Ancestors

Written by Chris Armstrong on 2025-02-02 at 10:22

The Simple Sabotage Field Manual has had nearly 200,000 downloads from Project Gutenberg in the last 30 days. I have no idea why...

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Written by Chris Armstrong on 2025-02-02 at 10:27

Well, that's extremely fun....

"Saturate a sponge with a thick starch or sugar solution. Squeeze it tightly into a ball, wrap it with string, and dry. Remove the string when fully dried. The sponge will be in the form of a tight hard ball. Flush down a W. C. or otherwise introduce into a sewer line. The sponge will gradually expand to its normal size and plug the sewage system."

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Written by Chris Armstrong on 2025-02-02 at 10:32

A digital equivalent to this sort of thing is that if you accidentally apply formatting to every excel cell, that's every cell up to XFD1048576, you can make them absolutely huge and unusable.

And the old student trick of changing a .mp3 to .pdf, uploading it to an assignment, and claiming the system must have corrupted it so you need an extension.

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Written by C. Anthony Lewis on 2025-02-02 at 11:31

@Rhodium103 does it get worse the more formatting one adds or is it just some formatting? I could suck it and see but it's Sunday (although I might try in a jiffy). Why .mp3 in particular?

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Written by Chris Armstrong on 2025-02-02 at 11:41

@morgrugyn

Haven't tested extensively across multiple versions. Just accidentally did it once and it took me a while to figure out what went wrong (and if it takes me a while, it's probably insurmountable for most people). It's probably just that it now needs to hold millions of cells worth of formatting data rather than just the top left that's in use.

Fucking up file extensions can be done on anything. There are likely more subtle and effective ways of also stripping out metadata to hide it.

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Written by C. Anthony Lewis on 2025-02-02 at 12:09

@Rhodium103 it's always the simple things that cause the most confusion... why is my 'empty' spreadsheet a gazillion Mbyte?

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Written by Chris Armstrong on 2025-02-02 at 16:05

@morgrugyn

Have checked it, and filling every cell white with a # E0E0E0 border (this is trickier than it looks) it will balloon the size of an empty sheet to 2.5 Mb.

Downside is that 64-bit 365 on a decent computer handles it no problem. It will clog up email attachments fast, though. Uncompressed PNG logos in maximum size, shrunk down into the corner, also knock it about a bit.

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Toot

Written by Chris Armstrong on 2025-02-02 at 16:08

@morgrugyn

There may be some more convoluted stuff behind-the-scenes, but I would need to research it.

I dare say that trusting people to be extremely incompetent with ubiquitous software might be the best approach if someone demands data from you.

And make sure to set everything to text strings. It should be human-readable but horrible for the computer. The aim is to get in the way and make it look like incompetence.

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Descendants

Written by C. Anthony Lewis on 2025-02-02 at 16:18

@Rhodium103 and use spaces and/or tabs to space things out in Word... but that probably wouldn't have that great an effect in most cases as that seems to be what's done anyway...

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