Years ago, EVE corps swapped Unicode lookalike characters in patterned ways, inserted patterned zero width space characters, and put very slightly color shifted background watermarks into forum posts to detect leaks.
There are a few different things here. The actual steganography technique by Claude Code here is fairly smart and subtle; it's appropriate for a binary signal. The less-clever part is the implementation of the underhanded code on the client.
For "MMO geopolitics fingerprinting", you can in theory do the entire thing mostly or entirely from the server, with the client not actually ever receiving any underhanded code per se. Such as sending dynamic stylesheets that vary in a pretty plausibly deniable way that can be secretly extracted from screenshots. Same for the character swap stuff. A very good analyst could still potentially detect it, but it's much harder.
With this, there's the smoking gun of the semi-deobfuscated underhanded code in the client. It will always have to exist in some form, but you can write it in a way where it not just looks like regular code but actually has a believable purpose and behavior which could plausibly be normal and benign for implementation of a feature or telemetry or whatever. They did not really do it in a sufficiently "cleverly psyop-y" way, so to speak.
That would actually be an interesting thing to read about
Years ago, EVE corps swapped Unicode lookalike characters in patterned ways, inserted patterned zero width space characters, and put very slightly color shifted background watermarks into forum posts to detect leaks.
There are a few different things here. The actual steganography technique by Claude Code here is fairly smart and subtle; it's appropriate for a binary signal. The less-clever part is the implementation of the underhanded code on the client.
For "MMO geopolitics fingerprinting", you can in theory do the entire thing mostly or entirely from the server, with the client not actually ever receiving any underhanded code per se. Such as sending dynamic stylesheets that vary in a pretty plausibly deniable way that can be secretly extracted from screenshots. Same for the character swap stuff. A very good analyst could still potentially detect it, but it's much harder.
With this, there's the smoking gun of the semi-deobfuscated underhanded code in the client. It will always have to exist in some form, but you can write it in a way where it not just looks like regular code but actually has a believable purpose and behavior which could plausibly be normal and benign for implementation of a feature or telemetry or whatever. They did not really do it in a sufficiently "cleverly psyop-y" way, so to speak.