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Like another commenter mentioned, I doubt that the watermark here is super sophisticated, but the fact that it exists and is “unknown” creates a higher degree o
by filmgirlcw 6y ago
Like another commenter mentioned, I doubt that the watermark here is super sophisticated, but the fact that it exists and is “unknown” creates a higher degree of risk for a would-be leaker. And that might be enough to stop some people from leaking.
That said, if you don’t work for a three letter government agency, in finance (especially at an investment bank) or at a corporation with tens of thousands of employees (and ideally, a tech company), there are plenty of non-technical reasons that leaking can be considered a relatively low-risk activity. The biggest reason is that the IT person tasked with finding a leaker, assuming it was from a meeting that many people attended, often isn’t paid enough and has a lot more valuable things to do than to try to play audio forensics. I know of several instances where companies have threatened to release the hounds, so to speak, to find a leaker, only for those hounds to be people who are either about to be laid odd or who have just lost a sizable portion of their team. Not a lot of motivation for those people to really care, so they just tell the angry executive they tried but couldn’t figure it out, the executive is placated by trying, and everyone moves on to another crisis.
And of course, many of these leaks only matter if the recording itself is widely shared or published. If something is recorded but given to a news organization who is instructed (or does their own due diligence and decides not to publish the audio/video/document) not to publish the recording but to use it as a source, well, good luck. In the US, shield laws typically prevent a news organization from turning over their sources.
It’s like with screeners for the Oscars. The screeners will be watermarked with your name and that’s usually enough to keep them off of torrent sites, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have a Dropbox or Plex account full of them that you share with your close friends and family. Like, sharing my WGA screeners with my mom is about as low-risk as it gets.
- goatinaboat 6y agoI doubt that the watermark here is super sophisticated Can you explain more why you doubt this? Zoom has the financial and other resources to be state-of-the-art here if they wanted to be.
- SiempreViernes 6y agoGiven the shoddy security engineering in other bits of their product, why would watermarking be the part they spend a lot of effort on? Presumably preventing things to be stolen at all is more important than finding who did it after the fact.
- Ensorceled 6y agoMaybe they bought a high quality, off-the-shelf watermarking tool? Maybe the person hired to do the watermarking is smarter than the group in charge of security?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- NineStarPoint 6y agoProblems with security engineering can also be an issue of correctly managing priorities more than not having pure technical skill. Spending a ton of effort on watermarking instead of getting the basic security stuff working wouldn’t be that crazy a story in the industry.
- not2b 6y agoBecause large companies told them their requirements for ditching Webex and adopting Zoom and this was on the list?
- sverhagen 6y agoZoom has a less than stellar reputation now for security. Meanwhile this entire feature seems like a checkbox for customers, just one more feature to add to the list. There's only going to be a very small segment of customers going to look into the details. It may not be worth it to them yet to build something more sophisticated.
- ddingus 6y agoMaybe they just licensed one. Radio has had this tech for a decade.
- jrochkind1 6y agoThey got that reputation 6+ months ago at the beginning of the pandemic. Since then their revenue has skyrocketted, giving them the capacity to hire, contract, and license to improve their security. They haven't shed the reputation, but reputation management is a different problem than security. Certainly for something high-risk, I would not put much weight on "Well, lots of people think they are bad at security, so the watermarking probably isn't very good".
- NineStarPoint 6y ago6-9 months to find people to hire, hire them, and get them onboarded enough to contribute meaningfully? That isn’t much time at all. Definitely wouldn’t rely on that if I was leaking something, but if they didn’t have it implemented well before the pandemic I doubt they would be there yet.
- nitrogen 6y agoThat's plenty of time to integrate a third party technology.