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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

#201

Post by allemagne »

rasz_pl wrote: post #126
asillystory wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Binging makes the pacing of slow shows way more tolerable.

Maybe you are thinking of Fast Forward button in you player? My time is precious to me, I stopped watching TV. Everything comes out of mplayer now, and if I cant fast forward whenever I want I simply dont touch that content. That touchy feely 2 minute character building all talk no action scene between two insignificant parts in Walking Dead? Two clicks and its gone.

Seems a little like you have a pretty efficient system for watching all that TV you don't watch.

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

#202

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #115
krob wrote: post #80

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)

It's not a very compression-resistant approach and more sophisticated methods are usually used, but a simple one is using the low bits of colour channels. In a red pixel you have bits like so: RED GREEN BLUE 11111111 00000000 00000000 A change in the most significant bit of any of these colours would be massive. 01111111 is half as bright as 11111111. But a change in the least significant bit(s) is barely noticeable.…

s/This the/Thus the/

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

#203

Post by bru »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #184
bru wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Normally I'm the one complaining about typical HN comments. However given the blog post was titled "Game of Thrones leak and watermark: a stupid tracking system" I felt that leading with "This is a stupid blog post" to be a fair and amusing twist. “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.…

Ah, I feel dumb for not catching it. It is fair indeed.

About the article: that's not what I understand...

> a group approved by HBO to receive [the episodes]

What I understand is that the leak did not come from HBO but from one of their service providers or journalists or anything like that. Am I missing something?

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

#204

Post by InclinedPlane »

iron_ball wrote: post #196
anigbrowl wrote: post #188

Next iteration would be changing the length of each scene by a few milliseconds. One can count that the first episode holds s=18 scenes. Each scene lasts several minutes. Once again each copy can be made shorter or longer by a couple milliseconds, providing a unique fingerprint for each version sent. This sort of thing makes it hard for me to take any of the article seriously. The author doesn't seem to know the firs…

Anyone who was going to get hooked on Game of Thrones is hooked, and anyone who is still on the fence isn't likely to torrent the leaked episodes. Incompetence is a better explanation, I think.

I think that statement is really rather silly. It's a bit like saying "anyone who is going to drink coke is already drinking coke". There's a ring of truth to it, but it still falls flat.

Edit: a few things: arguments based on the behavior of "the majority" and arguments founded on the principle that 100% of all people who have ever been Game of Thrones viewers are completely and utterly committed to viewing every single season are rather weak. Viewership of shows changes from season to season. More so, not every TV show viewer is the sort of person who must start a series from the beginning. Pulling in folks who are caught up on Game of Thrones but haven't been hooked on the current season and pulling in folks who will begin mid stream (and then maybe go back and watch from the beginning, or not) adds to their viewership. More viewers means more purchases, more purchases means more dollars.

Not to mention the value of retaining their existing viewership base.

These are all the same reasons why coke continues to dump massive amounts of dollars into advertising despite already being well known and having a huge chunk of the soft drink marketshare. In fact, the returns on investment for advertising already popular products tends to be higher than for products just entering the market, because the numbers are so big. There are millions of Game of Thrones fans. If even a few hundred thousand existing fans who might have held off on watching the new season are kept on the hook and if even a few hundred thousand non-watchers gain interest in the show via starting with the new season and if only a small fraction of those folks end up purchasing the discs, or HBO (in whatever form) then that's a considerable amount of money in HBO's pocket that would have been left on the table.

Which isn't saying it wasn't an accident, but business wise this is still a win for HBO.

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

#205

Post by RyJones »

anigbrowl wrote: post #191
jjoonathan wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yes, I know that - I work in film and post-production for a living and I can explain the origin and workflow aspects of video frame rates to you in excruciating detail. You know how annoying it is when you watch a movie and there's some sort of 2-dimensional 'hacker' character and s/he just says some gobbledegook about 'hacking the password' or whatever, you see something a progress bar briefly on screen, and then th…

thank you

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

#208

Post by forrestthewoods »

bru wrote: post #203
forrestthewoods wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Normally I'm the one complaining about typical HN comments. However given the blog post was titled "Game of Thrones leak and watermark: a stupid tracking system" I felt that leading with "This is a stupid blog post" to be a fair and amusing twist. “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.…

Ah, I feel dumb for not catching it. It is fair indeed. About the article: that's not what I understand... > a group approved by HBO to receive [the episodes] What I understand is that the leak did not come from HBO but from one of their service providers or journalists or anything like that. Am I missing something?

Ah, you're right on the leak source. I over read "within". Sadly if they do pinpoint who leaked the copy I'm not sure it'll ever become public knowledge.

HBO has had DVD screener leaks before. If they all have the same watermark and the watermark is the only tracking info they have then, for all the reasons you put out, that'd just be silly.

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

#209

Post by contravariant »

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?

I think that could be avoided by making sure that large parts of the signatures overlap. There's probably some scheme to be able to recover which copies were used to make the leaked copy (up to some finite number of copies, but it quickly becomes impractical to get enough copies).

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

#210

Post by chillingeffect »

anigbrowl wrote: post #191
jjoonathan wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yes, I know that - I work in film and post-production for a living and I can explain the origin and workflow aspects of video frame rates to you in excruciating detail. You know how annoying it is when you watch a movie and there's some sort of 2-dimensional 'hacker' character and s/he just says some gobbledegook about 'hacking the password' or whatever, you see something a progress bar briefly on screen, and then th…

This is a good time to bring up the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect(xhe).

It's where you read a page full of comments about something you really and truly deep know something about and see how very, every wrong nearly everyone is...

...then you go on to take every other page pretty seriously without remembering just how far off people were on the topic that you know about. I experienced this the other day when people were talking about beep.js on HN.

(xhe) http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gel...

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