothing illegal" "have nothing to hide". You dont do anything illegal in your point of view. AI tracking you might think otherwise.

A sudden knock on your door might happen because of an ambigious search/propmt.

tapland 4 hours ago||
There's a huge number of gamers moving to things like CachyOS. Some are stuck because of Valorant, LoL or Battlefield DRM, but it's a big move lately.
1970-01-01 4 hours ago|||
Others say

"I need it to work on a random Thursday, not wait for fsck after ever reboot"

https://github.com/IceWhaleTech/CasaOS/issues/1104

toilet 3 hours ago|||
I have the same issue on Windows 11. It's been bugging me to press a button or "check my drive" on every startup for at least half a year, no matter how often I let it run the check...
quik95 3 hours ago||
Same thing happened to me recently
b5n 3 hours ago|||
Why have you linked a bug report for a niche userland application that may be causing disk corruption as evidence against linux reliability? That seems like a pretty uninformed conclusion.
1970-01-01 3 hours ago||
This isn't a one-off niche user. Just look for more of these. You will find them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1cvwo93/arch_run...

b5n 3 hours ago||
This supports my initial reply. This was an f2fs bug in a bleeding edge kernel released only seven days earlier. The thread suggests perfectly reasonable mitigations, especially for an arch user: use the lts kernel or downgrade to 6.8.9.

If you're not familiar with linux and/or don't want to deal with trivial issues periodically, don't hang out at the bleeding edge. There are plenty of boring and/or beginner friendly choices out there.

I'm not saying linux is perfect, but your conclusions in this instance appear to be uninformed rather than supported by the facts.

1970-01-01 2 hours ago||
Ok fair point, here's plenty more of the same on stable. My point is Linux is always fine right until it isn't. Then you're back to a day of debugging your update.

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=218770

https://lore.kernel.org/linux-f2fs-devel/20240409203411.1885...

https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/2511.2/07280.html

https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/2511.2/07260.html

https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1226043

https://lists.opensuse.org/archives/list/bugs@lists.opensuse...

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/systemd/+bug/15478...

https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/63175

b5n 1 hour ago||
[flagged]
matheusmoreira 3 hours ago|||
> Some say "i do nothing illegal" "have nothing to hide".

I hate how pervasive this argument is. I'm so tired. Sometimes I wish they'd get the total panopticon they want so much. I'm sure the government will be able to find some crimes to hang them with.

adventured 2 hours ago||
The best response is always:

"That's not up to you."

When people claim they have nothing to hide, always point out that's not up to their determination. That freaks them out, it disarms their shrink-from-confrontation move.

And you can point it out super fast, in a plain six word statement. No need to launch into a deep discussion unless prompted.

Alternatively, simply respond with: yes you do. When they reply: "what?" - "every single thing you have ever done wrong across your entire life." Everybody has done something they would prefer to keep hidden, the cowards just lie about it.

unselect5917 2 hours ago||
Just because I have nothing to hide doesn't mean I have anything I want you to see.

People are entitled to privacy because they enjoy it. No further justification is needed.

frig57 3 hours ago|||
Anyone got tips or guides to starting a linux OS that protects privacy without sacrificing utility?

Considering putting linux on a 2nd PC

delecti 2 hours ago|||
Essentially any Linux distro protects privacy. You'd kinda have to go out of your way to find one that doesn't, because there's no online account connected to your install for any of them.

If you're reasonably technical, you can make nearly any use-case work on nearly any distro, but if you have choice paralysis, my top recommendations would be CachyOS if you plan to play games, and Mint otherwise.

Personally I'm happy with EndeavourOS. I picked it to find a general purpose distro similar to the Steam Deck (KDE and arch based) but with a more user-friendly installer.

Yiin 2 hours ago|||
omarchy.org
allthetime 2 hours ago|||
many games work flawlessly on Linux now. enough to make the switch anyways. a lot more than on mac.
RobotToaster 3 hours ago||
Genuine question: does Linux have an AI image editor as easy to use as the win11 paint/photos?
two_handfuls 2 hours ago||
This is not ok.
petjuh 5 hours ago||
How resistant is it to dithering? Can you just add +-1 randomly to each pixel r,g and b values and throw it off?
red_admiral 4 hours ago|
Probably not, if it's this kind of thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_hashing
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