Comment by xlii
3 months ago
Byte value is a count of flipped bits. Those bits aren’t even guaranteed to be correct (see cosmic bit flipping) and yet our computers work this out.
IMO this is risky because it’s easy to distribute upload, e.g. I could have infected, semi popular website that would submit distributed request on visit (think about it like 1000 credits daily to use to encode message). Visitors of this website wouldn’t see a thing and yet the encoded message would be consistent.
As for other websites - especially free image hosts - they often keep a metric ton of data, some won’t work if you won’t have an identifiable partner cookie on submission request, and there is post upload analysis etc.
like yes, theoretically somebody could probably manage to encode a few bytes of secret message.
but it's just that there's so many easier and better ways to do that, and even if they managed to accomplish it here it's hardly hurting this project - worst case scenario it's a bit of unwanted noise. it seems very silly to worry about it.