Hacker News

points by saidnooneever 1 day ago | 0 comments

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 ;)

[–] apublicfrog 1 day ago

Amusingly Nathan For You did this in a humourous way back in 2014 (S02E06 - "Party Planner").

[–] thedrexster 13 hours ago

I'm watching this now and _dying_, thank you!

[–] jacquesm 12 hours ago

That's evil.

[–] nxobject 1 day ago

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.)

[–] jacquesm 1 day ago

No, it was a bit more subtle than that but I'm definitely not going to post the secret sauce in an open forum. The trick is to trigger the filters in a way that they'll block the mail completely, not just spam trap it.

[–] nojs 1 day ago

Aren’t you running a high risk of your own email or other cloud accounts getting flagged doing this? What if your email provider (‘s AI agent) had permanently banned your account?

[–] notatoad 1 day ago

i think the point is that you're not sending these docs over email, and they never actually trigger the filter they might trigger. if you're emailing docs containing the "don't email me" trap often enough that you get your account flagged, you've got bigger problems.

[–] jacquesm 1 day ago

That's a risk, but not as big a risk as a report escaping quarantine.

[–] Geezus_42 20 hours ago

Zix/Appriver outbound quarantine was built for exactly that purpose.

[–] Geezus_42 20 hours ago

It usually takes more than one email unless its flagged as having malicious contents.

[–] rzzzt 1 day ago

Joining in on the speculation game: the EICAR string maybe?

[–] LelouBil 1 day ago

Oh I didn't know about this thing, thanks for the discovery.

[–] hosteur 23 hours ago

EICAR?

[–] b3lvedere 22 hours ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EICAR_test_file

[–] hosteur 21 hours ago

Indeed. My comment was meant as a guess on what they put in their watermark.

[–] b3lvedere 20 hours ago

Ah, i see. Apologies.

[–] miki123211 1 day ago

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.

[–] jacquesm 1 day ago

Oh, that's funny. I don't mind people with screen readers reading it. The Venn diagram with 'people with screen readers' on one side and 'people that are about to break an embargo' must be an interesting subset.

[–] sroussey 1 day ago

AI often goes the screen reader route though..

[–] jacquesm 1 day ago

Yes, I'm counting on that specifically.

[–] Xirdus 1 day ago

Probably getting larger and larger with all the agentic workflows popping up as of late.

[–] trinari 1 day ago

What's the benefit? It appears that the outlook rejection was unintended. So against llm processing?

[–] strbean 1 day ago

The embargo was enforced. This slightly mitigates scenarios where someone accidentally sends a document via email while it is under embargo.