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Next week on HN: Show HN: zoom-dewatermarker (github.com) Seriously though, I doubt what Zoom is adding (specifically for audio) is anything that new. Does an
by xxpor 6y ago
Next week on HN:
Show HN: zoom-dewatermarker (github.com)
Seriously though, I doubt what Zoom is adding (specifically for audio) is anything that new. Does anyone have experience removing this type of stuff? Would something like a bandpass filter for say, 100 Hz-15 kHz work?
- S_A_P 6y agoThat is my first thought. I have a few specialty plugins in Wavelab that I would be curious to run a Zoom capture through. If its ultrasonic, then as you say a low pass filter should suffice, but theres a million ways to encode data...
- vorpalhex 6y agoI mean, should be as easy as recording your own zoom call with the Watermark enabled and a well known audio track (a metronome, dead silence, etc). Rip audio from the recording and examine it for anything outside of the metronome. Probably need to do this several times for different participants and meetings to get an idea of what the watermark looks like and where in the spectrum it sits.
- Mistri 6y agoPerhaps they have countermeasures for this? Maybe a unique identifier for each meeting that alters the audio signature.
- vorpalhex 6y agoThat's why it'd be necessary to record several meetings and see how things change between them.
- sumtechguy 6y agoEasier way would be to get 2 copies of the same stream from 2 or more clients then compare. Repeat until extra/missing data is found.
- mpoteat 6y agoFrom my perspective, the only fool proof way of removing all audio watermarks from a conversation is to run individual speaker detection, STT detection, and voice cloning algorithms to "recreate" the conversation from scratch. Even things like background electrical hum have been used in audio forensics.
- farnsworth 6y agoI've seen the demos of AI systems that can be trained on an individual's voice, and generate new speech in the same voice. If I was waterprinting a meeting, I would train a system like this on the fly on the people in the meeting and use it to dynamically insert filler words (um...) in a unique pattern into the audio stream for each member of the meeting. That would defeat any audio filter tricks or recreating the meeting from scratch, so you would want to summarize/rephrase the meeting too.
- bobthepanda 6y agoHow would you explain these filler words if the lips don’t match?
- loa_in_ 6y agoBut if certain frequencies are in the training data, they still will be in the output. Won't you end up with watermarked audio still?
- ardy42 6y ago> I've seen the demos of AI systems that can be trained on an individual's voice, and generate new speech in the same voice. If I was waterprinting a meeting, I would train a system like this on the fly on the people in the meeting and use it to dynamically insert filler words (um...) in a unique pattern into the audio stream for each member of the meeting. That would defeat any audio filter tricks or recreating the meeting from scratch, so you would want to summarize/rephrase the meeting too. But wouldn't doing something like that make the recording seem like a deepfake, potentially reducing it's credibility? To an outside observer, it may make a genuine recording appear to be fake. I'm reminded of the controversy over the faked Bush Texas ANG documents. They were discovered by randos on the internet realizing the text looked like the output of a modern version of Word than the 70s typewriter they should have been written on if genuine. Imagine a similar but genuine document where the content was deliberately retyped using anachronistic equipment to obscure the leaker's identity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy
- young_unixer 6y agoNot if Zoom uses something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia