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How can I upload books (to libgen, et al) without a trace back to me? (lemy.lol)

submitted 3 months ago by matcha_addict@lemy.lol to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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I know Calibre can remove DRM, but it seems that Calibre does not remove things like watermarks, references to the buyer by name, etc. Now maybe I can try to find those manually, but that is an error prone process. Plus, what if they embed a unique digital signature that ties back to me? I understand that this is a very uncommon practice, but I do not want to find myself in a bad place.

I suppose the only way to remove a digital signature of any sort is to buy two of the same e-book by different people, diff them, and remove anything that differentiates them.

Is there any tool that does this or automates the process? am I being too paranoid, and this is not a real threat?

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[-] FierySpectre@lemmy.world 9 points 3 months ago

But then those images could contain the very fingerprints he's trying to avoid

[-] Lemongrab@lemmy.one 2 points 3 months ago

Theoretically, yes. Handling of images programmatically could allow for some simple lossy compression which would help.

[-] iopq@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

You can mess with the levels to see any hidden watermarks

[-] FierySpectre@lemmy.world 8 points 3 months ago

There are so many ways to encode information into an image without changing its look that I doubt you'll find most of them by "changing levels"

[-] conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 months ago

I'd personally be a lot more likely to blur and add random noise, then use lossy compression if I wanted to mitigate steganography, but even then, they don't need to encode a lot of information and they have a base image and secrets to compare to. It's entirely possible for them to have chosen something reasonably robust through random edits like that.