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

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

#161

Post by darkmighty » Mon, Apr 13, 2015, 5:45 PM UTC

DrJokepu wrote: post #152

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…

This might be a very naive suggestion (I know nothing about the subject) but couldn't you just take two copies, XOR them and blank out the difference to defeat such signatures?

We're talking about images, so if you take the pixels for example they're just {0,...,255}^n, integers.

You can if you have the original file, but then what's the point?

Otherwise, take image a=original+f1, image b=original+f2. Then if you e.g. average them you still have c=original+f1/2+f2/2 -- so both signatures are kept (theoretically if either you have a large number of sources you could average the signals out of existence, or perhaps the system isn't robust and can't detect multiple sigs). This assumes the introduced signatures are indistinguishable from the source (quite reasonable).

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

#162

Post by AlyssaRowan » Mon, Apr 13, 2015, 5:47 PM UTC

RobertoG wrote: post #143

I am curious about if somebody with access to two copies can just compare them and blur the stenographic watermark.

>The case of a leaker getting her hands on 2 copies is however highly unlikely.

I'm not so sure about that. Some groups used to have a general practice of always getting at least two distinct copies from a supplier to avoid burning sources. And I doubt they just averaged either, but detected discrepancies and manually eliminated potential areas of interest. A few releases of cracked software were even actually compiled afresh from source, or were object code before a wrapper protection was added. Some suppliers were developers themselves, who weren't always seeing eye-to-eye with their publishers.

Of course, perhaps the 'race' to be first has all but eliminated this from modern practice. I couldn't say.

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

#163

Post by fleitz » Mon, Apr 13, 2015, 5:48 PM UTC

It's easily defeated for the same reason that netflix's geolocation stuff is easy to bypass.

The entire point of the scheme is more subs, not not pirating GoT.

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

#164

Post by sorokod » Mon, Apr 13, 2015, 5:48 PM UTC

cpeterso wrote: post #139

sorokod wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True - and then what? The leaked episodes may have been stolen or can be claimed to have been stolen. Anyway, the horses have bolted and the damage is done.

Yes, but the leaker would be blacklisted from all future HBO (and possibly partner) pre-release materials.

Do you know for a fact that the leaker is the same person (organisation?) that has received the official HBO material? Maybe it is more like this: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/expendables-3-online-leak-two-arres...

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

#165

Post by belorn » Mon, Apr 13, 2015, 5:50 PM UTC

jewel wrote: post #129

felixgallo wrote: post #107

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.

I looked into stenography for a client who had a problem with audio being leaked by the users of his service. Even though there is a lot less signal in audio, it was trivial to encode a 32-bit pattern throughout the audio track in such a way that it was not discernible to his well-trained ears, and yet it would survive being encoded as a 64kbps MP3. We also checked pushing it through an analog loop, since that was mo…

> the losses from the discovery that he was applying stenography would exceed the ongoing loss from piracy.

A very likely correct conclusion, and there an additionally logical error with the assumption that privacy would disappear if they used it. Just because the copyright owner can sue whoever distributed the first copy doesn't mean piracy would stop after that. In order to get any effect at all, they would have to tell every customer about it, and the effect would likely not be 100%. It only take one person who upload the song to make it a permanent resident in torrent swarms.

If someone were to use this, the profit calculation is 1: Can winning lawsuits cover the costs, 2: Can informing (accusing) all your customers be worth the decreased rate of uploads. If neither of those 2 sound attractive to your business model, then spending money/reputation on personalized watermarks is completely pointless.

(edit) additionally, lets look at a typical scenario. Let say a file is being spread unlawfully and you track down it to customer 40#. The customer is a hardcore fan, studying for a music degree, and has no idea how the song "got out" when confronted. Customer 40# is against piracy, as can be seen by the major library of lawfully bought copies. However, they are also a member of a small fangroup, and did share the song with its 10-20 members. The customer was sure that everyone in that place would never think of uploading it to a public place. The question then becomes, do you continue with the lawsuit and put this student, this great fan in debt for the rest of their life?

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

#166

Post by Kalium » Mon, Apr 13, 2015, 5:52 PM UTC

cookiecaper wrote: post #154

Kalium wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A compromise already exists. It's really very simple - you and friends agree on a pace to watch a show at. This is flexible, and can fit any schedule! You and friends can watch in whatever pattern you want, and it requires exactly nothing of Netflix! You can deploy this method today ! This would unquestionably satisfy your needs. Why would you need anything other than a dump from Netflix?

It doesn't satisfy the needs of the larger community. Yes, if you watch in person with a group of a few friends and that's all you care about, this works fine. It can't realistically be implemented on the scale of something like a subreddit or a whole office. There is a massive difference in both quality and activity between /r/HouseOfCards and /r/GameOfThrones. The "season dump" just doesn't work on a scale that exc…

Communities are capable of organizing. Further, I submit that the needs of the larger community are served by a flexible dump. Subreddits and social circles are not the larger community - they're small, highly active communities.

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

#167

Post by cookiecaper » Mon, Apr 13, 2015, 5:57 PM UTC

Kalium wrote: post #166

cookiecaper wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't satisfy the needs of the larger community. Yes, if you watch in person with a group of a few friends and that's all you care about, this works fine. It can't realistically be implemented on the scale of something like a subreddit or a whole office. There is a massive difference in both quality and activity between /r/HouseOfCards and /r/GameOfThrones. The "season dump" just doesn't work on a scale that exc…

Communities are capable of organizing. Further, I submit that the needs of the larger community are served by a flexible dump. Subreddits and social circles are not the larger community - they're small, highly active communities.

/r/GameOfThrones has 484k subscribers. /r/HouseOfCards has 50k subscribers. These are not "small communities" and there's no reason that there should be 9.5x more interest in GoT than HoC; they're both gritty political thrillers and HoC usually has more episodes per season than GoT. I posit that the GoT sub is much more active because the way that HBO releases content makes communal watching and discussion much easier -- you don't have to worry about trying to coordinate episode watching times between 500k people, and people who can't make the official air time can avoid for 1-2 days before they find time and can get caught up.

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

#168

Post by joshstrange » Mon, Apr 13, 2015, 5:57 PM UTC

cbhl wrote: post #124

VeejayRampay wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still waiting for some clever chap to cut the opening out as well. The dream would be to have one version of the opening and a mencoder script to put the pieces back together. It would shave a few dozens megabytes on each file off.

People have done this with Matroska playlists already for some series, although it's not always worth the amount of work that gets put into it. (For example, the opening might change from episode to episode so that spoiler characters aren't shown before they show up in the series.)

Or still shown after they are no longer on the show. I've considered cutting my videos to exclude the intro but it's not an exact science and sometimes the intro is different and I don't want to miss that. In the end most intros are not long enough to worry about cutting (though GoT is LONG). If it's long I can just FF through.

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

#169

Post by Kalium » Mon, Apr 13, 2015, 6:00 PM UTC

cookiecaper wrote: post #167

Kalium wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Communities are capable of organizing. Further, I submit that the needs of the larger community are served by a flexible dump. Subreddits and social circles are not the larger community - they're small, highly active communities.

/r/GameOfThrones has 484k subscribers. /r/HouseOfCards has 50k subscribers. These are not "small communities" and there's no reason that there should be 9.5x more interest in GoT than HoC; they're both gritty political thrillers and HoC usually has more episodes per season than GoT. I posit that the GoT sub is much more active because the way that HBO releases content makes communal watching and discussion much easie…

I know Reddit and subreddits fairly well - most subscribers to a sub are silent and passive. 50k is a small community. Stacked against the whole of the viewerbase, 50k is even smaller a community. I posit that GoT is much more active because the show draws on a hugely engaging series of books that has been building a fanbase for a decade - an excellent reason for an 8x difference in size.

Bluntly, you're not making a compelling argument for taking flexibility away from the silent majority that watches and doesn't aggressively engage in public discussion. You're arguing from a position where the putative needs of that minority is the only thing that matters.

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

#170

Post by pyvpx » Mon, Apr 13, 2015, 6:02 PM UTC

waspleg wrote: post #148

The website says his method of randomly changing the length of the credits is a step in the right direction. I think that's completely wrong. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130808/02084524106/time-... "Our experience is that it leads to more paying subs. I think you're right that Game of Thrones is the most pirated show in the world," he said. "That's better than an Emmy." - Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes THAT is a…

as a child of the early oughts, having the CEO of Time Warner extol about having the most pirated show in the world -- not to mention explicitly stating it leads to more subscribers -- is almost jaw dropping.