Comment by jacquesm
4 hours ago
Nice sleuthing!
We do a similar thing to mark documents that are still under embargo and one day I forgot to remove the watermark. The customer complained they had not received the document (a day or two after I sent it), and much searching was done. Finally we found a line in an outlook log on their end that said that the watermark was the reason the file had been put in indefinite quarantine until someone would take a look at it.
That's when I realized my error, and of course it was soon fixed afterwards. It is the first proof that it worked though, so I'm kind of happy about that.
Note also if you cite LLM output on Hacker News, your post will likely get flagged and shadowbanned ("dead"), even if the citation had nothing to do with spam. Apparently Hacker News is using Pangram now to check all comments for LLM content.
Can confirm, got caught by it once. We were discussing if prompt engineering is still relevant, and I copied both the prompt I used and the output I've got. I realized I was shadowbanned because I'm not logged in on every device I use for browsing HN.
pretty crafty i must say hats off. i will steal this idea if you dont mind!
Feel free! The easiest way to do this is white text on a white background on the last page of the document. If you want to do it on every page do it in the header or the footer. Font size '1' for bonus points ;)
Now I'm curious: what was in the watermark that would trigger Outlook? (I'm having some fun speculating. My guess right now is a ye olde "bu¥ vi@gr@ ch33p!!!!" spam trigger.)
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remember about aria-hidden or equivalent, otherwise you are making the text visible to screen reader users.
I have read many snide comments and personal ID numbers that way, mostly in public and public-ish documents.
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Amusingly Nathan For You did this in a humourous way back in 2014 (S02E06 - "Party Planner").
What's the benefit? It appears that the outlook rejection was unintended. So against llm processing?
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