Injecting hidden GUIDs into local files without explicit user consent is a massive privacy overreach. It makes you wonder what other local tools are silently tagging user generated content.
I am doing metadata auditing for government documents these days and there are UUIDs in lots of files going back a very long time. I have certainly seen them in PDFs and Word and Excel documents that long predated the current AI integrations.
Edit to add: I just tested LibreOffice/26.2.5.2 and it is not injecting a UUID into the metadata either for a ODT or a DOCx (2007) file. I do not have native MS Office available on hand to test at the moment. I do see these UUIDs in published government documents but cannot swear to exactly what step of the pipeline is stamping them. Definitely on files that predate the AI integration push by Microsoft.
Your printer has been doing this for decades. There's an invisible-to-human dot matrix pattern that encodes things like model, serial number and i don't remember what else.
Also why color laser printers refuse to print b/w documents when they run out of color toner since they can no longer print the yellow DocuColor tracking dots.
No it's not ok, and most people are horrified when they learn. It's just a reality check that we've lived in a surveillance state for quite a while and it's time we take a stand. And a reminder that the government has done a good job of suppressing these realities from public awareness.
And it's a reality check that we live in a surveillance state. To a degree that most people find appalling, but the government is good enough at suppressing public awareness enough to cause an outcry.
It's also not whataboutism, the comment specifically wondered how else were being surrupticously tracked without our knowledge. This is a concrete example and I think many would be surprised such tracking also exists outside the digital realm.
It could also mean they are lying. It could be they are being forced to downplay how good the watermarking is because gov agencies want that tool available to them without people knowing about it. We'll have to wait for the next Snowden to find out.
I still don't see how this is supposed to work for text content that I copy and paste somewhere else. And with models getting better and better to "human language", wouldn't the false positives also rise as "real text" is flagged to be AI generated?
I don't know either, and maybe it doesn't or can't work. But also maybe it does and can. I do not have any where near the expertise to know which is the case.
AI-generated text warning (I submitted - but did not author - the piece), but it seems MS Paint and MS Photos add both a visible (can be turned off) and invisible (cannot be disabled and happens silently in the background with no user notice) watermarks to photos that have been AI-manipulated, even when using a local model to perform the action. It's not clear if this applies to even things like using AI-enhanced background delete/remove, but the invisible watermark is embedded in both the image pixels and the image metadata, both containing a GUID that can be linked to the exact prompt that was used and the originating device/user (on Microsoft's end).
Obvious next step is to explore if you can replace watermarker.dll with a (signed) no-op shim or MITM the API call to at least use your own (nil?) GUID that isn't linked to your device/account.
In case it's not obvious, my bigger concern isn't "this image can be identified to have been generated with/by AI" so much as it is "digital yellow printer dots have been forced upon us, except they can identify and retrieve the exact user/device/time/place/document/etc", completely destroying any and all illusions of privacy left.
I'd like to know more about the GUID part and how easy is it so deanonymize yeah.
But if it's only on ai generation and not on all images it seems easy enough to work around that part? Still better than printers doing it no matter what you're printing.
Sounds better to do postprocess filtering explicitly? For example, adding random noise with amplitude 1/255 (which should be as invisible as the watermark), followed by a smart blur that blurs more in directions where the colors are more similar (making the blur less obvious to humans).
But this is all moot really, if MS Paint is watermarking shit, it’s better to just use something else. Nothing from Microsoft is trustworthy.
There are several paragraphs where output looks very AI-like (and Claude flavored one at that), e.g.
> In other words, “generated locally” does not mean that the complete operation is local. Microsoft receives and moderates the prompt, then issues the unique GUID that Paint embeds into the locally generated image. Paint also sends the previous promptGenerationId as lastPromptGenerationId with its next moderation request, allowing successive requests to be linked explicitly.
> That relationship is important. C2PA calls this a soft binding: a value derived from, or embedded into, the content so that the content can still be matched with its provenance record after the file-level manifest has been removed. For a watermark soft binding, the value is the watermark’s content identifier. Microsoft cryptographically signed this assertion.
> After an AI result is applied to the Paint canvas, the available formats are still restricted to PNG, JPEG, GIF, and Paint’s own .paint format. BMP—the classic Paint format—is conspicuously absent.
The AI aspect of this is a red herring. The real problem is that they're secretly adding in a unique identifier into every image you create. If somebody does not like your meme, they can just send a copyright subpoena to Microsoft to instantly get your full name, address, email, phone number, and any other data associated with your Microsoft account. Just like age verification, this is another weapon in the war against internet anonymity.
Printing (even text) is also a risk: It's very likely your printer is secretly adding marks to the page that contain its serial number and the current timestamp. [0]
Meanwhile Microsoft (and Apple) have "telemetry" harvesting those serial numbers of all internal and external devices you've ever had connected or reachable. Then they link them to your MS/Apple account, IP addresses, and the extended social-graph of all computers that were ever in the same room or shared the same bluetooth speaker.
In short, your "anonymous" flyer critiquing The Regime and depicting Dear Leader as a clown could lead thugs straight to your door. Or to the door of whomever you're staying with.
> It's very likely your printer is secretly adding marks to the page
It's most likely how the FBI caught NSA leaker Reality Winner:
> Both journalists and security experts have suggested that The Intercept's handling of the documents, which included publishing the documents unredacted and including the printer tracking dots, was used to identify Winner as the leaker.
You don't need reverse engineering if it's publicly known fact for 20+ years, telemetry just identifies you. 20 years ago, you would need to find the printer.
Yeah - these criminal agencies use this to protect their billionaire buddies on top. The Epstein network must be really huge. I always wondered how one or two person can meta-coordinate +5000 underage girl and their +10000 customers. That never made any sense to me, yet suspiciously enough only Ghislaine is in prison. That does not add up.
>Then they link them to your MS/Apple account, IP addresses, and the extended social-graph of all computers that were ever in the same room or shared the same bluetooth speaker.
Did it get revealed that Apple did that? This is news to me
and then in few years a new mono-mustachioed or mono-browed leader will emerge who declares memes a blasphemy punishable by death and will call up all the telemetry gathered to punish all involved.
You know a certain dictator denies access to the country they control based on whether visitors "like" them? They use a private militia, funded by stealing from taxpayers, in contravention to that country's laws, to target citizens who are not supporters of them. Some of those citizens get shipped abroad to foreign prisons by these militia. Others get shot in summary executions in the streets - the controlling regime covers it up with false media reports, and uses corrupt judges to evade scrutiny ... a certain software company support that regime, even acting against foreign scrutiny on their behalf.
Essentially all of that country's businesses that are close to the regime need to be considered hostile.
We don't need to wait a few years, the revolution already happened; the insurrectionists were freed. These companies paid their tributes, in dollars, to the regime.
Maybe next ML will be integrated into software suites to enforce that regime's lies? Most Western governments use such software, the distributers of which have already shown they'll act in the regimes interests against supposed allies...
I had assumed parent-poster was making a sincere but humorous point, as opposed to sarcastically dismissing the risks of a change in management, but I suppose it's ambiguous.
"I don't worry because I have nothing to hide, based on my perfectly accurate perception of today's political and legal forces in my state and nation which will stay safely static forever."
Exactly. Forget the AI aspect, this is entirely to identify users for any purposes they deem necessary. People are ignoring the surveillance state aspect of this. Reminds me of the device id debacle they have attached to their outbounds Windows network calls
Can this also be weaponized? Get an innocuous image from someone you don't like, grab their GUID, add it to another image, sent it to the thin skinned politician in power.
I was forced to create multiple as part of the mojang migration - truly a nightmarish experience to use their AuthN, haven’t seen something quite as bad since
Nah I sunk many thousands of hours into these accounts; definitely not a small cost.
Sure I could get a new account and pay twice for the game I already purchased multiple times - that would’ve ground my gears too
I think the new account would have to be a Microsoft account also, so you wouldn't have even gained anything by not migrating.
Some servers allow joining without a Microsoft account even these days, but probably can't play on any of the servers you regularly play on, if you don't have a Microsoft account.
It does kind of say: The GUID is coming from the moderation endpoint, which is hit when you generate a local or cloud AI image based on your prompt. If there is no prompt, there is no endpoint, and likely no GUID.
Obviously Paint could have been watermarking prior to AI though, but this specific AI watermarking appears to be only that.
Since the watermarker runs locally, you could also do the reverse: generate some porn with a different open model, then run that code to tag it as "Content watermarked by Microsoft Responsible AI"
Probably both so they can change what they censor without waiting for you to run windows update and also so they can collect your information (IP, timestamp, etc) to associate with whatever you did
While it does make a difference, their willingness to quietly integrate watermarking features into what people saw as simple apps for doing simple tasks is unnerving. It only takes a small change for them to start baking your identifiable information into all images they edit, or some government politely asking them to do that.
I wonder if in ten years we'll have a horrifying world where everything that leaves a machine is imprinted with its permanent identifier. Every file comes with a verifiable history of who created it, what computers it passed through, who made edits. We're closer to that world than we think.
There is a certain convergence of wills here: watermarking AI products on the one hand, and infusing AI into everything on the other hand. When you layer generative AI into Notepad, once just a raw text buffer, then you’re setting the stage for watermarking everything because AI touches everything.
We already live in that world, and the sky hasn't fallen so far. Even in the worst case scenario, the world isn't going to be as horrifying as the alternative, because people react to the proliferation of scams, they will not keep falling for fake impersonation for the 10000th time a row. In this scenario, we simply will stop taking factual-looking images at their word in the same way how you don't take any piece of writing on the internet as factual, verifiable truth. Journalism will rely on a person vouching for their images with their reputation, and images with unknown sources will be looked at with suspicion.
I am not willing to pay the price of sending every bit I create to some megacorporation's server or stamp it with my only identity so the computer can tell me what's AI and what isn't. Especially not while the average quality settles into an uncanny valley that's often discernible with the naked eye, both for text and images.
Do not tell Microsoft where you sleep. IANAL but they are not a government or financial institution and do not have a right to that information.
Make sure you register mailing addresses with your credit card institutions in addition to your residential addresses, and make your mailing address your billing address so that you aren't forced to tell a thousand businesses like Microsoft where you sleep.
Windows 11 effectively forces users to register with a Microsoft account. Once that's established, all it takes is for an unaware user to fill out an e-commerce form and save an address for auto-fill.
> Windows 11 effectively forces users to register with a Microsoft account.
While it's definitely a dark pattern that I 100% do not agree with, Pro editions still allow you to do a local account. No need for the oobe /bypass command, still can be done through the OOBE GUI setup by selecting a Work/School account option then selecting Sign in options to then specify a local account to create.
My comment was in regard to the average PC user. The kinds of folks who would never install an operating system and would likely agree to use Edge while signed in to their Microsoft account.
Microsoft has also been pushing hard for Recall and recording all local activity forever. Not impossible to imagine that anything looking like a home address “somehow” gets ingested in the telemetry.
A bypass existing is actually not good because that's how the frog is boiled. Ignorant users get an account while power user are placated for now. Then at some point the bypass is removed and when power users speak up they will be told shut down by all the drones with "you have needed an account for years, why are you throwing a fuss now".
Any of a number of virtual mailbox services which can receive mail for you, e.g. anytimemailbox.com but there are several. You can either pick up in person, or they offer services like mail forwarding, opening and scanning, etc.
Besides privacy against leaking your sleeping-address to businesses, they're also convenient for avoiding package theft if that's a problem in your area, and receiving/forwarding mail if you travel a lot for extended periods of time.
I'd recommend against PO boxes because (1) they get rejected by some services (2) UPS and FedEx won't deliver to them.
Because these businesses have to register as CMRAs and you have to sign a notarized form for them to legally receive mail for you, some services will still detect it and not let you use the address, but my experience for the most part has been that most US financial institutions let you enter a "residential/legal address" (no CMRAs allowed) and a "mailing address" (CMRAs allowed) separately, and the mailing address usually becomes your billing address.
> Because these businesses have to register as CMRAs and you have to sign a notarized form for them to legally receive mail for you, some services will still detect it and not let you use the address
That's exposed in the USPS API for address validation. Which the USPS is starting to charge for access. Everyone doing address validation in the US eventually uses that service (sometimes through a go-between).
Or.....Install Linux and bypass all this stupidity.
They will move faster to track each and every one of you, all the while shoving ads and garbage down each of your respective machines... and you all pay for it?!
You still want the virtual mailing address for other reasons honestly. Even if your os isn't tracking you or leaking things giving your real address to any business could lead to it being leaked because no one cares about security, etc. If that's in your threat model you should be using a good proxy mailer
Perhaps so. But the problem at hand here is that MS Windows has so lost the plot of being an OS for users, to ABUSING users.
All these fixes and repairs ignore the fact that abusing people pays. Surveillance capitalism pays, and provides a revenue stream for Microsoft to further exploit.
> This is broadly impractical for the average citizen.
No it's not. Sign up for a virtual mailbox for $15-$25/month.
> A scalable solution would be to make this sort of thing illegal.
I'm posting this in the genuine interest of people being able to maintain anonymity from data leaks, privacy leaks, and in general not needing to tell businesses more personal information than is necessary to render services. This is in a country that has no protection of personal safety whatsoever, and any business data leak could mean life or death to average citizens who are being threatened by criminals, stalkers, and more.
It seems every time I post something of this flavor the same handful of you come out of the woods and want to make privacy illegal, and I'm not sure who you are trying to support.
> No it's not. Sign up for a virtual mailbox for $15-$25/month.
Did you notice that it's an affordability crisis out there? An absolutely enormous number of people are skipping bills, taking on credit, and using predatory lenders to make end meets, and your recommendation is to add another fee on top of things.
It's not practical or useful guidance for the vast majority of people. I strongly agree with supporting privacy, but this sort of behaviour (adding trackers, etc) to normal functions without a full disclosure and opt-out mechanism must be made illegal, otherwise we are just creating markets for "privacy preserving" technologies that are increasingly less likely to actually be effective for that purpose but sure do put on a good theatre of seeming that way.
At least in the US it's not even a good method either. Own a house? Boom, your information is publically available and you won't be able to remove it without a court order, which in most states is impossible to get. In most states, you don't even need to own a house, decide to vote? You information again is publically available. Tie your real name to a single account to purchase something, and you are trackable. Want privacy? You'd need to remove yourself from the internet, dump your phone, destroy your ID and work underground for cash. We can push against iot, and people have been forever, but at the end of the day the government will always they have a vested interest in being able to identify it's citizens.
My sister was a member of Scientology for 2 decades and she was encouraged to do this. As a result, she has almost no Social Security earnings and her Social Security check is about 1/4 of what she would be getting if she reported (and paid taxes to the government instead of to her "church") her income.
> decide to vote? Your information again is publicly available
I ran for elected office in the past. When I asked the voter registration office for a "walking list", they only checked that I did get on the ballot and I was provided with a list of every registered voter in the district I was running for. It had names, addresses, phone numbers, political party and a list of what elections you voted in (I think it went back 8 years). Some people were rather upset that I had access to that information when I knocked on their door and asked them to vote for me.
> Sign up for a virtual mailbox for $15-$25/month.
That isn't going to stop Microsoft from collecting your address by collecting your wifi info, or from the data you enter into websites or documents. When the maker of your OS is the enemy you will always lose.
Ahhh okay if that's what they meant, then yes, I 100% agree and apologize in advance.
I fully agree that businesses should not be asking for addresses. Non-financial businesses don't need to KYC in the first place, and financial institutions can KYC without needing to know where you sleep.
I got triggered because people seem to always want to come out of the woods and say "addresses should be public record" or things of that sort and I vehemently disagree in the interest of privacy, in a country where a stalker can just look you up, terrorize you, and the police will do nothing about it.
They (the ones wanting to make privacy illegal) are just the ones that want to develop the tools and consume the data for it because it'll be good for their resume or some bullshit, or they're just intrinsically broken humans.
> IANAL but they are not a government or financial institution and do not have a right to that information.
As soon as you purchase something from Microsoft - e.g. your Office 365 subscription - they have at the very least your billing address on file for the credit card.
We gotta stop normalizing that. Why do you need my address to receive my money? My birth date?
Even in places with strong privacy regulations requiring businesses not to collect data they don’t need, businesses apparently get away with asking this.
Because of the volume of stolen credit card numbers. If you have the address, you are much less likely to be someone using stolen CCs. Seriously, most of the crooks are that lazy. So the real reason is the credit card processing companies.
Also, post 911, there is this thing called "know your customer". It was set up to fight money laundering and financing terrorists.
The problem is CC processors. You can get away as a merchant with just a number and expiration date, that's the minimum you need to process a CC payment, but you pay exorbitantly higher fees. The more details you collect and pass on, the lower your processor's risk fee will be because the more info, the more likely it is that the customer is actually the cardholder and not using fraudulently obtained data.
And as soon as you connect with telephony systems (e.g. VoIP numbers) or rent out servers, some countries' telecom KYC laws apply that also force MS to collect validated address data.
Even without the CC processor requirements they would want to be able to identify you in case of a payment dispute. Digital payments are more like an IOU than like cash.
Seems to me that it's a challenge to make an apple account without adding a credit card to your account as well. A carfully chosen Linux distro (so many options!) is the way to avoid the brunt of these privacy issues, lots of open software calls home in some way or another so user beware!
Why would they need to subpoena Microsoft and why will Microsoft hand them the data if someone doesn't like my meme? I understand what you are trying to say but it does not make a whole lot of sense even from Microsoft pov. They are not bound by law to hand over personal data to anyone without a warrant issued. If a warrant is issued then it is their lawful duty to give that data, the same would be done by you if you were in their shoes or your office or your family. Law is not optional to follow. But Microsoft doesn't need to do watermarking on memes to track you or to do this as a war against "internet anonymity".
I would say the watermarking is not really a puzzle piece at all when it comes to the surveillance state, which was my point. They don't need watermarking to know who you are or to get information about you. So why would they work on this really visibile method if their intention was to progress the survelliance state? Microsoft with all their resources (and assuming it is an evil corporation purely acting from the state's interest to spy on you) will use this to track you?
You can incentivize cooperation without having to compel action with a warrant. This sort of corrupt quid pro quo is quite common, in other countries at least...
I am a human and I upvoted the comment immediately. Do not underestimate the wide ranging hate for age verification. Even my normie friends are against it. Meta/etc have been buying those laws but at the cost of more and more people waking up to privacy activism. I predict in a couple years it'll backlash as people first fight against AV, and then fight for more broad privacy reform in the US. At least for myself, I had never been actively calling my reps until the AV laws.
So you will defeat chat control by sitting there going “but you don’t have muh gdpr consent for that!”?
The whole EU vision is they know what the little people do all the time, think all the time, and spend their money on all the time. For the children, obviously.
If you think "chat control" is going to pass, I've a bridge to sell you.
In the meantime, the GDPR is your friend. The amount of FUD spread about it on here by those working in Adtech (and whose very salaries are dependent on invading peoples privacy) is insane.
> If you think "chat control" is going to pass, I've a bridge to sell you.
I genuinely wish you were right, but you are so naive it is frightening.
> The amount of FUD spread about it on here by those working in Adtech
You are confused. You are arguing with people that want to protect privacy. The EU demonstrably is not doing that, as WhatsApp gets ever more de facto mandated by the day.
As the article explained, the EU does not mandate a prompt-specific GUID, only the ability to identify the content as AI-generated. The highly privacy-invasive level of provenance tracking which Microsoft has added goes beyond the EU’s new mandates.
No - there is a huge difference between "this AI created this image" and "this user did it" - the first we need more of, and the second is a big privacy concern. The article does not say anything about identifying a user.
A guid isn’t a user id, if it is in this case, it’s an abuse of how guid is used, at least colloquially. I haven’t read enough to understand if it is user / machine id, I.e. only globally unique in the sense it’s a globally unique entity identifier.
This a variant of the provenance scheme: C2PA its implemented by all major Camera maker, and Google it seems, Apple support it with 3rd party apps on iPhone, but they have something called "Apple Reference Image" brewing.
Personally I think there is a good argument for being able to distinguish AI generated image and video...
> I think there is a good argument for being able to distinguish AI generated image and video...
Neat but that's not what's being built here. What's being built is "we can trace back this content to who made it" which is bad. Doesn't matter if today that it's limited to AI generated content. Won't be tomorrow. Your devices should not act against your best interests. No cop in my pocket please.
They have only themselves to blame for this. They've spent decades developing technology to spy on and micro-regulate what their captive customers can do with their property. Now that they have this technology, it's only logical that they be held responsible for misuse.
The only (and inevitable) solution at this point is for big tech to get micro-regulated like the banking industry. The same mindless greed that drove them to take control away from their customers will be responsible for the same control to be taken away from them.
Be careful what you wish for. I'm sure Microsoft and Google would love the kind of regulation we apply to big banks. It has become a moat that makes it impossible for other (snaller/foreign) financial institutions to compete because they don't have massive specialized regulatory departments.
The more complex the rules become, the more difficult it will be for alternative providers to exist, unless they have explicit carve outs. So far, with age verification and user id laws, there doesn't seem to be much appetite from politicians to create exceptions for open source and smaller projects. By comparison, in the US the regional banks have special exemptions for many of the really onerous regs, which is why they are still a bunch of them.
You don't think that regulation would require everyone to embed watermarks and guids to make sure that nothing objectionable is being generated or created?
This has nothing to do with generating harmful content and everything to do with fascist surveillance. This is an OS level functionality that get utilized before AI even existed.
"privileged take"?, sorry I am not from the US, so I don't compete in the sorry-o-lympics.
Nothing is stopping you from using it for free at home, everyone is privileged in that regard.
And it was obvious to everyone else, I was talking about decisions you can take yourself. I'll try better in the future to be hyper explicit about this, so people who are looking for a reason to feel hurt will have a harder time.
If you work at a company and it's a company device, then its not your privacy to worry about - you don't use your work device for personal matters, and the concerns are someone elses.
IBM, SAP, Capital One, GE, Cisco, Intel, Deloitte offer a Mac/Windows choice program. Better than just one choice, and arguably a bit better of a privacy record than MS (especially of late)
Microsoft is still the best Indian OS manufacturer. And as such, it's forced upon people throats by corrupt Indian IT department heads, so a few non Indian people who actually care don't have a choice.
A few months back, MS incorrectly tried to stamp a Copilot "watermark" (just an auto-added note) to any and all Azure DevOps commits, regardless of whether an LLM was actually involved. They removed it after a lot of github issues were submitted to the source of the issue which was a VS Code Copilot extension.
MS has been very sloppy in their implementations. I would recommend against using Paint or any other LLM enabled app they use as a result. Things may be getting incorrectly stamped.
Xusheng here! I have not gone through all comments, but wish to clarify a few things:
1. The watermark only applied to AI-generated contents through the in-app AI (copilot/cocreator, etc). If you draw something by hand it is not watermarked
2. Privacy implications: I believe your MS account is linked to the prompt and the GUID. And the GUID is embedded into the image as both an insivible watermark and a file-level C2PA metadata. I did not write about this very deeply in my blogpost, but when I do an image generation, it deducts my AI credits (yes, MS gives you like 60 free AI credits), so MS surely knows where the prompt is coming from. Though I am not sure about their storage and retention, e.g., do they actually store the data, and if they do, for how long, etc
I had this trigger the other day incorrectly and went and installed Paint.net. I pasted in a screenshot I took and just wanted to resize it. I got a banner saying it was made with AI and would be updated to reflect that.
I guess it shouldn't be surprising if an application called "paint.net" can determined if AI was used when connected to the internet. (I have used Paint.net more than a decade ago).
ah, right, i vaguely recall that now. But why/how would it know AI was used, outside of a local LLM, weird it would say that AI was used (unless it's referring to the software itself).
MS Paint wanted to add the "this is AI" tag on a picture they just resized. OP didn't like that, so they went and downloaded Paint.Net to avoid having to deal with (MS) Paint shenanigans.
I was stating that MS Paint mis categorized a Print Screen screenshot as AI generated when pasted. Which pushed me to install PaintdotNet onto my laptop instead.
> mis categorized a Print Screen screenshot as AI generated
Maybe. Question is, was that a false positive, or merely a bad user-facing message?
Assuming you didn't have any AI-generated images caught in the screenshot (e.g. some advert - plenty of those even in Microsoft apps like Weather, nowadays), what if - and I'm speculating here; I don't know if anyone actually does it yet, but it's so obvious they eventually will -
- what if parts of your screenshot already had an invisible watermark on it, like the ones for tagging AI images? You can imagine an app rendering its window to texture, and embedding a watermark on those pixels before sending it over to the system compositor, and the reasons have nothing to do with AI.
Watermarks are DRM tech. "AI generated" is just a specific kind of metadata that can be put in one, and a huge red herring for discussions.
It's only a matter of time before we'll need to have software for detecting and removing real-time watermarks from display output at OS level. (Unless, of course, platforms decide to add app window live watermarking as a "feature", and given the story with remote attestation, I think it's more than likely.)
I admit it’s a while since I’ve used windows, but it’s such a shock to hear that MS Paint isn’t just a point and click pixel coloring app anymore. It seems like they could have left it as a pure “paint” app and added the fancy stuff to some new image editor or something.
I guess they’ve optimized their workforce to just keep making changes so they get promoted rather than just creating really good software.
Yeah, I've been working around that for now by uninstalling notepad. Which actually uninstalls the store app, which in turn exposes the actual notepad executable that ships with Windows. Really confusing, and will probably break in some future version of Windows.
I don't understand why they didn't just stuff all the AI things and new features in Write, where it belongs…
It automatically saves and reopens whatever you previously pasted in there. Quite a shock the first few times it happens. It's not a safe temporary holding area anymore.
Yeah I switched to Windows 11 recently and was a little annoyed by that - Notepad was always a place to paste formatted junk to get the plaintext - I don't need anything persisted.
Someone got their use of child porn leaked this way. They opened notepad on a twitch stream and a bunch of CP links came up. I don't remember who it was.
He still streams on Twitch, he got a temporary week "long" ban and then came back claiming it was a virus or an accident while also claiming he has a porn addiction problem... but don't worry he's very "sorry" (to have been caught).
The state of this Amazon-owned streaming platform is wild... and that's without even looking at the rampant antisemitism (their second top political streamer, Hasan Piker, currently has a bipartisan US House resolution (H.Res.1239) in progress calling him and Candace Owens out for their antisemitism), repeated call for violence (their top political streamer, Asmongold, was recently banned for a few days for calling for the murder of immigrant's children by ICE) and the repeated reckless/distracted car and even truck driving streams with some even leading to accidents (luckily enough without any deadly one... yet).
All these are against Twitch rules, but the staff and even the CEO (who cosplays as a streamer) selectively apply the rules and unban the streamers who are under contract with Twitch or are well connected with the staff.
I have no idea why Amazon or Twitch shareholders have not cleaned house already (e.g. ousting the CEO and the people in charge of the moderation), especially considering the fact that even with all these transgressions, Twitch isn't profitable after years of activity.
They are waiting for someone to actually die I think, with clear links to Twitch... if that ever happens there are plenty of evidence that Twitch and Amazon know what is going on and barely does anything about it.
You definitely shouldn't assert that someone is antisemitic based on the current US House, even if bi-partisan. And I thought bills of attainder were unconstitutional?
To answer your question of why, it's probably because they make money.
There are plenty of evidence of Hasan Piker's antisemitism to the point that people have been collecting and contextualizing them: https://whoishasanpiker.com/antisemitism
Also plenty of groups fighting against racism and antisemitism have come out against him (ADL, AJC), it's easy to Google.
That House resolution is just the latest good indication that it's not just some isolated incidents.
Piker's only answers are that he's taken "out of context" or that he's "joking", there's literally no context that make his public statements better or less antisemitic though, if you have any I'm interested. He also publicly voice his support to groups that are openly antisemitic (Hamas and Hezbollah) and recognized as FTOs (Foreign Terrorist Organization) by the US government.
Now, it's his First Amendment right to be this way but Twitch/Amazon share a responsibility when they platform this content, and even more when they apply moderation selectively, in my opinion that should forfeit their Section 230 protection. They are deliberately shaping the discourse on their platform by permanently banning other streamers with opposing views and never taking similar actions against Piker.
EDIT: Regarding the bills of attainder, it likely doesn't apply here because they aren't trying to punish these two antisemites specifically, they just use them as examples of the proliferation of antisemitic content on platforms like Twitch and want Congress to condemn this practice and encourage platforms to address the issue.
I don't use Windows, but I have to say that TextEdit on the Mac is absolute crap. Literally every default is wrong. Text is too small, looks like crap, cut-and-paste always brings absolutely crappy styling with it, its autocomplete and autocorrect is bad and wrong and annoying. No one at Apple uses this application with any regularity and it shows.
I wanted dark mode, tabs, and autosave, and now I don't have to use a different app to get those, so that works out great for me. Not sure what "breaking changes" even means for that though. Did it suddenly stop being able to open text files? No, it still just works.
That's a really fair point, but i'm not sure if that's what they meant by "breaking changes" if that was followed with "autocorrect, rich text, and Copilot"
"Breaking change" is a pretty common term, especially here, so I don't get the confusion about what it means. It means an interface-breaking change, so that the same input produces a different output, and is generally to be avoided because it forces the user to have to adapt and means the new version isn't strictly better[1].
The inclusion of autocorrect (that I mentioned) would be example here: previously, it would accept whatever text you gave it verbatim. Now, it will sometimes change non-dictionary strings to dictionary words.
(Another thing that bothered me was that, on the update, it forgot my font settings and I had to work to re-find them.)
I'm happy to admit my phrasing was confusing, but not enough so that you would be unable to see the relevant failure mode.
For a long time I used metapad as a notepad replacement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metapad (I even renamed the exe to notepad). Very fast and minimal.
Background removal is really useful though, saves a bunch of time.
Unfortunately, some of the regular paint tools like eraser don't erase in a smooth antialiased way and just end up looking jagged (also only a square shape for eraser...no eraser brush mode unfortunately), so it ends up being a better looking option (well, when it works properly, which it does often enough to be useful). For whatever reason a bunch of tools and transforms (scaling, rotating), just produce such garbage jagged looking results, it's not serviceable even for those basics.
I've been using ComfyUI to do fine background and watermark removal. Might take a look into that as an alternative. Run Flux.2 Klein or Comfyui's own workflow.
Key point, saves a bunch of time. Copy, paste, click button, done in three seconds. The app is also just there, preinstalled. It's great precisely because it doesn't require "looking into" anything. Yes, there's a bunch of other apps and services, but that's all besides that point. It also works pretty much on any pc made in past decade and half without crazy gpu/vram requirements for a relatively miniscule task.
It's been a "bug" for several decades now. Not everything was of shitty jagged quality in either 90s or 00s. Particularly when using some more capable image editors.
There's a bunch of smaller editors that don't have such problems, like paint.net for example. It's an arbitrary "limit" (accidental even) stemming purely from bad quality implementation of basic features, not from how basic that feature set is.
Again, even a "pure" paint app with very limited functionality can have it be implemented badly, and it has nothing to do with how "fancy" or complex or advanced of a feature set it has.
If you don’t mind CLI, rembg is a good option for background removal. It lets you swap between different models depending on the type of image so you can use something like `birefnet` for photorealistic images and `toonout` for illustrations.
If you read the article instead of the headline…….. it’s adding a fairly standard mark to AI generated images to let’s others know, in the same manner a giant swath of the GebAI industry has agreed to.
That's just nostalgia. Why do we set the bar at windows XP paint instead of windows 1.01 paint which was different? Probably because winXP paint is the one we grew up with, and also the best version. But if we said no new features ever, we'd be stuck on win1.01 paint. The best version of Paint was a complete UI redesign away from the original.
I don't so much mind about Paint, but modern Notepad is completely unusable. We had "Notepad but with Rich Text formatting" -- it was called WordPad and no-one used it so they eventually deleted it.
last place i worked at had internal telemetry on end user machines. i dont know the way it was being used, although i suspect it was a document viewer.
The people who still use Windows yet complain about this are quite confusing to me. There's been every indication that it will keep going like this for years now, and the cost of switching is just not that high. If you're still riding that train it's time to just embrace it.
For you. I mean, obviously it's still high enough that they're not switching. Beside the point, I'm bouncing between the different OSes at home and work, and honestly they're all deeply broken in different ways that require significant effort to make the best of it. I get people hate ads, so Windows is at the bottom of the list, but honestly I could care less for that additional 2 min of initial tweak when I'm spending half a day doing the setup anyway.
On Notepad stopping being raw text only, the main issue to me would be the safety it provided. Being first party meant never having to care about security (e.g. the company getting bought by a random malware vendor) or availability.
Oh, my sweet summer child. Please realise that such blanket statements like that are profoundly ignorant. (Note: I'm running an entirely Windows-free household. )
The problem is changing the way companies build themselves up to work. Business logic. Even for medium-sized companies (100-1000 heads), what you're proposing is paying scores of business analysts months (years?) worth of time to review business processes, before you even get the teams of IT people to start making the switchover.
And that's not even taking into considering the fact that many large software packages simply do not work under nix and there is no realistic alternative. Basically every industry related to engineering simply cannot switch.
The processes and systems required to build Big Things in the real world are gargantuan and terrifying and sickening. Companies spend hundreds of millions every year putting up with Microsoft's bullshit because there is no alternative.
>The people who still use Windows yet complain about this are quite confusing to me.
What confuses me is how people think theres anything close to an alternative for corporate environments.
Windows isnt Windows. Windows is the best supported OS by the Microsoft cloud stack. They get away with this sort of nonsense because large corps have nowhere to go.
>the cost of switching is just not that high.
Lol, lmao even. The cost of switching one laptop to linux is quite low. The cost of taking an enterprise using Microsoft everywhere to linux is something else entirely.
> They get away with this sort of nonsense because large corps have nowhere to go.
I think a lot of large corps could function quite well with a model like: (a) allow employees to choose a MacBook instead; (b) use various macOS enterprise management tools (such as Jamf); (c) use Windows virtual desktops for Windows-only apps
The main reason many don’t isn’t because this strategy won’t work - it is because it would cost them significantly more than a Windows-only strategy. So they won’t do it, or they will but limit it to only certain job functions (engineering, executives, sales) where the business benefit is clearer
The problem with adding Linux to the mix, is the variability of hardware and distributions can make it a lot more complex to manage, compared to a Windows-only or Windows+Mac fleet. And you also need people in your IT org with the skillset to handle it
>The main reason many don’t isn’t because this strategy won’t work - it is because it would cost them significantly more than a Windows-only strategy. So they won’t do it, or they will but limit it to only certain job functions (engineering, executives, sales) where the business benefit is clearer
Yeah VDI is getting close to universal adoption, but security is always where things come back to. Eventually an end user is going to have something sensitive on their macbook, and they will have fallen through some sort of compliance gap.
Its easier from a compliance standpoint to control everything permissible.
I’m not sure why you were downvoted. I have to use Windows for work. The barrier to entry is simply lower for many system administrators and users alike. The homogeneity of a Windows rollout is extremely attractive. You are going to have a hard sell getting your accounting team and receptionist onto Linux. Your developers will complain and make do. I love complaining about Windows!
> Yes, using original paint in 16 colors saved to PCX in 640x480 should be enough for anybody.
There's a wide, wide gap between adding features that your users need and adding features that you want to cram down their throats to promote other products that you want them to use.
> Or we could let owners of properties add features as they see fit.
Or we could let paying users offer legitimate criticism of the products they use, without essentially telling them to shut up.
I don't think adding an identifier which can most likely be mapped back to user is "standard mark".
It doesn't explicitly say it, but there is hardly any other reason why it would add server generated ID (from authenticated session) to the saved file.
We've probably lost the fight over GenAI marks, at least for now, and I do understand the need for them. However the same technology that can embed an invisible watermark that survives a round of photographing, printing, crumbling and scanning back - can be used to embed more information than just "it's AI generated". Encoding GUID is just a harbinger; as a next step, why not encode the app that produced the image? Also a hash of its license key? Hell, what's stopping an app from doing it itself, watermarking its own window before passing the pixels to OS for compositing?
EU law requires the mark. Did you know about the level of the “so many levels”? If such a large market requires behavior by law, and quite reasonably so, it’s also quite reasonable to mark AI generated content as such.
All the slippery slope nonsense on this page has failed so many times it’s not worth debating. If you don’t like this tool, use another. When they embed your social security number and face and address in the mark get back to me.
It's a pixel-perfect modern clone (with some actually useful extras that won't get in the way unless you look for them), and yes, you can clone the repo and run it locally.
it is kind of interesting when you think about it. what utility does something like paint actually have? did it ever have any real utility? (icon editing?) it always kinda felt like a demo that came with early versions of windows that didn't actually do anything useful.
Used to be you saved and shared screenshots by pasting into Paint and saving it. Printscreen didn't save a file and only some programs (Skype) let you paste the screenshot directly from the clipboard. That's how I remember it anyway.
The utility of Paint is that lightweight software is an absolute fucking godsend (which, Microsoft being Microsoft, is on a mission to ruin). I have all manner of professional tools - Photoshop, Aseprite, Manga Studio, etc, and if the edit is something that can be done in Paint, I will use Paint over any of the others, because I'll be done editing before I've even managed to open the file in another program.
I get the privacy concerns, and we are right to expect Microsoft to say that this is what their tool may be doing. However, I fear that one day we will look back and wonder why we didn't do more to sign and preserve human authenticity. Having a stamp saying "AI manipulated" should be a part of digital lineage tooling.
Well if that's any reassurance, you can generate a meme picture using AI, then paste it into Paint to add some funny text. That way you can get the best of both worlds.
That's nothing new. Ever tried to develop a driver? Or replace a system file? Or install an app on iOS not from the store? That war was lost two decades ago with the iPhone
I would be surprised that anyone is surprised by this. They've been making local accounts harder and harder now to the point of being impossible.
Anyone not deep in tech will accept the "think of the children" defense without much worry, and anyone who is deep in tech already knows that if you really want an OS that doesn't spy on you, you need to go to a *nix of some flavor.
The visible watermark toggle giving users a false sense of control while the invisible GUID persists regardless is the worst part. People who turn off the watermark think they opted out.
The request is JSON and contains at least these fields:..."prompt": "..."
Local SD (especially the earlier versions) is already uncensored, so they're effectively crippling it with additional spyware that phones home to tell Microsoft what you're doing and asking whether they approve of it. IMHO the invisible watermark isn't the worst part, but rather the fact that MS is logging every interaction you have with the model, which doesn't ever need to leave your machine.
As another Linux fan, I don't. What Microsoft does to their users changes the overton window of what's acceptable in tech. Before you know it there will be a politician demanding that all software systems that don't implement such tracking will be outlawed and there will be no one left to speak up to you because they are all already used to the tracking so why should you get a pass.
This is gonna sound a bit harsh, but from the outside it genuinely looks like Microsoft is actively looking for new ways to degrade and humiliate their users. (And having no trouble finding them!)
Scanning the comments, I see some curiosity and outrage but little recognition that this is legally required in places like California and Colorado and Texas and probably some more places.
And federally, the C2PA strongly encourages digital providence albeit without legal consequences... yet.
All AI content coming from companies that service the US market are watermarking things.
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)
Okay, there are watermarks on AI stuff, interesting, not good but everyone else already talked about.
My question..how does it work? Is it robust? I remember that young me hid data in pixels of png with simple stegonagraphy and it was a fun little project..but brittle. How exactly does the fingerprinting survive jpeg compression? Is it repeate over and over the images or is it just one area? If that one is pure black by chance the jpeg algorhitmen would erase it all no?
I'm pretty sure the robustness of watermarking has been a solved problem for at least 30 years, I remember visiting the mit media lab in the mid 90s and they were explaining how they could watermark digital audio by imperceptibly adjusting the acoustics as if the walls of the room the audio has been recorded in were changing distance relative to the microphone according to a wave function
There is no robust-without-qualifiers watermarking. There is only robustness against common operations but as soon as someone is actually trying to remove the watermark they can at the very least use exactly the same technique to embed random noise instead to overwrite your watermark.
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.
It is quite likely that Snipping Tool is also doing this. Every camera also leaves device specific signature because of its inherent silicon sensor defects.
If you want to stay anonymous, don't share images you can't verify at the byte level. Apply filtering to decrease the low bit noise that could hide cryptographic signatures. Don't trust complex container formats.
These days entire scenes can be tweaked by AI to add unimportant but identifying marks, at a level far above signal processing tricks, like moving objects in the scene. Verify from multiple sources.
If Anthropic can manipulate text to add a watermark, what’s preventing providers from doing the same to generated images? Modifying the container format can’t protect you from a signature in the image’s visual representation, unless you apply noise to that (and know it’s enough noise/the right kind of noise to counteract whatever unknown technique they’ve applied).
Anthropic's watermarking technique is possible, and worryingly could effect low frequency choices (eg as I said, with object placement or style). However, this has to be a generation time decision, you can't really do that with a small edit. In fact small edits tend to be detectable spectrally.
Microsoft is in a pretty good position to do something that can be valuable to certain institutions.
Imaging every pdf file, every image, every office documents, and every video has a hidden record of the associated Microsoft accounts of all computers it has ever passed through. This should sell well, and realistically nobody can stop them. Why haven't Microsoft done this much earlier?
Interesting find. Overall it makes sense from a deepfake-fighting perspective and EU requirements. But what's concerning is that users aren't really told about this, as far as I can tell. Would be cool if someone checked if it can be bypassed, like swapping the DLL or intercepting the API call. But yeah, it's another step toward every digital trace becoming personally identifiable...
It's both and the main reason why anti-cheat is needed is the central matchmaking model, which is itself a form of DRM. If people were still hosting smaller community-moderated servers there would not be a need for invasive anti-cheat but people could also pay on cracked servers without paying.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Most of these links weaken your claim rather than support it. The lkml links are patch submissions in a _development_ discussion, not ordinary users running a stable distro. The f2fs bugzilla links are the same issue we already discussed, a regression in the brand-new 6.9 kernel released only days earlier, with the fix landing in 6.9.3. The suse bug is an upstream e2fsprogs issue. This is precisely the kind of issue distro package maintainers can catch, patch, or avoid before it reaches ordinary users on a stable release. The launchpad link is another development discussion, not an example of ordinary users experiencing a bug in a stable release.
Linux does experience regressions, but your argument conflates upstream development, bleeding edge releases, and stable distro releases. Those distinctions are fundamental to how linux distributions work, and these links don't support the claim you're making.
>Most of these links weaken your claim rather than support it.
Yep. Good catch, I think you win the argument. These are all distros that are under development and their underlying issues should never be called-out as handing the user frustration as they willingly chose to become a victim of the kernel.
Do those users use the OS that randomly takes hours to shut down because it desperately needs to install updates right now - and then it won't shut down at all and reboot instead. And even if it doesn't do that shutdown takes ages and you need to attend it and can't just walk away because the OS will drop you in a logged in desktop when some random application decides to interrupt the shutdown process.
> 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.
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.
I always say, "okay, unlock your phone and give it to me for 30 minutes". of course they refuse. "so you don't give your phone to a friend for half an hour, but it's fine if the government and intelligence agencies spy on you 24/7?"
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.
Pretty much all of them. None require online accounts or anything like that. Browser choice is probably more important.
For something that just works I recommend Fedora or Ubuntu. It's what I'd put on my mom or wife's PC.
Currently using Omarchy on my laptop though which is a tad more exotic, it's Arch + Hyprland and is pretty polished for that stack (at least the current version, 4.0) but still a tiny bit of jank.
Use free software. Proprietary software is used by its owners to control you. This is nothing new, just another example to add to the countless ones we already have.
Randomizing bit 0 might not be enough but if you know the algorithm used (and you do in this case because it is applied locally) then you can always replace the embedded data with random noise.
Thanks Microsoft, for adding my signature so I won't have to claim authorship when it ends up in a museum in 200 years, and the NSA archives are declassified for art historians filing a FOIA in 2226, who find out, "yep, it was from his PC."
No, I wasn't suggesting that. I was saying that if there was digital art (human made) aesthetically significant that a curator would want to display it in a museum, Microsoft's GUID supplied to a data collection agency would make it possible to retrieve if ever/whenever that data were declassified (assuming it isn't purged)
It's possible a very bad curator with a terrible taste in art might select slop to display, but I was refering to "fine art" or at least finer art that is digital.
Microsoft quietly embeds a hidden tracking identifier in every AI-generated image you create using Paint or Photos on Windows.
A researcher discovered that these apps embed a server-issued GUID (a globally unique identifier) as an invisible watermark in locally generated AI images.
The watermark is tied to the prompts you type. And since those prompts are associated with your Microsoft account, Microsoft could "theoretically" trace any watermarked image back to the user who created it.
This is recycling an idea from the 80s. Back then, laser printer manufacturers added tiny yellow dot patterns to every printed page. With this, they could identify the printer.
Now Microsoft has brought the same idea to AI image generation, and added it to two of the most widely used default Windows apps.
Microsoft had disclosed its AI safety measures in official documentation, but the practical implication, that your output image file carries an invisible fingerprint linked to your identity, was never clearly mentioned, of course.
The researcher found this by reading Microsoft's own published documentation and analyzing the watermarking mechanics.
AI watermarking is a requirement by law in the EU. But "this image was generated by AI" is different than "this image was generated by AI by Mr. Winston Smith".
For anyone who values privacy, this is something to worry about. If you generate an image locally, on your own device, why should it carry a tag that can identify you to the company whose software you used?
But then, anyone who values their privacy won't be using Microsoft Windows anyway."
Since the cat is out of the bag, I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft generates an invisible watermark for ALL files and not just AI generated ones. The real story is that since AI watermarks are possible, there is no technical barrier to them adding personal EXIF metadata to a file where it can't be seen, removed, or decrypted, whether it is media, a document or other file.
Interesting. I really didn't think watermarks would end up going anywhere, but maybe with enough adoption we can have easy ai generated content flagging after all?
I mean, workarounds wouldn't be hard, just annoying, anyway. Like an extra step or two (take a screenshot, change the image format, wipe the metadata; or print, take photo with camera, clean up in something like gimp, same other steps).
It actually might make the new horrible world even worse. Imagine the populace getting used to a AI image detector flagging things as fake using this fairly easily defeated GUID marker system. Most people are just making memes or cat videos and don't even try to remove this so eventually the populace starts to believe these things actually work.
Now some one slightly more sophisticated starts creating deepfakes of a woman and uploading them or fabricating video of an political event without this marker. The subject protests it's fake and AI generated but a loud majority of ignorants feed it into Microsoft AI detector and call you a liar and say it's confirmed real. Most people don't know any better and eat it up because a computer said so.
US Social Security Numbers are a useful analogy: The designers knew they weren't something anyone could securely depend on, and told people not to do it... but companies did it anyway, for their own convenience and cheap security-theater. Ultimately a lot of individual victims suffered for it.
It would have almost been better if one big incident blew the "knowing an SSN means something" myth apart early on.
Don't use them if it does not fit your requirements. The last ten years I am more that happy with Lazpaint or Libreoffice Draw. The last year I have added Imglass to the mix.
With regards to Microsoft being ... uhm ... "transparent":
> The same page says that generated images:
> “will contain C2PA manifest helping users identify that it is an AI generated image.”
> [...] That is a meaningful disclosure of remote filtering and C2PA metadata.
> C2PA manifest contains a GUID identifying the invisible pixel watermark
> Calling the feature “Content Credentials” is accurate, but it does not
> make this prompt-associated identifier obvious to a Windows user.
I don't think this is accurate, because without that detective work, most
people would have no idea that Microsoft tags and tracks the images here.
This reminds me of printers printing identifiers to ID individuals. What this
to me means is that I can no longer use any such Microsoft services, because
there is no trust for me here. Microsoft sniffs on me, if I were to use these
software products. AI is a big spy-op too.
Microsoft could easily admit "we watermark all your images, whether you like it
or not", but corporate speak forbids this and they don't really admit to it.
They do not use the word watermark officially, but their .dll names reveal it.
That means they resort to deceit and propaganda.
It really is time to strengthen the whole open source ecosystem. I no longer
want my taxpayer's money to go into traitorous US companies that abuse EU
citizens here. (Note: the same would apply to EU companies, but the USA dominates the software sector, unfortunately. This also has to change permanently.)
This muddle of an article makes it totally unclear to me if this GUID is attached by the AI generation call or every image I edit in MS Paint. I'm going to assume the former unless they release a clarification.
Edit: Actually trivial to test, just save an image of all black and see if it suddenly has other values on save.
Assuming the watermark works like the upcoming AI watermark for text, then it uses the content's entropy to embed the information. An all-black image doesn't have much entropy, so it's unlikely you'd find anything.
With every new thing Microsoft goes trying so hard to come out as the good person, but they just cannot help themselves but to inject their evil. It had to be changed with Nadla coming, but their enshitification is just keeps getting worse and worse. What on Earth is this.
Misleading title IMO... here they are using "locally generated output" to specifically mean only AI-generated images, not your "500hrs in MS Paint" hand-made masterpiece.
Until proven otherwise via open-source audits and reproducible binaries, you should assume that all commercial photo editing software is embedding watermarks in any way they can get away with. This includes the professional software that you pay quite expensive licenses for. You should also assume that even if they're not today, they will eventually be coerced into doing so, in the same way that printers embed tracking dots.
You should however not accept this state of affairs even if you exclusively use open source software because the next step is that it become illegal to have photo editing software that doesn't include the tracking information needed to protect the children, fight terrorists or whatever the boogeyman of the day is.
Ya know, this would probably be pointless but if I were a programmer (I'm not -and refuse to be a vibe coder) I'd probably just grab appropriate libraries and make my own replacements for this shit. GLTK+ (?) is an obvious choice to use for recreating mspaint, and to replace notepad -I was told making a simple editor was an excercise they have you do when you learn programming to begin with?
I already replaced the 'solitaire' games suite with pysol running on WSL2 and it's a vast improvement!
tldr -if MS is going to screw us, why don't we mitigate it by using replacements?
I'm honestly surprised they don't upload the entire image to apply the watermark server-side, to the point that I'd like someone else to repeat this investigation and confirm it's not happening.
Shipping the watermark generator on user's machine would make it very easy for someone motivated to find how it works and write a "watermark remover".
If C2PA and similar signature systems ever become a meaningful authenticity signal, they will create huge incentives for someone (potentially a state actor) to hack at least one camera in order to sign images of arbitrary provenance with its private keys. This will in turn inevitably lead to the same game of cat-and-mouse we have seen play out with video DRM schemes, where keys are regularly extracted from exploitable devices and used to decrypt as much content as possible before the device gets blacklisted entirely (harming all legitimate owners in the process).
I've done this btw. I went for the Pixel Camera app since they were the ones bragging the hardest about their "security". Writeup + PoC should be dropping some time tomorrow. Despite 90+ days from initial report, it remains unpatched.
I don't think that that's a good idea, because it implies trust when there actually isn't any.
Being signed with something just means that whoever has that key could've done that. That might be the owner of a specific camera, but it might also be the camera manufacturer, anyone else in the supply chain, or anyone who dumped the key.
Imagine fake evidence signed with the same key as your camera uses being used in court against you. And the court believes it because it has this signature attached and those computers are very secure and all.
Exactly that will happen. Not widespread, of course, but it will.
The hard part is deciding how much post processing is acceptable with these images. Feels like a lot of phone cameras optimize images and curious how much of it is considered “AI”
I was thinking any photo created with a camera should be signed. Why we don't have that in 2026 is beyond me.
But what you're talking about is the generative aspect of these photos likely expanding over time. We're seeing that today with the ultra zoom features on some cameras regenerating objects (and especially text). Without the user doing anything the phone will generatively fill in detail, most worryingly text and people. Then there's the Samsung moon issue - taking a photo of a pixelated printout of the moon caused Samsung phones to generate a new image of the moon.
In the imaginary dream world that Adobe, Google et al live in, the final file does indeed have a signature.
Each piece of software in the chain must use TPM-like technologies (yes, even GIMP) to make sure it's running a "legitimate" build of the software, on "legitimate" hardware, and re-sign the file at each step along the way (using keys provisioned during some flavour of remote attestation flow, or using a RA-authenticated remote-signing oracle).
The final file embeds every preceding manifest, so you can "verify" all the way back to the original.
If this all sounds patently unworkable, that's because it is.
OK, but given that GIMP is a general purpose tool, what use is the signature if all of them verify it, when I can drastically change the image to whatever I want it to be?
The manifests at each step can embed a thumbnail (although this is optional, iiuc!), so looking at the thumbnail history it should be obvious that the edit was significant.
Presumably the OP is proposing something like a TPM attached to the image sensor that signs the sensor output or something like that. You can’t sign it because you can’t get the key out. The key could be per-camera and be a published list.
I suppose a dedicated fraudster could still stage an appropriate scene. An appropriately lit matte image might even suffice.
At the very least there is always the analog hole where you point the camera at a sufficiently high quality screen. The sensor can't tell whether the light it receives was emitted by sunlight reflecting (and refracting) from someone's face or by a bunch of LEDs pointed at the sensor.
That's assuming they don't just have a backdoor inserted expressly for this purpose. Now only the rich or powerful can produce an "authentic" recording of an event and the same system can be used to hunt down whistleblowers and political enemies by looking up who bought the camera.
Keys could be stored in something like TPM on Camera, and could sign the image. The key could then be verified from the camera itself to prove the authenticity of the image.
If we as a society deemed it necessary, the camera manufacturer could also provide a list of keys for devices they have manufactured. And an image/key could be provided, and the manufacturer could verify the authenticity that way.
The TPM signing could be tied into the sensor hardware itself, making it difficult, but not impossible, to sign arbitrary images with the TPM.
If the TPM signs the original image taken by the camera, then even the slightest image processing on another device would invalidate the signature. Routine changes like cropping, scaling, converting between image formats / quality levels, or applying image filters would invalidate the signature.
An adversary can manipulate the date/time settings on the camera and forge evidence to frame someone. "This cryptographically signed photo, with timestamp, proves that you were here at this time!"
And camera sensors can get damaged and need replacement. But if replacement of the TPM-and-sensor chip is allowed, then you can just as well replace it with a sensor from another camera. In which case a signature from a specific TPM+sensor doesn't prove that a specific camera took the photo, at best it might be evidence that a specific camera model took the photo.
If the manufacturer will happily ship a replacement TPM+sensor for a specific camera, someone can fraudulently claim that their sensor is broken and be given a new TPM+sensor for the same camera. And there will now be multiple TPM+sensors in existence that have the same key. Since this module can be switched between cameras, there could be multiple cameras that signed a given picture.
To ship (identical) replacement TPMs, the manufacturer would also need to know the private keys of all the cameras, so the manufacturer could forge arbitrary signatures at will.
Finally maybe the manufacturer doesn't want to deal with the above problems and decides that repairing the camera's TPM is not allowed after all, or that only the manufacturer is allowed to repair a camera, but then they may be in violation of right-to-repair laws in several jurisdictions.
The point of the key (as the for some reason dead comment points out), is not to prove who took the photo, but what device took the photo. Just as if someone stole a hardware token with a PGP key on could impersonate the owner. The key itself doesn't prove a person, just a device.
If a key was reset, a revocation of the original key could be issued, showing that the key was associated with the device for this particular time span. And then the new key registered.
This is ripe for abuse though, so resetting a TPM might not be accepted for this use case. I'm not certain in which case you'd want to reset a TPM for this use case though. Unless you took enough photos with the device to risk a birthday attack if you were using something like ECDSA.
When I was in photography class in college, I created backplates in photoshop for still life portraits of small trinkets I was photographing. The photos were taken on black and white film and developed in the campus dark room. Led to some impressive photos. In our class's critiques, I explained how it was done. A lot of peers went from impressed to meh'd. The point: the black and white film laundered the new-age manipulation, and a digitally signed photo from a modern camera remains vulnerable to the same premise.
No. You'd only ever be able to show that key material belonging to $specific_camera was used to sign/mark the image.
Was the camera manufacturer breached? Did somebody on the factory floor steal some keys during the provisioning step? Or did somebody build their own photo-sensor simulator and plug _that_ in to the camera's motherboard to feed it a "real" image? Before going _that_ far, just point the unmodified camera at a sufficiently high resolution display...
"I think it would be nice if all pens added a unique isotopic tracer signature to their ink. You could tell exactly who wrote everything."
"I think it would be nice if all typewriters had their unique fine-detail type artifacts registered with the government. You could tell exactly who authored a given document."
I think it would be nice if you took these ideas back to Stalinist Russia where they belong.
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