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WikiLeaks Reveals the 'Snowden Stopper': CIA Tool To Track Whistleblowers (zerohedge.com)
schwit1 quotes a report from Zero Hedge: As the latest installment of it's "Vault 7" series, WikiLeaks has just dropped a user manual describing a CIA project known as "Scribbles" (a.k.a. the "Snowden Stopper"), a piece of software purportedly designed to allow the embedding of "web beacon" tags into documents "likely to be stolen." The web beacon tags are apparently able to collect information about an end user of a document and relay that information back to the beacon's creator without being detected. Per WikiLeaks' press release. But, the "Scribbles" user guide notes there is just one small problem with the program: it only works with Microsoft Office products. So, if end users use other programs such as OpenOffice of LibreOffice then the CIA's watermarks become visible to the end user and their cover is blown.
LibreOffice is just a Russian tool to help their spies in the USA. Presidential order to ban its use.
nice one, 1 more reason to not use m$...
Or just use a machine not connected to any network when you open the files! Anyone who is opening stolen classified docs is going to use an air gapped machine
Hahahahahahahahahahhaahahahahahahahahahahha... Microsoft Office... Hahahahhahaahhahaahahahhahaha
If you really want to do it, there's always ways.
- Take pictures with your phone of the documents or take screenshots
- Open them with a different software (OpenOffice, as suggested)
- Print them on physical paper and scan them afterwards
- Print them as PDF
And there may be many other option to bypass this stupid protection. In general, this kind of protection is only for the really stupid, anyone who has a bit of brain will find a way around it.
bacon bait plus Skittles not scribbles. c'mon man.
Member when slashdot wasn't 'play by play on everything wikieleaks does, some other tech stuff'
That's what they want you to think.
Sig ?
Do the editors think CIA doesn't read slashdot or something? Or that it never heard of Linux or LibreOffice. Why would the beacons be limited to MS-products reading MS Office documents? They are not morons, you know.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Calm down. Take a deep breath.
Now, make your point. Are you are saying that those of us who value our fellow citizens above our own possessions, should not attempt to raise awareness of issues that concern us? Because that triggers your?
Is this suggesting cooperation from MS?
Is it MS' software that was reading these tags and relaying them to some other process that phones it home to the CIA? Or does MS' software do that directly?
I, and everybody else not on the extreme left, would very much like to civilly discuss with you the many very serious issues facing not just our nation, but the entire world today.
The problem, however, is that any time we try to have rational, in-depth discussion with leftists we get hit with false accusations of "discrimination", or we get called "haters", or we're falsely accused of some sort of -ism or -phobia, or we're wrongly mislabeled as "bullies", or we're mislabeled as "intolerance", or we hear "fake news" yelled over and over.
We need to engage in political dialog. We need to discuss these matters. But we can't do that when leftists immediately derail every discussion with these false, nonsensical accusations and personal attacks.
Perhaps that's how these leftists were taught to respond during the college courses they took. Well, we're in the real world now, not academia. Maybe the false accusations and overly emotional tirades got you good marks from your teacher within academia. But outside of academia those techniques have no benefit, unless stifling discussion and sowing dissent and division is what you want to accomplish.
Centrists and rightists are trying to find real solutions to problems like healthcare, the economy, surveillance, and conflicts around the world. If leftists want to join us, we welcome them with open arms. The only condition is that they must be willing to participate in this discussion and problem solving in a respectable, meaningful manner. So far they have not managed to do this.
Don't worry, the LibreOffice team is diligently working on a fix for this missing feature.
Wow are you deluded.
I have also observed this from the Green triangle-corner of the political polygon, even within my own extended family. It is my belief, that external forces are manipulating both sides, grinding them against each other, to weaken the entire playing field before playing their own hand.
Perhaps, a joint investigation by a pan-political group could serve as both the beginning of a solution, and the beginning of a reconciliation between our people.
I wonder if the first three posts are by the same author, trying to set up a "slam dunk", but ending up derailing? I always get the feeling that these are by paid astroturfers.
I assume everybody on this thread (including me) are different voices in some schizo's head.
You see it here once in awhile. A glimpse of their construct.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Maybe, you and I were really the same person all along? Maybe we both only exist within the mind of the GGGP? OMG plot twist!
Sick bunch of fucks
Slashdot should make a new rule that the first thread gets deleted.
Why? It's almost always off topic.
Fuck M$.
You know AC's (Anonymous Cowards) post political statements or plain ad hominem (Trump is popular) to distract the first page worth of comments right? People quickly skim the summary and then go straight for the comments. A person who may actually be able to have an intelligent discussion on the subject sees this and is no longer interested in presenting his/her opinion. Feel free to go back over the last few weeks regarding these leaks and privacy policies and see what I mean. I think it's being done on purpose because it's happening so much now. Being started by who, I'm not sure, that's why they're AC. If you don't actually know anything about how this stuff works, then let actual techies talk and let the others stick to sign panting. You're not helping anyone, or is that the point?
As someone firmly left of center, and also craving a civil grownup conversation on the issues without being called names (getting sick of being called a cuck and a snowflake for simply showing compassion to others), I would like to take you up on your offer to talk about the issues you mentioned. In particular, I would like to discuss healthcare as it is the first one you brought up, and interestingly for this topic in particular, those on the left would argue that they are the ones who are attempting to find solutions while the right is stonewalling. So I would open by asking what do you as someone right of center perceive as being broken with our healthcare system, and could you describe what an ideal 'fixed' system would look like?
That's a perfect example of the name-calling knee-jerk response he was referring to. Add some value, make a point, instead of name-calling.
Most people, if not all, should have access to quality medical care. The service exists, but it is currently setup to be too expensive for most people without insurance. Also, most people don't like to pay for some random strangers' medical bills, although we all do that very thing for local government services like police and fire. As long as the burden isn't too different from those services, add medical to that list of socially-funded services. This is from a non-leftie.
I think we are in strong agreement here. I think most on the left if they stop and think about it really didn't like Obamacare, because a system that just makes sure as many people have health insurance as possible, plus a few regulatory tweaks to insurance, doesn't really solve anything as it is the health insurance system itself we have in the US that enables the system to be broken. When a hospital can charge $400 for a single pill of ibuprofen (not hyperbole, that's exactly what my wife's EOB said after she gave birth) because the insurance company will gladly pay for it, it provides an impenetrable barrier to those who can't afford that sort of care, and can't afford the premiums to get the insurance.
The problem lies in the fuzzy boundary between "most people don't like to pay for some random strangers' medical bills" and "As long as the burden isn't too different from those services". I am sure there are plenty of people who don't like to pay for some random stranger's house fire to be put out as well. Especially with many of those who identify as libertarian considering all taxes to be theft. So the question is how do you convince people that the taxes required to fund a universal healthcare system will be an acceptable burden?
Slashdot should make a new rule that the first thread gets deleted.
Why? It's almost always off topic.
It's actually kinda insightful here. The "fake news" moniker is one gigantic genetic fallacy which is being used by both the Regressive Left and the Alt Right to ignore anything outside of their hugboxes.
Just speculating, but this may be why it took so long for the latest MS Office vulnerability to be patched.
It's a little too late to stop Snowden
Twinstiq, game news
can't you simply use a terminal with the iftop command running to see what addresses are coming and going?
So what's the copyright on this tool? Can I embed it in the reports I write to spot if my competitors steal them? (they're not using LibreOffice or anything, if they were smart enough for basic security, they wouldn't have to steal my stuff...)
We'll see adaptations of this everywhere in the near future. I know a dozen consulting companies immediately who are afraid that their stuff is stolen by competitors.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Create a Canary Token and place it on your server: https://canarytokens.org/gener...
Would the real Darth Sidious please stand up?
Is there something in the leaked documents that mention Snowden or whistleblowers?
This is a watermark system system mostly intended to unmask foreign spies. It wouldn't have stopped Snowden since he used airgaps and released everything at once after leaving and was quickly caught after that.
It looks similar to the kind of tool content owners use to track pirates.
Not all secret documents are stolen by whistleblowers and journalists, far, far from it.
Prepare for CIA trolls to derail discussion...
Clearly, you converse with a different group of people than I do. But so far you haven't raised any substantive issues to discuss.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Prepare for CIA trolls to derail discussion....
... say we need a anti-anti-Whistleblowers tool but then I see we already have it. Gotta love open source.
Easily defeated... Get multiple copies from different "accounts", diff them. Then summarize the contents and don't directly post their wording or ordering of the content.
Summarizing removes ambiguous markers... like saying the same thing many ways. "John went to the store" "John traveled to the store" "One day John shopped at the store".
Reodering removes marking you by giving you legit content just re-ordered depending on who you are....
Diffing between many accounts shows you which things are real, which types of marking are used, and in general who may be more trusted than you.
Even better if you wait awhile and see if any soon-to-happen information actually happens to disprove a disinformation campaign.
Avoid taking photos or photocopies. Simply changing the size of periods and their offsets can encode binary information into a document even if a quick glance shows yours and your other accounts copies to be identical.
Leakers are too smart for this.
I am genuinely curious how a conservative and a liberal actually having a respectful intelligent conversation about the issues constitutes trolling in the mind of some ./ moderator.
I think the takeaway here is that Wikileaks and whistle-blowers now know to open documents in an offline VM and convert them to a safe format before reading or submitting. Something the ultra-paranoid would already be doing...
Copy, paste as text. Finished.