News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Game of Thrones leak and watermark: a stupid tracking system by madaxe_again on Monday April 13, 2015 @10:44AM (#9367900)
While stego might be a route, blurring the watermark may not be enough to obscure the source.

Given a known frame, they could blur the same portion of the same frame on all watermarked copies, and the one with a matching output is your culprit.

Blurring loses information, but is more akin to a hash than a deletion, as it's a deterministic process.

Edit: this sort of thing. http://dheera.net/projects/blur

Re:Game of Thrones leak and watermark: a stupid tracking system by peeters on Monday April 13, 2015 @10:48AM (#9367931)
It's a deterministic process, but it still has inputs. You'd have to know those inputs or test for every possible set of inputs to whatever blurring method was used.
Re:Game of Thrones leak and watermark: a stupid tracking system by darkmighty on Monday April 13, 2015 @06:41PM (#9371001)
It depends on the blurring method. If you do a gaussian blur, for example, you might be able to do a pretty good inverse blur by finding black frames and performing blind deconvolution. If I were at risk I'd use a nonlinear injective filter instead, to make sure information is lost (linear filtering is not only deterministic but perfectly without noise and no frequency response nulls).
Re:Game of Thrones leak and watermark: a stupid tracking system by spb on Monday April 13, 2015 @04:10PM (#9370121)
I imagine HBO knows every reviewer they gave a watermarked copy to.