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Regardless of what you think about the lawsuit, you have to give them credit for their watermarking method: https://imgur.com/IGs0sg7 https://imgur.com/IGs0sg7
by jonas21 6y ago
Regardless of what you think about the lawsuit, you have to give them credit for their watermarking method:
https://imgur.com/IGs0sg7 https://imgur.com/IGs0sg7
- sien 6y agoDoes anyone know if ebooks are watermarked in a similar way?
- worker767424 6y agoNot sure about ebooks, but I assume every workplace email sent to all does this to catch leaks.
- Polylactic_acid 6y agoThey almost certainly are for some sources. And probably with your unique user id to work out who leaked the copy on to torrent sites. The way to check this is pretty easy though, get 2 users to bit for bit compare their books to work out if they are identical.
- young_unixer 6y agoOpen the book in Evince, Print to PDF. Bam, your book is now anonymous.
- probably_wrong 6y agoI am not following your line of reasoning correctly. The watermarking is done using characters that look different from each other. Printing the book will not change those characters, and therefore it is still possible to extract the original information. Harder, but not impossible. For this information to be lost, Evince would have to print the book in a crappy font that uses a single symbol for both. Which is possible, but I think it's not what you were going for.
- young_unixer 6y agoThe hash won't be the same, which is what matters the most. They won't have people manually reviewing the punctuation to catch infringement, and it's highly probable that Evince printing to PDF will mess the whole internal structure, so it's hard to automate it.
- Polylactic_acid 6y agoIf you just print it then that defeats the point. They don't care about individual copies, they want to find who is stripping DRM and posting books on torrent trackers.
- ceejayoz 6y agoHow likely are you to notice if your resulting PDF had a specific unique pattern of zero-width spaces embedded with it? Or if a few curly quotes aren't curly? Let alone scenarios like the cover JPEG having stenographic info in it...
- rwmj 6y agoNot ebooks, but interesting technique used to find who is leaking your sensitive documents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap
- efreak 6y agoAbsolutely. It usually tends to be either more visible, or less visible though - some pdf files have a literal watermark on the pages, while other formats like epub contain a guid or other watermark content in the source (epub is zipped xhtml) https://gizmodo.com/harpercollins-is-now-using-digital-watermarks-to-stop-e-1635220938 https://gizmodo.com/harpercollins-is-now-using-digital-water... https://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/everything-you-need-to-know-about-social-drm-for-ebooks https://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/everything-you-need... Amusingly, I believe if you use calibre's ebook conversion to replace stylesheets and add toc, it may also actually remove those markers that have no actual content and only exist to provide a unique ID.
- JMTQp8lwXL 6y agoIf I was going to scrape this data and re-purpose it, I would've absolutely cleaned up those apostrophes. The pivoting between straight and curly would certainly be a pet peeve. Unless there's a semantic difference between the two I'm unaware of.
- jdub 6y agoThe semantic difference would be important in a song like Baby Got Back by Sir Mix-a-lot, which includes both speech quotes and imperial measurements.
- robin_reala 6y agoImperial measurements should use the prime symbol and not straight quotes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_%28symbol%29#Designation_of_units https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_%28symbol%29#Designation...
- edflsafoiewq 6y agoFor lyrics, you should just transcribe the pronunciation, eg "six foot two".
- jdub 6y agoThe units are not spoken, but for clarity they should be notated in the lyrics.
- nxpnsv 6y agoI for one would impose metric... it may be harder to rap, but true talent steps up to a challenge...
- BuildTheRobots 6y ago"But I would walk 804 kilometres, And I would walk 804 more, Just to be the man who walks a 1,608 kilometres, To fall down at your door..."
- akersten 6y agoThis is very clever! Also, take a look at Claim 2 of this patent[1]. Do you think these are similar enough to constitute infringement? [1]: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9881516B1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US9881516B1/en (Software patents should be abolished. I just like to point out their absurdity and how it's easy to independently develop a technique (steganography in a search engine result) that someone has already grubbed a "patent" on.)
- jcranmer 6y agoIf it's not implemented in PHP, it's not infringing! The patent claim requires the program to "load available PHP server header information"
- akersten 6y agoThat is just so bizarre to me too. That one would be able to copy the exact core of the idea, but write it in a different language, and suddenly it's not infringing, even though it causes the computer to do the same thing. How these patents even pass the sniff test, I'll never understand.
- efreak 6y agoThis bit at the end is the best part, I think: > while particular embodiments and applications have been illustrated and described, it is to be understood that the disclosed embodiments are not limited to the precise construction and components disclosed herein. _Various modifications, changes and variations, which will be apparent to those skilled in the art, may be made in the arrangement, operation and details of the method and apparatus disclosed herein without departing from the spirit and scope defined in the appended claims._ If I'm reading this correctly, this patent is claiming things that are "apparent" (obvious?) to those "in the know". Computer or not, how did this get granted?
- dehrmann 6y agoReminds me of a much older practice for the same reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agloe,_New_York https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agloe,_New_York
- zozbot234 6y agoYou have to admit, it's genius!
- mikejb 6y agoThat's pretty clever! How the tables have turned since hiybbprqag
- SilasX 6y agoWasn’t sure if you were having a seizure there, so for anyone else who was wondering: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hiybbprqag https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hiybbprqag https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hiybbprqag-how-google-tripped-up-microsoft/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hiybbprqag-how-google-tripped-u...
- mcintyre1994 6y agoI posted about this the other day and someone who used to work at Microsoft made a really interesting/helpful response - worth checking out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24112418 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24112418
- mywittyname 6y agoWarning: The Word of the Day for Aug 11 at Urban Dictionary is pretty NSFW.
- SilasX 6y agoThanks, sorry, I should have noted that anyway just for linking UD.
- teddyh 6y agopgnttrp!
- lefrenchy 6y agoCan someone explain to me the benefit here? Is it making it less likely for the google scrape to get a search hit?
- ehsankia 6y agoThere's no "benefit", they were just looking for a nice unique way of watermarking textual content, to prove that what shows up on a Google search is indeed sources from them and not some other transcription of the lyrics.
- DoubleGlazing 6y agoYou'd think Google would be wise to that since they do that themselves. E.G. When they caught Bing copying them... https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/ https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/ And they definitely do it with maps. There is a tiny little village I visit in rural Roscommon each year. Each year a new major retailer appears to have opened in this 500 population village, well according to Google Maps that is. At the moment there is a branch of New Look situated on a farm down a single track country lane.
- shagie 6y agoThis is a variation on the trap street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street I recall coming across this in my travels. There was a named "town" at the intersection of two streets - upon passing through there, nothing. Later wondering where the town went I found that it was not ever there and was just present to identify people copying that map.
- captn3m0 6y agoCalled a Paper town.
- CydeWeys 6y agoI'm not disputing that they proved their point, but this is triggering one of my pet peeves about common misunderstandings of Morse code. Timing is critical in Morse code. You can't just write out a bunch of dashes and dots to transcribe it without clearly transcribing the rests between dots and dashes as well. They haven't given us the rests at all, so all the info they end up having is: dot dash dot dot dash dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dash dash dot dash dot dot dot dash dot dot And that can be interpreted in any number of different possible ways besides "REDHANDED". E.g. it could also be "AU5EWRFE", or any of thousands of different interpretations (actually probably a lot more than that; this would be a fun programming problem). They should have used a binary encoding; 22 bits (all they have given us) is not enough information to uniquely encode the string "REDHANDED". Once you include the short rests that are needed, we're talking 44 binary bits or 22 ternary bits. And if you want the long rests to distinguish properly the spaces between words, then 22 ternary bits won't do it; you need the full 44 binary bits.
- Arnavion 6y ago>They should have used a binary encoding; 22 bits (all they have given us) is not enough information to uniquely encode the string "REDHANDED". The fact that the sequence can be interpreted as REDHANDED with a particular way of grouping the input is just being cute. Regardless of the grouping, it is a binary encoding of a 22-bit number, and so would have a one-in-2^22 chance of being reproduced at random. Edit: To clarify: You're saying they should've mentioned 22-bits in the context of binary digits without mentioning Morse code, and if they did want to bring up Morse code they should've used trits or more bits to encode the stops. I'm saying that the fact that their 22-bit sequence can be interpreted in Morse code as a relevant word is just dressing, and does not detract from the point that the sequence was likely copied. Put another way, if someone tried to counter by saying their sequence could've been generated independently because "AU5EWRFE" and many other strings also encode to the same sequence, it would not affect the facts at all.
- CydeWeys 6y agoI think you missed the first sentence of my post.
- loa_in_ 6y agoWatermarking, while similar is not the correct word, though the purpose of watermarking and this steganographic embedding is the same.