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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

#101

Post by exelius »

dewitt wrote: post #94
exelius wrote: post #85

Or there's another reason not to use a better tracking system: HBO is ok with leaks. The more the show gets leaked, the larger the audience. Some portion of that audience will pay for HBO, and hopefully stick around for the other HBO shows. HBO has been remarkably progressive on the piracy front. It's also only the first four episodes: enough to get you hooked enough to want to see the end. Of course, torrents are al…

> HBO has been remarkably progressive on the piracy front. I'm not suggesting that's not accurate, but I'd love to better understand your sources for that, as my single point of anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise. About six or seven years ago we torrented a single episode of an HBO series (I forget which—we were cable-cutters and it wasn't available to rent online at the time) and while we knew it was wrong, it wa…

They're just empty threats to make you sign up for HBO service. I don't recall hearing of HBO ever going after anyone who just downloaded a torrent. They've said in the past that they accept some level of piracy as part of the business model; so long as people are watching their shows they will keep making money.

It's not "sure, go ahead and pirate our shows!" but more of "People pirate our shows, so we look at piracy for trends to see what countries/audiences have a large, underserved viewer base for our shows." Some people pirate because shows are unavailable, so you can sell to them and make money. People who pirate because they're cheap and don't want to pay aren't HBO's target customers (and they probably don't have enough money to be worth suing anyway).

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

#102

Post by JacobEdelman »

All of these systems are security by obscurity. Just suggesting them on a blog ruins them. Watermarking is not truly possible with current technology, which means you can't give someone something without given them control over it. Is that such a bad thing?

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

#103

Post by cookiecaper »

gpmcadam wrote: post #24

> Apart from that I think that binge-watching the first > 4 episodes is a stupid idea that will make you ache > for a month waiting for the 5th episode ☺. For me, I find more enjoyment in binging shows than being drip-fed, I watched all 4 in a row and don't regret not waiting (besides I've waited 12 months I can wait a few more weeks for more.) But more importantly, my online activity means I'll probably be spoiled b…

I honestly think that there needs to be a compromise between the weekly releases common in TV and the season dumps common by streaming services like Netflix. Dumping the whole season at once doesn't allow any communal discussion or suspense, dragging it out over 2 months is meant more to drive revenue for the distributors than the enjoyment of the viewing public. I think releasing 3 episodes a week is probably the optimal strategy; it gives the show's communities time to confer and it keeps a reasonable pace without placing what some apparently feel is a demand to watch all 13 episodes in one sitting. It mitigates spoiler paranoia that you get with Netflix shows (which only further diminishes the communal aspects) and does other good things. I think it's all around the best strategy for the consumer. I understand Netflix uses binge releases as one of its selling points, but maybe now that they've established a respectable pedigree, they can stage some of their releases in iterations moving forward.

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

#104

Post by sorokod »

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…

Steganography (which may or may not have been used) wouldn't have any effect whatsoever on the number of downloads

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

#105

Post by [deleted] »

genericuser wrote: post #14

While using the millisecond length of things would be clever and would catch which copy it originated from while it remained secret that was how you were doing it. As soon as it was known it is not much harder for the person ripping the copy to shorten all the scenes by a random number of milliseconds than it is for them to blur the watermark. I mean this could be a good addition to the current tech used in something…

[deleted]

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

#106

Post by bithush »

I am surprised things such as Cinavia[1] isn't more widely used for tracking. It is designed to cut off the audio after 20 minutes which you see on a PS3 with many Bluray Disc rips released on torrents.

For that to work obviously you need the player to implement the feature but this isn't about disabling playback but simply tracking a leak. Just tweak it audio on each early release copy and you are good to go.

The really interesting thing about Cinavia is that it survives even an audio transcode/re-encode so even converting 5.1 DTS to MP3 or similar won't kill it. It is extremely robust in that sense.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia

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

#107

Post by felixgallo »

For at least the last 20 years, there are steganographic watermark systems in which inocuous parts of the images are used to hide coded data that stands up to even most lossy recompression.

Either HBO is using these and nobody knows yet; or they had an internal leak prior to their application; or they leaked it themselves. Under no plausible circumstances did they visibly watermark a corner and hope for the best.

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

#109

Post by jamesrom »

sorokod wrote: post #104
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…

Steganography (which may or may not have been used) wouldn't have any effect whatsoever on the number of downloads

I don't see anyone anywhere claim that it would. It would only aid in tracing the source of the leak.
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