Paranoid question
Community Forums/General Help/Paranoid question
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| I'll probably make an idiot of myself for asking this, but I don't care. Can files contain hidden information about the owner of the computer they were made on? I'm making spinoffs that could possibly upset the makers of the originals, and even though I'm not selling them, and I'm even making them anonymously, still... they ARE outright spinoffs, and might cause a backlash. The biggest part of my fear is that I bought my new computer with someone else's credit card, and the computer has I think a unique service tag. Could that person's identity get linked to my games by the service tag and or credit card number being hidden somewhere in the cryptic looking data of my game files? I can't read it, and I don't know what the heck it says, so it's really bugging me, and I'm going to be using all kinds of files like that, exes, pngs, oggs, et cetera. I know it sounds paranoid, but hey, who really knows what's in all that stuff that's in most files, you know? I'm just worried about the person whose credit card I used, and therefore dread making games now cause of what could happen, so please be gentle in your replies. Last edited 2012 |
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| This is beyond paranoid - this is tinfoil hat territory. The computer will not have any details on it about the credit card that was used to buy it with. Also, don't make games that infringe copyright. I'm not even going to go into the reasons why because I've had a bad day and I can't be bothered - just don't do it. |
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| Credit card info is very serious - there's no way any OEM would somehow register it in something as trivial as files. Just for the sake of argument though, there is a way to store "hidden" data in your files, at least in Window's NTFS (new technology file system). They're the Alternate Data Streams (ADS). When you look at a file's properties through Windows, you can see a "Summary" or "Details" tab which includes Tags, Author's name, Comments, Copyright etc. as text information. Most of the time the file won't have any of these streams\they'll be blank - if you create a TXT file right now, for instance, it won't have any of this information. But you (or a software) is capable of adding information to a file using this feature. Using ADS, you could hide a movie file or something big that totals in the Gigabytes inside a simple MP3 file that's about a few megs - and it wouldn't show up in the total file size (the OS doesn't show the size of the ADS but just the default stream, which is the file's content). Article about the ADS: http://www.riyazwalikar.com/2009/09/ntfs-alternate-data-streams.html At the end there's a download for an application that reads the ADS of a file and let's you extract or delete them. There seems to be another here as well: http://www.softecdesign.com/NoFrames/Eng/ADSView.htm |
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| @Kryzon: sure it's possible to store "hidden" data in files. Images get abused for it "all the time", just look it up. There are enough tools available to store (encrypted) data in some file without anyone but its users knowing it. |
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| Many types of files like Word documents DO contain out-of-band metadata about the owner and creator of the file. Even jpegs taken by digital cameras can contain GPS data showing where and when the picture was taken and on what phone. It's very possible that Adobe products and other photo editing utilities put invisible stegonographic watermarks in the images they produce-- it's even possible to do this in such a way that the watermark is visible through substantial image degradation. It's not tinfoil hat territory when they really are bombarding you with hate rays. At some point I think the credit card WILL be tied to the computer in some way. At this point it is not, but CPU ID and other unique features of computers would make it possible for governments to track the purchaser of a given computer. I'm not sure but I think it's very likely that certain compilers like VC++ encode the CPU ID in .exes that they compile. If you are paranoid about this sort of thing you are better off using GNU. Unfortunately I think the original question was quite reasonable given the state of things. |
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| Makes it sound like you swiped someones card and bought a pc with it, and are afraid to make anything that might link you to the stolen card :) I'm just sayin, sounds a bit.. off |
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