Faking a JPEG
27 comments
·July 11, 2025EspadaV9
creatonez
For the full experience:
Firefox: Press F12, go to Network, click No Throttling > change it to GPRS
Chromium: Press F12, go to Network, click No Throttling > Custom > Add Profile > Set it to 20kbps and set the profile
myelinsheep
Anything with Shakespeare in it?
mrbluecoat
> I felt sorry for its thankless quest and started thinking about how I could please it.
A refreshing (and amusing) attitude versus getting angry and venting on forums about aggressive crawlers.
ASalazarMX
Helped without doubt by the capacity to inflict pain and garbage unto those nasty crawlers.
marcod
Reading about Spigot made me remember https://www.projecthoneypot.org/
I was very excited 20 years ago, every time I got emails from them that the scripts and donated MX records on my website had helped catching a harvester
> Regardless of how the rest of your day goes, here's something to be happy about -- today one of your donated MXs helped to identify a previously unknown email harvester (IP: 172.180.164.102). The harvester was caught a spam trap email address created with your donated MX:
Modified3019
Love the effort.
That said, these seem to be heavily biased towards displaying green, so one “sanity” check would be if your bot is suddenly scraping thousands of green images, something might be up.
recursive
Mission accomplished I guess
derefr
> It seems quite likely that this is being done via a botnet - illegally abusing thousands of people's devices. Sigh.
Just because traffic is coming from thousands of devices on residential IPs, doesn't mean it's a botnet in the classical sense. It could just as well be people signing up for a "free VPN service" — or a tool that "generates passive income" for them — where the actual cost of running the software, is that you become an exit node for both other "free VPN service" users' traffic, and the traffic of users of the VPN's sibling commercial brand. (E.g. scrapers like this one.)
This scheme is known as "proxyware" — see https://www.trendmicro.com/en_ca/research/23/b/hijacking-you...
cAtte_
sounds like a botnet to me
derefr
Eh. To me, a bot is something users don't know they're running, and would shut off if they knew it was there.
Proxyware is more like a crypto miner — the original kind, from back when crypto-mining was something a regular computer could feasibly do with pure CPU power. It's something users intentionally install and run and even maintain, because they see it as providing them some potential amount of value. Not a bot; just a P2P network client.
Compare/contrast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winny / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_(P2P) / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Dark_(P2P) — pieces of software which offer users a similar devil's bargain, but instead of "you get a VPN; we get to use your computer as a VPN", it's "you get to pirate things; we get to use your hard drive as a cache node in our distributed, encrypted-and-striped pirated media cache."
(And both of these are different still to something like BitTorrent, where the user only ever seeds what they themselves have previously leeched — which is much less questionable in terms of what sort of activity you're agreeing to play host to.)
tgsovlerkhgsel
AFAIK much of the proxyware runs without the informed consent of the user. Sure, there may be some note on page 252 of the EULA of whatever adware the user downloaded, but most users wouldn't be aware of it.
ronsor
because it is, but it's a legal botnet
lblume
Given that current LLMs do not consistently output total garbage, and can be used as judges in a fairly efficient way, I highly doubt this could even in theory have any impact on the capabilities of future models. Once (a) models are capable enough to distinguish between semi-plausible garbage and possibly relevant text and (b) companies are aware of the problem, I do not think data poisoning will be an issue at all.
jesprenj
Yes, but you still waste their processing power.
immibis
There's no evidence that the current global DDoS is related to AI.
bschwindHN
You should generate fake but believable EXIF data to go along with your JPEGs too.
russelg
They're taking the valid JPEG headers from images already on their site, so it's possible those are already in place.
derektank
From the headline that's actually what I was expecting the link to discuss
puttycat
> compression tends to increase the entropy of a bit stream.
Does it? Encryption increases entropy, but not sure about compression.
gregdeon
Yes: the reason why some data can be compressed is because many of its bits are predictable, meaning that it has low entropy per bit.
JCBird1012
I can see what was meant with that statement. I do think compression increases Shannon entropy by virtue of it removing repeating patterns of data - Shannon entropy per byte of compressed data increases since it’s now more “random” - all the non-random patterns have been compressed out.
Total information entropy - no. The amount of information conveyed remains the same.
hashishen
the hero we needed and deserved
dheera
> So the compressed data in a JPEG will look random, right?
I don't think JPEG data is compressed enough to be indistinguishable from random.
SD VAE with some bits lopped off gets you better compression than JPEG and yet the latents don't "look" random at all.
So you might think Huffman encoded JPEG coefficients "look" random when visualized as an image but that's only because they're not intended to be visualized that way.
I like this one
https://www.ty-penguin.org.uk/~auj/spigot/pics/2025/03/25/fa...
Some kind of statement piece