Tamper-proof watermark threatens to put digital pirates out to sea - Polidicks

So if people played music at a public event, I could get a metadata reader app for my phone and steal their payment information? Cool.

[QUOTE=Araknid;45436924]i dont think it'd be that easy[/QUOTE] Well... the principle for streaming audio conversion is pretty easy to understand and software is available for this. Here's a quote from a [URL="http://www.wondershare.com/convert-video-audio/convert-streaming-audio-to-mp3.html"]site[/URL] that deals with this sort of software. Only intended for legal stuff of course. [QUOTE=][B]Record the streaming audio as it plays through your computer's sound card[/B]. So this streaming audio to MP3 converter can certainly help you accomplish streaming audio to MP3 without any audio quality loss.[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=Ogris;45436397]I give it a week.[/QUOTE] It was circumvented in less than an hour of being announced.

This doesnt make any sense at all. I can't tell if its the writer of the article misrepresenting it or what but there's nothing that this actually does. First of all, how are you going to get their fucking credit card details embedded into a movie? are you somehow keylogging it off their computer? illegal, and causes more issues than it solves, and no, you don't have that capability anyways. Furthermore, its INCREDIBLY easy to beat watermarks for music and movies at least. Just check for differences between files for the movie and wipe out the areas that might contain watermark data.

Not only that, but storing someone's CC details embedded into a media file is just asking for easy CC theft to happen.

Wait, people still BUY illegal, copyrighted material? I know that's not really the point of the article, but is this seriously still a thing that people do?

1. Have person A and person B buy a song. 2. Use audio editing software to record the difference between the two files. 3. Apply the difference to either copy. 4. No watermark.

Well, it could be hard to detect, but not impossible to circumvent. Take the song, let's say it conists of 2 000 000 bytes of data. If you would decide that the least significant bit contains the hidden data and for each 8th byte you could create another byte from said data. And with each least significant byte for a determined range in the file (say byte 255 to byte 65535 you could quickly encode a hidden message with the length of 8160 character with (assuming) minimal loss of audio quality. This could more than well fit an identifying code for whoever bought the track in the first place. Though encoding to and from different formats could probably destroy this data.

Uhh, how the fuck is a digital watermark that records your fucking credit card details a good idea?

[QUOTE=mugofdoom;45439320]Uhh, how the fuck is a digital watermark that records your fucking credit card details a good idea?[/QUOTE] But it's tamper proof :downs:

[QUOTE=Rastadogg;45438503]Wait, people still BUY illegal, copyrighted material? I know that's not really the point of the article, but is this seriously still a thing that people do?[/QUOTE] Yes. Someone was trying to get me into downloading movies and making copies to sell to people, of course I refused, not worth it.

[quote] technology which embeds metadata - such as a user's credit card and bank details, internet protocol (IP) address, transmission time, and received format - directly into a song or movie.[/quote] So basically if it's metadata you just convert to a format that doesn't contain the metadata, and if it's encoded into the audio/video you reencode in a lossy format to get rid of it. Everyone will probably be doing this anyway because whatever stupid proprietary format they come up with that contains this information isn't going to work on most devices/players.

[QUOTE=Jorori;45436791]Wasn't the DRM of that game like hard-installed into your harddrive permanently (staying there even if you formatted it) and monitored everything you did with your disk activity or something like that? As in an actual trojan virus/malware but worse? Maybe I mixed it up with another thing or I was misinformed, but I swear I read something like that somewhere :v:[/QUOTE] [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securom[/url] Not when you formatted it (nothing is immune to format) but yes it usually doesn't come uninstalled with the games it came with.

People need to stop thinking the point of this is to stop downloading it, this system is in place to go after the ones who upload it in the first place. This would possibly discourage others from uploading unless they find a way to disable the hidden message (which means having to find the message)

[QUOTE=synthiac;45440810]ITT: People who have never heard of Cinavia.[/QUOTE] Cool, never heard of it. The [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia"]wiki[/URL] on it, ends with a few paragraphs regarding methods for defeating the watermark.

[QUOTE=Fetret;45436342]Calling something tamper-proof might be the best way to make sure it will get tampered with.[/QUOTE] To quote Bioshock: "The boys in Ryan's labs can make it hack-proof. That don't mean we ain't gonna hack it."

So while everyone else just got on with their lives and invented better ways to deliver music and files to people, ensuring that more will buy, these people spent more time and money on something that didn't work a thousand times before in the past. Good job!

[QUOTE=mugofdoom;45439320]Uhh, how the fuck is a digital watermark that records your fucking credit card details a good idea?[/QUOTE] Probably do you'd be deterred from sharing the media with the digital watermark on it.

[QUOTE=Ogris;45436397]I give it a week.[/QUOTE] A week? Watch this Save Song Open Song in Goldwave (It's free) Save Song as .mp3 Done. I cracked it Hiding metadata in a file isn't going to work, and isn't really going to do anything to stop piracy. This is something the source of where the track is purchased from does. So Pirate Tom here buys the track, saves as .mp3 in Goldwave which encodes the entire thing again, hell slap on a different bitrate before doing it to be sure, and then distributes via Limewire or whatever and what? You think everyone who downloads it has their IP magically stored within the file, or Tom's information is retrievable now? Having a bot seed the file, log IPs that download it, and send DMCA notices to those ISP's is more effective than this. This whole thing sounds stupid, and if it stores payment information when bought, sketchy. Can't wait to see stories of people who have had their bank accounts emptied because of their lost iPod had a bunch of music on it

[QUOTE=ThePuska;45436466]Why do you incorrectly assume that the researchers are less knowledgeable in their field than you are? Previous research has come up with audio watermarking which is resistant to lossy encoding, noise and filtering. Image watermarking has had similar advancements.[/QUOTE] This is a form of cryptography. It's utterly ridiculous to assume that an advance on one side will never be challenged. It will be. It'll fail eventually. And the fight continues.

If you don't people to pirate your songs if you sell them at outrageous prices you are delusional.

So, nobody rips from cd/dvd anymore? Did all the rippers and encoders from the last several decades that [I]don't[/I] add watermarks, just stop working? Amazing technology.

[QUOTE=tirpider;45443434]So, nobody rips from cd/dvd anymore? Did all the rippers and encoders from the last several decades that [I]don't[/I] add watermarks, just stop working? Amazing technology.[/QUOTE] As long as people want physical media, it will continue to exist, and this method won't work. I don't see everyone abandoning it at least until internet is really cheap and 100% reliable everywhere, and by the time that has happened on Earth we'll probably have interstellar colonies with shit internet.

From what I understand its targeting the people who share the song, If a artist releases the song on secure paid sites only it could work and not youtube etc. When you buy the song it encodes your data in to the mp3 file the site delivers making that copy unique to you. If you then go and upload it everywhere they know it was you. That is the way it supposed to work on paper. If they can get the information to stay embedded in the audio file it will work but that seems unlikely and its restricting the mediums the artist can use to publish the music.

[QUOTE=Gray Altoid;45440392][url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securom[/url] Not when you formatted it (nothing is immune to format) but yes it usually doesn't come uninstalled with the games it came with.[/QUOTE] [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexnet]Flexnet[/url] installs itself into the boot sector of your hard drive, which formatting generally doesn't touch. There are probably methods to remove it, however.

[QUOTE=Zeke129;45440000]So basically if it's metadata you just convert to a format that doesn't contain the metadata, and if it's encoded into the audio/video you reencode in a lossy format to get rid of it. Everyone will probably be doing this anyway because whatever stupid proprietary format they come up with that contains this information isn't going to work on most devices/players.[/QUOTE] The point of that technique is that the metadata would be transparently embedded into the audio itself.

[QUOTE=Awesomecaek;45436360]Haha what daft idiot wrote this? Yes, sure, illegal license-less sites will sell you music and put the stamp into the file, totally. And even in general it's retarded because there's no way this will be resistant to just re-encoding the song which will lead to practically inaudible change in sound but completely demolish any digital data hidden in it.[/QUOTE] It's not about sites that allow sharing embedding the data, itss about the original sharer getting tracked. The audio file itself has to come from somewhere - this is a way to find the person who shared it first. Of course, it's just a question of time until it will be stripped out. [QUOTE=TheTalon;45443005]A week? Watch this Save Song Open Song in Goldwave (It's free) Save Song as .mp3 Done. I cracked it Hiding metadata in a file isn't going to work, and isn't really going to do anything to stop piracy. This is something the source of where the track is purchased from does. So Pirate Tom here buys the track, saves as .mp3 in Goldwave which encodes the entire thing again, hell slap on a different bitrate before doing it to be sure, and then distributes via Limewire or whatever and what? You think everyone who downloads it has their IP magically stored within the file, or Tom's information is retrievable now? Having a bot seed the file, log IPs that download it, and send DMCA notices to those ISP's is more effective than this. This whole thing sounds stupid, and if it stores payment information when bought, sketchy. Can't wait to see stories of people who have had their bank accounts emptied because of their lost iPod had a bunch of music on it[/QUOTE] Imho, this probably doesn't add the metadata next to audio data itself (as we're used to from mp3s) this probably encodes the metadata into the audio itself

[QUOTE=HumanAbyss;45443043]This is a form of cryptography. It's utterly ridiculous to assume that an advance on one side will never be challenged. It will be. It'll fail eventually. And the fight continues.[/QUOTE] there's hardly a fight it's just companies coming up with ridiculous anti-piracy measures and getting absolutely slaughtered

This seems horribly illegal. Encoding people details? That's going to lead to more crime. Also, even if it is as ecure as it claims to be, some team out there will crack it.

Like people have said, it's very likely the data is encoded into the audio itself, designed to survive lossy compression. It's likely a lot like that Cinavia garbage. The most likely way that this will work is that when a person buys music legit from a store, some record that links back to them is hidden in the audio waveform. As a result, if a person then leaks that out onto the internet, they can trace it back to the person who leaked it. However, this is fraught with a zillion issues. One being: what information are you gonna hide in the MP3? The article says that credit card details are gonna be in there. That would not only be illegal, but would violate most card company's contract with retailers. See, when retailers sign up with a card company to be able to accept payment from those cards, they agree to keep CC data secret. If they actually try to put CC numbers into the music, then the card companies are gonna terminate their contract with the retailers for failing to uphold their agreement to keep that info secure. Secondly, anyone busted for leaking music could simply say "Yeah my phone with the music on it got stolen" or "I had it on a flash drive and lost it". Additionally, because this data can survive reencoding, it may also be able to survive re-recording. Someone recording music played out loud might be able to read the hidden information in the audio. It's fraught with a thousand problems and will likely be defeated with a scrubber program if it ever comes into use.