Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Game of Thrones leak and watermark: a stupid tracking system

blog.frite-camembert.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 286 posts

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

#231

Post by tomjen3 »

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.

>Under no plausible circumstances did they visibly watermark a corner and hope for the best.

Corporate ineptitude.

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

#232

Post by Phlarp »

nitrogen wrote: post #223
Phlarp wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>reworks its content acquisition pipelines as new digital and analog technologies come to market. I would have gladly paid them to watch a stream at 8pm last night, yet somehow that still isn't an option in 2015. Instead I ended up with 4 episodes from a torrent at 8:15. Tell me more about embracing new technology as it comes to market.

I thought HBO Now (I'm not a subscriber) allowed one to stream 5 minutes after air?

I remember hearing lots of noise about them offering a stand alone streaming service, I was even excited to try it out and see how it handled the traffic of a season premiere (HBOgo has been notably terribly on this front)

I googled around for about 15 minutes and was only able to find news articles announcing it. I'd be happy to pay them for what i've already watched if anyone could direct me to a sign-up for this elusive streaming service.

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

#233

Post by MichaelGG »

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?

Over 4 separate files, depending on how they encode the IDs, you might still find out who the leakers are. They might share some bits and not others. The studio can take its time if it has a serious leaking issue.

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

#234

Post by slayed0 »

Phlarp wrote: post #133
slayed0 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those episodes would immediately be leaked to everyone after becoming available and HBO would lose a ton of viewership on its own platform.

This is happened anyway, and they are capturing none of this possible revenue. Even if only one person purchased the early access and leaked it to everyone else they'd still be one sale better off than they currently are.

Yes this has now happened one time. It doesn't happen every season. If you allowed early release of episodes to customers who were willing to pay more, you can pretty much guarantee that those will be leaked early every single time.

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

#236

Post by circuitslave »

I scanned these comments and didn't see any mention of it - I used to work for a company - http://www.teletrax.tv/ - that used Philips made hardware to encode video watermarks that were not easily detectable. We would then use detector hardware in the top (n) markets of the US and "detect" whenever some channel broadcast a watermarked piece of video. This was usually used to enforce things like Sony licensing you to show a movie of theirs (n) times over a given period of time. There's competitors in that space as well like Nielsen, etc. I am sure HBO is using more than just a visible watermark to track their content.

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

#237

Post by MichaelGG »

VeejayRampay wrote: post #111
selectout wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unsure how the credits work for Game of Thrones, but if it's like most shows where it's just the rolling black screen at the end of the show then most torrents cut that part off entirely by default.

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.

Some release groups do this. It's incredibly annoying. It might have made sense a decade ago. Especially, I think, some of THORA's really high-quality rips. OK its 22GB. I've saved maybe half a GB doing this intro/outro in separate files. Does it really matter?

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

#238

Post by Udo »

sosborn wrote: post #159
Udo wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there was an option to just pay HBO per episode and then legally torrent the episode, I'd gladly do it in a heartbeat. Heck, it could be as simple as an HBO web page where I can donate an appropriate amount, and that would in turn legalize the download. I wouldn't even want them to digitize or host the content (they'd screw it up anyway). Sadly, that's not going to happen. I think illegal filesharing threatens the…

> I think illegal filesharing threatens the industry primarily not because it's free, but because it offers a lot of features and convenience which the content providers refuse to grant their customers willingly. It's a bit of a cycle isn't it? The reason they refuse to grant the convenience is because it enables illegal filesharing. Works the other way too.

> because it enables illegal filesharing

Illegal filesharing doesn't need to be enabled, it's already happening regardless.

Incidentally, the argument that people would simply re-share illegally what they bought had been used against getting rid of DRM in audio files for a long time. Today the major music stores provide DRM-free music by default. Yes, these files can be shared, but considering the fact that they were already out there, the impact was minimal.

The only material difference between me using Napster in the nineties and me using iTunes right now is the fact that they're actually allowing me to pay for my music.

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

#239

Post by MichaelGG »

robertwalsh0 wrote: post #74

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 water…

Or a real stenography technique that doesn't require them to actually re-render scenes.

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

#240

Post by oaktowner »

avn2109 wrote: post #69
fredley wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, when I heard that the files were protected with a watermark, I assumed that they actually meant a steganographic watermark. I thought that this tech had been adopted into the industry ages ago, I'm rather surprised if it isn't the case, given the arms-race between the media and illegal distribution.

Arms race? The entertainment industry has cantered out onto the jousting pitch with their horse and lance. Meanwhile illegal distribution is calibrating the laser cannons in their orbital battle station and dispatching their aircraft carrier battle groups.

I kind of assumed the laser cannons were on flying ostriches.
Post reply on HN