181–190 of 286 posts
Author is plain wrong here. The big visible watermark is there for the psychological effect, not to trace the leaks. There's always a plenty of hidden ones. (Missing frames etc) HBO will definitely know who they sent the episodes to, but that doesn't necessarily mean they know who leaked them.
> 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 also agree with the spoilers. The cat is out of the bag and I'm not going to potentially ruin the show by waiting for each to air (and seeing spoilers or "theories") especially after waiting this long for the new season.
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Yes, I was wondering why they sent 4 episodes for review. Then I watched the first episode and I saw why...nothing is going to happen until the 4th episode. They've been teasing us with white walkers since season 1. And those dragons too...they were born in season 1 or 2 and they've hardly killed anyone yet. I guess I'm a sucker for the never-ending suspense...best show on tv.
The 'problem' is that there are relatively few minor characters. Though there are clearly some overarching plot lines, pretty much all the arcs are very important to the story. As a result you've got to focus a little bit on each person and in a 55 minute show that means 5-10 minutes per story arc per episode. This only gets worse as more characters become important. It's somewhat balanced by other characters being k…
This is a stupid blog post. There are two goals: 1) Prevent copies from being leaked 2) Trace leaks if they happen Watermarks are actually great for the first goal. They are big, ugly, and obvious. This discourages people from leaking. If they do leak it's crystal clear they're taking a huge risk. This is also why the DVD screener is low-res SD. HBO already tracked down where the leak came from. Whatever methods they…
That you for that "typical HN comment". >This is a stupid blog post. Have you seen the topic discussed on the Internet? I looked for it and I haven't, so I simply started it. Given the score of the submission and the number of comments, that goal is reached. I learned a lot from other comments and I'm happy. > HBO already tracked down where the leak came from. Source?
“Sadly, it seems the leaked four episodes of the upcoming season of Game of Thrones originated from within a group approved by HBO to receive them,” the spokesperson said. “We’re actively assessing how this breach occurred.” http://www.buzzfeed.com/jaimieetkin/game-of-thrones-season-5...
They've at least narrowed the leak down to be from inside HBO. They may not have it down to an individual just yet. Their internal process may need some work.
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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 won't do this for GoT in particular as the opening changes episode to episode and gives you a preview into the locations that that episode will deal with. A lot of people enjoy the openings and pay attention to them. I liken it to the Simpsons or Futurama in the sense that things subtly change (e.g. locations which are destroyed in the show, are destroyed in the opening, and such).
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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…
I think he might have made the wrong decision in his case, as adding leak penalties to his contracts would have made his users more careful with his files. Since he was in turn licensing some rights from other parties, leaks in the past had caused him some legal trouble and he didn't want to have that happen again. His solution was to add DRM, but it didn't close the analog hole so there's still the potential for leaks. (I haven't talked to him in a few years so I'm not sure if things have improved.)
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That's a mountweazel (better known as a fictitious entry) - reference books used to do it to trap people copying the text: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry
With it changing to detect which person leaked, it's more a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap
This sort of thing makes it hard for me to take any of the article seriously. The author doesn't seem to know the first thing about either video formats or the authorial role of editing. Things are cut on particular frames for a reason. Also, editors don't deal in milliseconds, they deal in frames. Sound editors work in frames and samples, and while I have no objection to steganography-type adjustments to the final output, the idea of monkeying around with the content of the film, even on the margins, for tracking purposes tells me that the writer shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a post-production facility, for the same reason that most programmers don't want an art director telling them how totheir code would look prettier in a fancy font and in a more earth-toned color scheme.
Honestly, I think HBO is quite well aware of this srot fo thing already, and the 4 episodes were leaked to hook people on the rest of the series. There's already a lot of digital distribution technology involving rock-solid encryption, single-use keys, check ins and outs, and so on. Tweaking things like the length of the end credits (or rather the black frames at the end) are potentially viable but also trivially obvious to any editor. But monkeying with the program material is strictly out of bounds.
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Add a series of random names in the middle of Special Thanks. The names are in a list stored somewhere, so are actually (large base) digits of a serial number.
Trivially detectable. Find two screeners. Search for different frames. Oh look, the credits are different! Let's delete the credits to be safe! You want to make it so that the entire binary content of the film looks different for each person, so there can be no point of reference apart from what it looks like (which is the same).
But yes, once it was discovered that information was being embedded in the credits, those would be cut.
...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?