There's three news headlines for the day to also demonstrate the message was written and signed on the declared day.

The canary is edited and signed, manually, by an actual human every Monday morning.

I have high confidence that the individual tasked with this can quickly think of another unpredictable metric with which to datestamp the canary.

They could state just that fact, which still serves to prove the point.

But that's something you could prepare now, or if you need specifics then at the start of the new plague. Then subsequent releases won't be proven to have been created within the prior week.

Then they just post something else to make it obvious. I mean seriously, come on. Just because you can come up with an incredibly specific and unlikely scenario in which this exact thing wouldn't work doesn't mean anything. They just stop doing that exact thing.

Do you have an example of other information that could be included to validate that the message was not generated and signed in advance?

The latest bitcoin block hash.

The current nytimes headlines.

The most recent close of the largest stock markets.

The last power balls numbers.

Most of those would be valuable in their own right if you had foreknowledge.

Any other current events headline from major news sources.

Closing stock price of multiple stocks.

This week's powerball numbers.

Count of babies born in several hospitals on a specific day.

But why would they do that?

I understand that in this scenario we trust rsync.net and are afraid of secret warrants. If rsync.net wanted to deceive is, they could do that by... just lying? What incentives do they have to pregenerate these messages?