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by ajb 1120 days ago
It's been known for a long time that the bandwidth steganography is limited to the amount of randomness in the open data, eg Anderson and Peticolas "On the limits of steganography", '98 (I hope that's the right one anyway - a while since I read it). Which implies that if someone came up with a good reason to publish a bunch of high entropy randomness, the world would have much greater bandwidth of potential steganographic channels.

Now AI has done this for us. I suppose that under authoritarian regimes you will soon have to cryptographically prove that you generated your random bits deterministically from specific keys.
1 comments
staunton 1120 days ago
> I suppose that under authoritarian regimes you will soon have to cryptographically prove that you generated your random bits deterministically from specific keys

I guess that's sarcasm but I don't really get it.

Just in case you mean it, that doesn't seem even remotely technically doable to me. And even if you managed to make people generate all randomness from a fixed PRNG with key escrow, you would have to check what they did with that randomness. If you're willing to go that far, the obvious way to go is to just ban the internet completely (and perhaps also people talking to each other).

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nl 1120 days ago
While I'm sure it is sarcastic it's worth noting that most (all?) blockchain wallets already do this.

Technically it's in reverse: the seed is random and then serialized into a human readable seed phrase but the deterministic key generation is already widely deployed.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Deterministic_wallet

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nullc 1116 days ago
There is even code to code secrets into grammars with perfect uniformity. https://github.com/sipa/gramtropy

But it only works on specially constructed grammars and not LLMs. :)

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ajb 1120 days ago
Don't forget that an authoritarian state can use punishment as leverage - they don't need to do all the diligence themselves, they can just punish you if you can't prove that your random numbers were generated deterministically.

But I was being a bit facetious. Most likely they would just to punish people who are caught using steganography.

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