Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • Reminds me of Blizzard embedding data inside World of Warcraft screenshots (link goes to a small write-up from 2012 in a forum focused on video game cheats; sorry, could not find a better source): https://www.ownedcore.com/forums/world-of-warcraft/world-of-...
    by Ennea
  • A number of prominent corporations used to embed these in the background images of their internal webpages, so that leakers could be identified from the screenshots they shared. Caused a whole fun adversarial loop where journalists had to transcribed and/or redraw screenshots before publishing to avoid exposing the identity of leakers...
    by swiftcoder
  • Watermarks (spymarks) for AI generated content are important because increasingly we aren't able to tell the difference between real and fake anymore. We will not just increasingly think fake things are real, but also that real things are fake.

    Of course, the absence of a watermark/spymark doesn't prove that the source wasn't AI generated. But the absence provides evidence that it wasn't.

    AI companies should simply use watermarks in the responsible sense: they should indicate that the material was AI generated, not include personal information in it.

    by cubefox
  • > A watermark is a visible mark embedded in a physical or digital medium to verify authenticity or assert ownership.

    We also recently had this with LG spy-TVs. Cars here in the EU also spy on people, allegedly to show how alert they are. Perhaps they sneakily upload that information somewhere ... Facebook also has the spy-glasses now. People getting angry about Flock-spy-cameras.

    It seems we are now in the age of spying of everyone at all times. Future spying will be done via even smaller devices.

    by shevy-java
  • The word choice example is cool. I wonder if it really works dependably. I'm sure many many exerpts in posts and books have those same 8 bits - you'd need a lot more bits - but the more you add the more strange your writing style might become.

    Like it choose between "winding" and "curving" but there are many uses of curving that probably can't be replaced with "winding" like "her gently curving thighs" with "her gently winding thighs"

    But I'm sure there are some intricacies I don't understand. Anyway, very cool website, thanks for sharing it~!

    by Morromist
  • It increasingly seems to me like the only way to prevent value to be extracted from myself is to stop engaging with new tech altogether.
    by paweladamczuk
  • These are going to be very popular for intercepting images on their way to a display. Think of the advertising possibilities. Ad attribution can be 'vastly improved' when both the ad and every step in the funnel are all spymarked and all of them are reliably reported on by virtue of their pixels hitting your screen.

    First the low-end laptops and phones (and probably later, most of them) will incorporate some low-level driver that is constantly scanning for these and passing them to a helper app to phone home. I assume this is something Apple will, to their credit, refuse to do[1] but I don't think other OEMs will have any qualms based on what they already do with their TVs.

    [1] (though they don't do this kind of thing out of altruism, but because their cash cow is app store rents and fat hardware margins, not third-party advertising.)

    by xp84
  • Spymarks just seem like another word for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography. On that note, one way we can prevent it is to assert that all our content is byte-for-byte identical with the last known trusted stage of what we have produced (for example: a camera we are certain does not watermark, an image editor we are certain doesn't watermark, an image compressor we are certain can't watermark, etc). One vector that I am particularly concerned about is social media. Most images and videos uploaded to most social media is re-compressed by the target platform. This is a door to tracking that is far too easy for social media platforms to open. They might rationalize it (if discovered/announced) by saying that our memes won't be reposted, images or work stolen, etc... but honestly I'd rather my work be stolen than tracking information inserted in there. Oh, we also have stuff which is way more secure, like time-stamped cryptographic signatures.
    by Retro_Dev

Explore Birbla archives