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by ButlerianJihad 10 days ago
It didn't matter; once I found out even the possibilities for steganography across a large catalog of JPEG images, it was game over for me. It doesn't matter if there were zero or five dozen secret messages in the files I forwarded. I didn't want to be a conduit for that possibility.

The risk, of becoming a mule, an unwitting accessory to some evil cause, was just far outweighing the rewards of sharing dumb crap with my mother, you know?
1 comments
drugstorecowboy 10 days ago
But.. unless your mother or the people she was sharing them with were the intended target of the secret messages how would you be a mule? Do you think terrorists were depending on you to save the memes so that later they could break into your sweet meme stash and find all their evil secret plans?

Normally would not comment just to make fun of someone but this is just a wild take, how could you be sure that HN is not full of coded messages?

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ButlerianJihad 10 days ago
You're begging the question that secret messages necessarily require "targets" to work or to be passed along. That is not true.

If your pastime involved trading envelopes with other collectors of envelopes, and you started passing along a bunch of sealed envelopes with unknown contents, how would you feel? Or if you enjoyed well-constructed cartons, and you found yourself trafficking in sealed cartons with unknown contents? That would basically make you a shipping, receiving, and logistics provider. Anything at all could be in those parcels. Why do it? Why open up to risk?

The main point here is that there was no point to my trading in memes. It was recreation; it was optional; it was totally a lark with my boomer mom and her audience. I had no reason to look at these memes and I had no reason to forward them on. Sure, the risk was very, very low that anyone "evil" was encoding "secret messages" or "targeting" anyone I knew. But since I had no reason to engage in this activity in the first place, why not quit? Why not just distance myself? Thereby removing 100% of the risk.

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drugstorecowboy 9 days ago
To be honest with you, you haven't convinced me. Secret messages do in fact require "targets"... I would love to hear an example of a situation where someone might want to send a secret message with no "targets" in mind. For all you know, my replies are coded messages and you are providing the cover for it right now. And to use your example were I trying to traffic in something illicit, handing it to a random carton or envelope collector in the hopes that they will trade it again to the intended person would be an extremely risky and ineffective method of doing that, so ineffective in fact that I would never consider that to be possible. Someone attaching a package to the underside of your car and the target grabbing it when you park would be much more likely, would actually make sense, and still is not really a risk worth considering.

I don't agree with you at all, nor do I understand how your mind works, but I very much appreciate you taking the time to respond and respect your commitment not to facilitate anything nefarious even though we disagree.

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