Five controls that separate a detector from a rumor mill
The name is the honesty: hearsay is weak evidence by definition, so the harness is built to never certify a lead it can't defend — and to say "lead," never "proof." Remove any one of these and it degrades into a machine that repeats what you want to hear.
Held-out negatives
Markers placed nowhere, checked against every relay. If one appears, the relay is fabricated (or the pipeline is contaminated) — the run is invalid. This arm is the experiment.
Contamination gate
A public marker in a relay is gated: the relayer might just be quoting your public copy. Only a private marker in a third party's relay is a strong lead.
Impossible gate
A relay observed before you planted the marker can't be a relay of it — a provenance or harness error, gated out.
Stands-alone rule
A marker counts only when it stands alone, never inside a larger token. A substring is not a marker — the citogenesis guard, shared with the family.
Corroboration ≠ proof
A certified lead is scored by how many independent relays carry it. One is a whisper; five is a signal. It is always a lead — never proof of who relayed it.
The control arm, live
Before trusting any relayed hit, you verify the controls. This is the harness's own logic — relay.py + score.py — ported faithfully to run in your browser: the same exposure axis, the same held-out arm, the same contamination and impossible gates, the same corroboration count. Fresh 128-bit markers are generated with WebCrypto; flip the three failure modes and watch the leads gate out — a public marker leaves the certified set, an impossible relay is discarded, and a fabricated held-out hit voids the whole run. Nothing leaves this page.
the registry & the relays
the panel · run & score
What a certified lead does — and does not — mean
What it does mean
A marker only you placed privately, before the relay, standing alone in a third party's relayed context, with a held-out control arm proving the harness isn't fabricating hits — corroborated by N independent relays.
That is real evidence your marker was relayed across the context membrane.
What it does not mean
It does not prove who relayed it, what anyone "said," a training path, theft, or a licensing obligation. It is hearsay — a corroborated lead, temporal and structural, never a causal or legal finding.
And a negative means almost nothing: most relays you never see.
Sound — and the limits it names out loud
Sound
- The controls are real and verifiable:
python selftest.pyproves — with no network — that a private marker relayed by third parties is certified and corroborated, a held-out marker in a relay spikes FPR and the run is refused, a public marker is gated as CONTAMINATED, a pre-plant relay is gated as IMPOSSIBLE, a run with no control arm is refused, and a marker inside a larger token does not match. - The exposure axis is the honest move: it removes the explainable-away hit (a public marker anyone could quote) from the certified set — on purpose.
- The self-test above is that exact logic —
run_panel+score— running client-side.
Limits (and it says so)
- Provenance is claimed. The gates are only as honest as the party and timestamp you record on each relay.
- Private can leak. A private marker can reach public by routes you don't control; when in doubt, mark it public — the gate errs toward fewer certified leads.
- One membrane only. This is the context membrane. For the published one use forward-observers; for the weights one use surfacing.
- Hearsay is hearsay. Even a corroborated lead is a lead. It never becomes proof of who relayed what.
canary.py (128-bit markers + exposure axis) · registry.py · relay.py (stands-alone scan) · score.py (held-out arm + contamination + impossible + corroboration) · harness.py · selftest.py (plant-then-relay, no network). Closure-Loop layered: Detection → Anchoring → Comparison → Witness → Lineage.