field notes
Notes from the chart room.
Mechanism first. No promises a detector can contradict.
What SynthID actually is, and what removal can mean
Frequency-domain embedding, why crops do not kill it, and where a rewrite stops being invisible.
C2PA: the manifest that outlives the edit
How a JUMBF block is structured, where it hides in JPEG, PNG, WebP and MP4, and why re-saving is not removal.
Why metadata strippers miss most AI files
Three classes of provenance data, and the order you have to remove them in.
How to verify a cleaned file yourself
Byte-level checks, decoder round-trips, and the PSNR number that tells you if quality held.