Canadian election databases use "canary traps"–and they work

ColinWright 43 points 5 comments May 04, 2026
arstechnica.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (4 comments)

rdevilla

As the article states, it's an older practice so this maybe goes without saying - canary traps are also useful for tracking the flow of information throughout a population. A well crafted, bespoke whisper passed into one ear that returns to you from another direction is a very strong signal.

varun_ch

This reminds me of some ways Microsoft used to try catching/dissuading leakers. If someone could find a source for these.. The Xbox 360's dashboard used to have 'aesthetic' rings that actually encoded your serial number, so they could catch leakers I think I remember hearing somewhere (maybe Dave's Garage) about beta builds of Windows using intricate patterns as wallpapers to trick people into thinking it was also a leak prevention measure.

JumpCrisscross

Does anyone have a link to a knowledgeable summary of the political situation in Edmonton?

dataflow

How do you prevent this from being trivially defeated by getting multiple copies of the list and intersecting them?

Semantic search powered by Rivestack pgvector
8,303 stories · 78,303 chunks indexed