This is the stage I (and others) are at times set to. You see, I needed an alternative to keeping my IP in house, in house is data at rest and people will get to it, large companies have no scruples when it comes to profit and some are a lot more desperate than others. So I had to create a place where no one would look and I went to a place where EVERYONE looked. The safest place is often underfoot. This is not a place I created, someone created this setting for me. If I was a betting man, I would think it was the Russian Mafia and one of them was a photographing enthusiast.
He (or she) was good enough to have it on the dark web under the eyes of the NSA for a long time. In the end I have no knowledge if he ever got caught, but the idea was really good, and I stumbled upon it by pure accident. That person, or someone connected to him made the error of placing the photoshop PSD online. If it had been a JPG file, I would never have been the wiser. But it was a photo of the Kremlin. I was looking for a different building and no matter how you set it, the Kremlin is a beautiful building, as is the grand mosque of Riyadh. It does not take an architect to admire the beauty of a building. One does not need to be from San Francisco to admire the Transamerica Pyramid. So there I was looking at the Kremlin in Photoshop. And I suddenly noticed something, in JPG I would have missed it. There was a second magenta level. One was #FF00FF, the second one was #FF02FF and that layer had morse code.
Now consider a photo, 6720 × 4480 and morse is merely one pixel high. I can easily hide 60 lines in there without anything or anyone picking it up, the eyes cannot differentiate a pixel that is #ff02FF instead of #FF00FF, and if you have two layers. One in Magenta, One is Cyan #02FFFF added to #00FFFF and they end up in a JPG, you have a novel way of hiding a text, especially when it is morse and especially if the only way is to merge #FF02FF and #02FFFF into a combined layer. Consider that and consider
“.. -. ….. –. – …. . .-. . .- .-. . – .– — -.. .. — . -. … .. — -. … – …. .- – .- .-. . .. –. -. — .-. . -.. –..– — . .-. . .-.. -.– -… . -.-. .- ..- … . – …. . – . .-.. . -.-. — — -.-. — — .–. .- -. .. . … .. –. -. — .-. . – …. . -. . . -.. — ..-. – …. . -.-. — -. … ..- — . .-. … .-.-.-“, now consider that this line is one pixel high, I could add 120 lines on each picture and I am smart enough to only place the JPG in a place where 27,000,000 people roam, over all the boards, 3 sets of 4 dozen pictures does not even raise an eyebrow and as the images are not upsetting anyone, no one cares. I never uploaded them from anywhere I worked or lived. So good luck finding them, but on July 30th those images get a reduced limelight and that is the start of a race where some Americans are not invited. They had their chance and now lets see how some treat free IP, will they adhere and respect the consumer or will they make the same mistake?
It was my way out, live or die, my IP will survive and it optionally will land in hands willing to keep the options open. Others had their options and were willing to make the bet that they could outthink me. But when you see where they would not look, because the margins were expected to remain low, how does that make them worthy of billions? You see, when you’ve never had that, you will never miss it and like others I have pride and I have ego and I find Microsoft unworthy, especially after they betrayed the gaming community (as I personally see it) after they got whipped by Nintendo in gaming (Nintendo Switch) after they got handed their guts with the Surface (Apple iPad) and soon after Adobe slaps them silly and take away their Powerpoint market. After Amazon removes their cloud presence in business and gaming. Why should they be allowed to live longer? They failed in 4 markets, isn’t that enough to ignore them?
Now I am making sure that they cannot claim any of my IP as I set it to an encrypted setting on the internet. And without those logs they remain clueless. I might never be rich, but I’ll have the last laugh and if Amazon catches on what Microsoft missed in META, they will be reduced to a third world IT company that will leave the top 10 of wealth players before 2030. There is only so much failure that they can adjust for, and we get it things go wrong “Uninstall Windows 11 KB5012643 if it crashes your apps”, I personally reckon that proper testing might have prevented a lot, but that might merely be me. We need to consider what we do and even as the US department of Defense trusts them, it does not mean that we need to make that same mistake. In all this, the useful unregistered IP was a way to keep my IP free from certain hassle and it was needed, especially as I find that time is running out and as more and more companies are getting weirdly nervous and greed driven to obtain more and more revenue. Microsoft is not alone, but it is the most visible one, partly due to all the corrections that Microsoft marketing needs to make on a global setting. So I rely on unregistered IP to keep mine decently safe and it is underfoot of a few players who never considered to look where everyone else was looking, they only needed the right pair of shades to see what needed to be seen. Are you catching on yet?
We need to change the way we think, or we become truly lost.
Lawrence van Rijn - Law Lord to be 