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Comment by robbiet480

2 years ago

"No way to prevent this," says only forum where this regularly happens

I don't know why they would want to prevent it. It's free publicity for them with no consequences. They just have to make sure to delete it eventually.

do you have any actionable suggestions aside from moderator-approved messages or turning the forum read-only?

information suppression is pretty tough work, especially when you're trying to suppress the unknown.

  • Train a ML model as a classified document classifier and scan everything through that... now they just need to dig through their archives for the training set from all the past leaks.

  • Isn't there standard text on these? On a cover page and/or headers/footers?

    I get that the content of the documents is not known, but I would think the structure of them is known and could be matched on. Perhaps specific phrases that are only likely to appear in military documents, or a classification level in a header/footer, or even some specific combination of font, font weight, line spacing and indentation.

    They could maybe even slurp up the text from PDF's they blocked to prevent someone from posting similar plaintext. Probably not, though, because an endpoint that says whether something is or isn't classified is basically a classified document generator with enough time or clever tricks.

    Then just forward the reports to whatever country's military owns those docs (or let the company's government do that). I think War Thunder only needs to make a nominal effort; the various militaries of the world will take care of backing it up with a dire threat.

    • > Perhaps specific phrases that are only likely to appear in military documents, or a classification level in a header/footer, or even some specific combination of font, font weight, line spacing and indentation.

      Do you have any idea how difficult it would be to maintain a database of distinguishing sensitive marks on documents?

      Hell, some documents are so protected even the labeling is protected information.

      Infeasible.

      Edit: I don't mean infeasible or difficult from a technical standpoint. I mean procedurally, this isn't viable. You couldn't accomplish it in a way that wouldn't be so full of holes as to be functionally useless.

  • Probably the only thing they could do to fix this problem for good is to basically not include any modern equipment at all.

    • Even then, don't they have the type of userbase that would still keep arguing about equipment that is not in the game?

Would it be possible that these leaks happen on purpose?

  • Not really much of a conspiracy there, most of the "leaks" are technically public info NATO documents, War Thunder's developer doesn't want to touch ANYTHING that might have been classified at one point.

  • That is almost certainly what is happening. There are tens of millions of Westerners who are sympathetic towards the adversaries of the West (primarily Russia).

    • Don't attribute to malice what could be attributed to stupidity.

      Most or War Thunder leaks were basically "the in game stats are wrong, here is the proof: [CLASSIFIED DOC]".

      And in other cases (like the Ukraine War leaks on Discord) it's just flexing like "I know things you common folks don't know".

      It doesn't mean nefarious leaks for money or sympathy don't occur, but there are generally far less visible.