Game of Thrones leak and watermark: a stupid tracking system • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by rhino369 » Mon, Apr 13, 2015, 2:58 PM UTC

intopieces wrote: post #50

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 su…

HBO doesn't want to encourage more people to go learn how to use bittorrent / usenet / streaming sites.

Someone who figures out how to get these episodes very well might just cancel HBO and get them all that way.

Though, a fairly credible rumor said that Showtime did strategic bittorent leaks. For a while almost every single season had the first two episodes leaked in high quality. Of course, it could have been one leaker just doing it each time.

I think it is pretty incredible that these leaks are not more common.

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

#72

Post by est » Mon, Apr 13, 2015, 3:04 PM UTC

royjacobs wrote: post #48

est wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

the algorithm could tell exactly which sources are used in the final video?

impressive!

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

#73

Post by smitherfield » Mon, Apr 13, 2015, 3:08 PM UTC

bryanlarsen wrote: post #58

smitherfield wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To elaborate, intellectual property law is essentially "use it or lose it" - a company that does not defend its IP against unauthorized use is likely to have it invalidated. One that actively promotes unauthorized use is almost certain to.

"use it or lose it" is only a property of trademark laws, not copyright or other IP laws.

If HBO is not making a good-faith effort to secure for George R.R. Martin all the royalties that he is entitled to (which deliberately leaking GoT to torrent sites certainly would not be), then there isn't a court in the world that wouldn't consider HBO to be in breach of contract and return the TV rights to Martin.

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

#74

Post by robertwalsh0 » Mon, Apr 13, 2015, 3:11 PM UTC

Was talking to my partner about this and she had a pretty clever take:

"Seems like a simple idea would simply be to change just the spelling of one seemingly insignificant name near the end of each version of the credits and then by actually watching the credits you'd know the leaker straight away."

"Of course, you'd leave the watermark on there so the leaker doesn't know how you caught them and thinks that the watermark is still the tracking mechanism."

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

#75

Post by erroneousfunk » Mon, Apr 13, 2015, 3:12 PM UTC

peterkelly wrote: post #47

"A few milliseconds" won't work - you must do it in units of frames.

That's what I was thinking, too. Given that each frame is about 42ms, that's not a trivial oversight. Much easier would be to use stenography to slightly manipulate the color of sets of pixels in the video. Far more information available to mess with, and extremely easy to hide (do it in various corners of various frames, keep the secret carefully guarded, or only let parts of the "secret" out to different groups, so that no one person knows all of the manipulation information, except, perhaps a head of security coordinating the entire thing)

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

#76

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft » Mon, Apr 13, 2015, 3:12 PM UTC

bigiain wrote: post #22

slayed0 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes you know the method they are using. As the post mentioned, a few milliseconds + or - at the end of a scene would not be noticeable and the overall timestamp would still be constant if "self-compensating offsets" were used.

So how many video frames do I lop off a scene to subtract "a few milliseconds" from it?

If it's 30fps, each frame is about 33ms. One or two is sufficient. Most films are 24fps, or 23.99 for some weird NTSC->film->NTSC reason.

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

#77

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft » Mon, Apr 13, 2015, 3:13 PM UTC

laurencei wrote: post #21

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #5

Not very clever. Get two leaked copies, and mix them up. Use the credits from copy A, or hell, even chop off 11 milliseconds from them. Then mix and match scenes... even chop off a few ms from some randomly selected scenes. I bet you wouldn't even need the two copies.

That's just a suggestion. They could change the opening credits by 2ms. Or a specific scene. They could even add a single extra sword 'clang' noise in part of the audio track on one single scene. There are so many options.

I'd wager $10 this was done by an intern who can barely use email correctly.

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

#78

Post by jawr » Mon, Apr 13, 2015, 3:16 PM UTC

There are audio watermarks on these leaked videos, and potentially other video watermarks that might not be visible at first sight.

The watermark which has been blurred is a just a visual warning to the original receiver of the file to remind them that they have a special copy, it's not meant to act as a form of identification.

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

#79

Post by ianferrel » Mon, Apr 13, 2015, 3:25 PM UTC

jjoonathan wrote: post #67

URSpider94 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Do you actually know that or are you speculating? I wouldn't be surprised if MP4 (or other video formats) provided a mechanism for tweaking the timing of a given frame. Of course, if you're using such a primitive watermark you might as well just add a note in the metadata...

But wouldn't it be trivial to notice that in the reencoding step and throw it away?

"Huh, this frame is supposed to be delayed by 3ms. Ah, screw it, [checks 'force to 23.97 fps' button]."

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

#80

Post by krob » Mon, Apr 13, 2015, 3:25 PM UTC

Everyone in her claims that there are mechanisms to add non-visual watermarks into both video & audio, anyone have any suggestions as to what products / systems to use so this can be implemented? Minus writing one yourself (like writing your own framework, you don't know all the gotcha's of an expert)