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Game of Thrones leak and watermark: a stupid tracking system

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Re: Game of Thrones leak and watermark: a stupid tracking system

#41

Post by nothrabannosir »

golergka wrote: post #30

All these methods meddle with films editor's jobs. And, the be frank, their job is much more important than considerations for piracy: they make the movie (or tv series) actually interesting. Making them do that (or changing their tools to support meta-data to do that) would be equal to bothering creative professionals who are essential to your product's success with mere details. And, if I remember correctly, GoT pr…

There's a difference between post-release piracy and pre-release bootlegging. I would be surprised if this leak doesn't noticeably dampen their view count for the first four eps. Although that's hard to measure.

Re: Game of Thrones leak and watermark: a stupid tracking system

#42

Post by bru »

edoloughlin wrote: post #37
fredley wrote: post #2

...or just use steganography. Steganography in videos can be made to be invisible to the naked eye, and extremely robust - even to video compression. It's also difficult to detect, and even more difficult to remove/tamper with. What the author of the article is proposing is actually a kind of steganography, albeit a rather crude one, and probably rather difficult to implement (since scene timings will be different fo…

What the author of the article is proposing is actually a kind of steganography, albeit a rather crude one, and probably rather difficult to implement ...but easy to explain (and sell?) to the entertainment industry, who have shown themselves to be mostly technically illiterate. Some cynical, unscrupulous hacker could probably extract a lot of money from them for such a service...

Author here. That's my goal, but I don't have their email address so I simply wrote it down there.

Re: Game of Thrones leak and watermark: a stupid tracking system

#43

Post by URSpider94 »

markbnj wrote: post #32
fredley wrote: post #2

...or just use steganography. Steganography in videos can be made to be invisible to the naked eye, and extremely robust - even to video compression. It's also difficult to detect, and even more difficult to remove/tamper with. What the author of the article is proposing is actually a kind of steganography, albeit a rather crude one, and probably rather difficult to implement (since scene timings will be different fo…

Came in to say this. It's the obvious answer, and presumably the IP owners know about it even if the author of the article does not. It's also obvious that the author doesn't understand video encoding if he is proposing measuring millisecond differences in the length of specific scenes.

This.

The minimum difference in scene length allowable would be a single frame.

Re: Game of Thrones leak and watermark: a stupid tracking system

#44

Post by imglorp »

golergka wrote: post #30

All these methods meddle with films editor's jobs. And, the be frank, their job is much more important than considerations for piracy: they make the movie (or tv series) actually interesting. Making them do that (or changing their tools to support meta-data to do that) would be equal to bothering creative professionals who are essential to your product's success with mere details. And, if I remember correctly, GoT pr…

Piracy is actually in their interest up to a point. It generates free advertising through free samples, and might lure new subscribers who are on the fence about buying. The endgame is they really want people to sign up for the whole package.

Re: Game of Thrones leak and watermark: a stupid tracking system

#46

Post by bru »

fredley wrote: post #16
llimllib wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course we have no idea if they used steganography or not, right? He bases the article on the idea that they have no tracking info except the watermark, but I don't see any evidence that they don't know more.

To be honest, when I heard that the files were protected with a watermark, I assumed that they actually meant a steganographic watermark. I thought that this tech had been adopted into the industry ages ago, I'm rather surprised if it isn't the case, given the arms-race between the media and illegal distribution.

Same here. I was really surprised. That's why I thought that my very simple idea warranted writing a post.

Re: Game of Thrones leak and watermark: a stupid tracking system

#48

Post by royjacobs »

est wrote: post #36
fredley wrote: post #2

...or just use steganography. Steganography in videos can be made to be invisible to the naked eye, and extremely robust - even to video compression. It's also difficult to detect, and even more difficult to remove/tamper with. What the author of the article is proposing is actually a kind of steganography, albeit a rather crude one, and probably rather difficult to implement (since scene timings will be different fo…

> and extremely robust - even to video compression. It's also difficult to detect, and even more difficult to remove/tamper with. Split & merge frame by frame, in random, from multiple video sources. Visually they will be the same, but steganography has a high chance of been broken.

Any steganography solution on the market today that is worth its salt would actually be robust against this. The amount of different sources you would have to combine to protect against this is higher than you'd realistically be able to find.

Disclaimer: I used to work at one of the leading companies in this field.

Re: Game of Thrones leak and watermark: a stupid tracking system

#49

Post by zapu »

TheLoneWolfling wrote: post #31
zapu wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you knew that was already going on. Security by obscurity, but still, I don't believe this kind of watermarking was ever used. Maybe something like Cinavia[1] could be used instead? It's an analog watermarking system for detecting pirated copies and refusing to play them if player detects such copy is played on something else than bluray disc. Apparently this survives transcoding, and was/is major pain for pe…

Step 1: setup an automated setup for playing video and detecting if the output was detected via the watermarking system. Step 2: Run the whole thing through an optimizer seeking to minimize error while not being detected. Step 3: Wait a few hours.

Still, we are talking about one-shot solutions for big events, like this Game of Thrones release.

Obviously I can come up with anything and you would be able to present a strategy how to beat it. But that's not the point.

If this kind of various copyright protections become norm, people might actually be afraid to leak stuff, because you will never know how safe it is and what kind of protection you might run into. Even after analyzing spectrogram and generally watching the media multiple times, trying to find anything weird.

Well, obviously when you grab infinite number of watermarked copies, you might be able see where the irregularities are. But that's not how leaks happen.

Re: Game of Thrones leak and watermark: a stupid tracking system

#50

Post by intopieces »

Can someone help me understand the negative impact of this leak? From what I can tell, the leak only benefits HBO. Viewership numbers in the age of time-shifting are worthless. Moreover, viewers now cost HBO money, in terms of server load during the peak viewership time. If even a small number of people avoided the broadcast during the premiere, HBO actually wins - and there's no telling how many people decided to subscribe to their new service after watching the leaked copy.

Anyone who remembers the first GoT streaming premieres, they were largely catastrophic on the the servers. Last night appears to have gone well. I'm beginning to think HBO leaked it themselves.

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