Sean Parker Is Going To Great Lengths To Ensure 'Screening Room' Is Piracy Free, Patents Reveal (torrentfreak.com) 141
Napster co-founder Sean Parker has been working on his new service called Screening Room, which when becomes reality, could allow people to watch the latest Hollywood blockbusters in their living room as soon as they premiere at the box office. This week we get a glimpse at the kind of technologies Parker is using to ensure that the movies don't get distributed easily. From a report: Over the past several weeks, Screening Room Media, Inc. has submitted no less than eight patent applications related to its plans, all with some sort of anti-piracy angle. For example, a patent titled "Presenting Sonic Signals to Prevent Digital Content Misuse" describes a technology where acoustic signals are regularly sent to mobile devices, to confirm that the user is near the set-top box and is authorized to play the content. Similarly, the "Monitoring Nearby Mobile Computing Devices to Prevent Digital Content Misuse" patent, describes a system that detects the number of mobile devices near the client-side device, to make sure that too many people aren't tuning in. The general technology outlined in the patents also includes forensic watermarking and a "P2P polluter." The watermarking technology can be used to detect when pirated content spreads outside of the protected network onto the public Internet. "At this point, the member's movie accessing system will be shut off and quarantined. If the abuse or illicit activity is confirmed, the member and the household will be banned from the content distribution network," the patent reads. [...] Screening Room's system also comes with a wide range of other anti-piracy scans built in. Among other things, it regularly scans the Wi-Fi network to see which devices are connected, and Bluetooth is used to check what other devices are near.
This would be cool (Score:5, Insightful)
If the latest "Hollywood Movies" were worth watching...
Same here (Score:1)
Ive been told that it gets much better after "phantom menace" but i cant be bothered to find out.
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About 10 million people per week on the average,
Re: This would be cool (Score:1)
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So that means you missed District 9, Kick-Ass, Exit Through the Gift Shop, The Artist, Skyfall, Snowtown, Boyhood, The Imitation Game, Ex Machina, What We Do in the Shadows, Anomalisa, Kingsman: The Secret Service, and 56 Up. That's just English language.
Now I realise that not everything is for everyone, but good films exist.
Re:This would be cool (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah there's nothing worth watching. Certainly not something like Guardians of the Galaxy 2 which 90% of audiences really like and critics well and truly stand behind which has already made over $700million at the box office. Certainly not beauty and the beast which is similarly acclaimed and has made $1.2bn at the box office.
I mean sure only a majority of people enjoyed Alien Covenant, the The Fate of the Furious seems to cater to fan service. But who would see those? Surely no one. I mean it's not like the latter brought in $1.16bn at the box office. There's nothing good out there, nothing original. No horror movie that challenges tropes like the critically acclaimed Get Out, not the hilarious and well written light hearted Lego Batman movie, and definitely not the historical comedy Their Finest which has a comical piss take on the propaganda during the war.
Given that something either critically acclaimed, and well watched by many people, has come out in pretty much every genre available this year alone, maybe the reason you don't think anything is "worth watching" is because you're a bore who doesn't like movies. In the meantime Hollywood is doing just fine entertaining billions of people around the world, regardless of your assertion.
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If this is the low bar you set then you probably like a lot of movies. The Fate of the Furious? The Fast and the Furious part 4 zillion is what you list as original? The first one sucked let alone the sequels.
Guardians of the Galaxy and the other comic book movies are pretty much the only good content being produced right now and that is because of good writing in the base material combined with one thing hollywood does well which is effects. Hollywood
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Not at all. Just your assertion that there's nothing worth watching couldn't be any wronger unless you disagree with the vast majority of the people in the world. I like movies worth watching and there's plenty if you look around.
Your problem is you seem to be looking at only garbage and then making blanket statements across the industry. There's literally something for every taste in the cinema if you actually looked at what's playing rather than simply basing your opinion on whatever ad comes up between y
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Yeah there's nothing worth watching.
Sturgeon's Revelation has always been correct. There have always been movies worth watching and there have always been nine times more movies not worth watching.
Re: This would be cool (Score:1)
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Instead of getting fat sitting and munching popcorn and watching a make believe sci-fi movie, do some outdoor activity, like walking, jogging or going to a park where there is a sports field (baseball, football, soccer, etc). This "out of the house" activity will do more to prolong your healthy life than watching a dumming down Netflicks movie or some other piece of unimagination.
Re: This would be cool (Score:1)
Good luck with that (Score:4, Insightful)
Especially since filing patents publicly telegraphs your defensive strategy to the people who want to subvert it.
Strip by Numbers: (Score:1)
All you need is to get enough leakers that combining copies of their videostreams with automated analysis subverts the watermarking they are looking for.
If it is too obvious it is easy to subvert. If it is too vague, it is easy to lose if 3 or more copies are merged via whatever anti-watermarking techniques you choose to use.
Glad to know that Sean Parker has flipped sides though! I always thought he was a little self-serving shit.
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No this is a good thing. By patenting those he'll ensure that other services don't introduce similar garbage.
Re: Massive invasion of privacy (Score:1)
LOL (Score:3)
Watermarking? Really? That doesn't stop anyone but the dumbest of the dumb. And if you're supplying unique watermarks to each customer, then all a pirate needs is a couple of accounts to compare the streams and identify the watermark.
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Re:LOL (Score:4, Informative)
Heavy duty traitor tracing systems are far more sophisticated than that. Watermarks are low frequency and spread spectrum (both resolution and temporal). Meaning each receiver gets their own, dedicated encoded stream. The tracing system will simply identify *all* the accounts used to combine the signal. In layman terms, its like mixing signals of different frequency - you can separate those out again if you know what to look for, though in practice fancy number/coding theory methods are used for reasons below.
If you attempt to extract common component, from a small number of signals, you *still* can identify the sources from the supposedly "common" signal you get, because what you get actually isn't a baseline, you'll still include all the unique marks of all the accounts they had in common. This is possible because despite the low bandwidth, the steganographic bandwidth as a whole is fairly high (millions of bits per minute), and you need to interpose just few to get a match.
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Presumably most people still assume that anything they can't see in a video is invisible to everyone else as well. Real video watermarking today is more like security pens: you can barely see what they write normally, but under a UV light it becomes clear as day, and getting rid of all traces is surprisingly difficult.
Since most people don't have the mathematical equivalent of a UV light, they'd unaware that the watermark is even there, but tracing a leak would be pretty easy if the originator found a copy
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It would work for the rubes, yes. It wouldn't work for any of the release groups in "the scene".
Everything would still leak. Net benefit: Fucking nothing.
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I'm not sure you're talking about the same kinds of watermarks as everyone else here.
Watermarking in the sense of digital content protection usually refers to embedded some sort of signature, possibly unique to each recipient, within the underlying data. We're not talking about some TV studio's overt branding in the corner of the video, or anything else so crude.
Also, we're not talking about preventing a copy from being released. We're talking about having robust evidence if you find a leaked copy of exactl
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It may be relatively easy to get access to some copy. However, it's also relatively easy to ensure that only the intended recipient first receives a specific watermarked copy. We're talking about systems that will probably have a substantial price tag and need some sort of installation here, not things you can just walk into your local store and buy anonymously.
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Trick is you do not need to get rid of the watermark, because people are idiots and have forgetten the real reason for watermarks, all you have to do is overwrite them, obfuscate them (watermarks are meant to protected to prove worth, so destroying them is meant to destroy the implied worth).
Other protection they could apply, make the viewers house liable ie content gets copied they can immediately seize possession of your house. What no one will buy the shitty content then, defeating the whole exercise in
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Trick is you do not need to get rid of the watermark, because people are idiots and have forgetten the real reason for watermarks, all you have to do is overwrite them
You might be able to do that, but you would have to substantially decrease the quality of the video, which defeats the whole purpose of beginning the project — getting a watchable video out the other side.
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but you would have to substantially decrease the quality of the video
No you don't. It is in fact possible to edit compressed video content on a pixel level without needing to re-encode the whole thing. This is actually how proper watermarks are inserted.
It's very non-trivial to do and as far as I know there's no publicly available software to do it with, which means it would probably be a while before scene groups obtain that capability.
Nonetheless, you could spot the watermarks by comparing two of the same video and then changing them once identified.
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No you don't. It is in fact possible to edit compressed video content on a pixel level without needing to re-encode the whole thing. This is actually how proper watermarks are inserted.
You can't just change any pixel to any result without leaving evidence behind. And it's obvious that if you are editing the individual pixels used in a specific watermark that they will be able to detect what the watermark was. And since the watermarking schemes are complex, you need many more than two copies of the file to reasonably imagine that you have found all the watermarking data. It's still a very effective scheme.
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2 people with different streams can easily detect the differences and annihilate them. Then you're left with a common signal. You don't fucking COMBINE the signal. You SUBTRACT, and you find the differences, and you cut them out of the originals.
You'd have to do layers and layers of groupings to identify individuals or small groups of people, such as a different watermark scheme every hour, and a different scheme for every region, or whatever.
For a release group to think they're safe, they'd need to see
Re:LOL (Score:4, Informative)
The true signal is made of 2 4 6 components. Signal A is 1 2 3 4 6 and signal B is 2 3 4 5 6. The common "pirate" set you get by "substracting" is 2 3 4 6. The problem is, 3 now identifies you as a set union. This scheme is run on *hundreds of millions of bits*, and can easily identify unique copies and arbitrary combinations of copies to very high degree. Not only the result remains watermarked, but you can determine the precise set intersections.
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If you attempt to extract common component, from a small number of signals, you *still* can identify the sources from the supposedly "common" signal you get
You're not trying to average away the distortions, you're trying to find the union so you can jam the signal. I don't have to be able to decrypt your cell phone to jam the frequency band.
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The opposite. Think of analog TV with very poor reception - despite *high amounts* of noise (which is what you argue with jamming), you can still make out the picture. This way, you can still read the watermark.
You have to realize these sort of setups are used to identify cinema the CAM rip was made in. Given the amou
Boycott this (Score:2, Insightful)
These are very invasive anti-piracy measures. Consumers need to push back and say that enough is enough. The only way to do that is boycott this and boycott the theaters. Hollywood and the MPAA are way out of control.
Watermarking (Score:2)
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Watermarks are a neat trick if each person only has a single copy and getting hold of more would be difficult, like Oscar screenings, digital cinemas, classified documents and such. Or if there is only one watermark for all copies, like Cinavia on Blu-Rays. If you can trivially get many streams with unique watermarks then it's extremely hard to hide the nature of the watermark and and prevent anyone from destroying it.
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If you can trivially get many streams with unique watermarks then it's extremely hard to hide the nature of the watermark and and prevent anyone from destroying it.
It really isn't. A good watermark will be more like a good hash: a slight change in the input results in a very different output. A diff of two (or more) watermarked videos would just show almost entirely different data in every case. And while you could run the actual image data through lossy transformations to try to even out any distortions small enough to be invisible to the naked eye, you'd probably have to degrade the quality so much to reliably remove all traces of the underlying watermarks that the
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No modern watermarking system that I know of is this easy to defeat. You seem to be looking at the problem in terms of single, independent pixels. You have to look at it the same way you would if, for example, you were writing a compression algorithm.
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I'm wary of writing anything about anyone's specific product, even pseudonymously, given the online video industry is pretty litigious and there are NDAs and patents all over the place. If you'd like to read up on some papers, Google Scholar does have loads of them (though unfortunately many aren't worth much, being light on detail and written in very broken English).
Essentially, though, many of the more attack-resistant watermarking strategies no longer rely purely on spatial data but instead make changes
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Re: Sounds familiar... (Score:3)
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It's extremely easy to defeat by simply ignoring it by using a proxy and a stolen credit card bought for a handful of cents. Then are you going to prosecute the person with the stolen identity? Great, don't care.
This is what I thought up in all of thirty seconds. Actually put my mind to it and I'll defeat your "unhackable" system in ways you haven't even dreamed possible.
As always, executives are idiots who believe by implementing sophisticated algorithms and systems will defeat hackers. The reality is that
History repeats itself (Score:5, Funny)
Sony: Bluray has advanced encryption that cant be cracked.
World: Here's the crack.
Sony: We've updated our encryption, all of your old bluray players are useless.
World: Here's the crack.
Denuvo: Use us, our games can't be cracked.
World: Took us a while, but Here's the crack.
Sean Parker: Look at this anti piracy tech.
World: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
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My reckoning is as an earlier AC's: It's security theater (tee hee) to pacify the suits'n'shareholders.
It will be pirated, at predictable rates even. They know it. They don't care. They'll still profit. This is just to soothe the reps who balk about pirates being responsible for the entertainment industry's all-time wait we're making more than ever disregard that I suck cocks.
Re: History repeats itself (Score:1)
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If the attempt is to block it via a watermark, I can literally record it at a compression that will destroy any "watermarking".
this is fucking LOL all around.
Re: History repeats itself (Score:1)
Not the big challenge (Score:3)
Cinemas are a protectionist business, if you don't give them a time limited exclusivity they refuse to show it at all. Since by far most movies can't survive without box office sales, they win. Don't expect that to change unless a collective Hollywood threatens to give them the finger.
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They'd have an easier time recouping their costs if the studio wasn't charging *itself* sixty million for the sound, 128 million for the CG, 50mil for the studio fees and so on.
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Since by far most movies can't survive without box office sales, they win.
Not yet, perhaps. But going by the experiences of Netflix and friends, the world is moving rapidly towards on-demand streaming from the comfort of your own home as the technology improves. I personally don't go to the cinema much any more: it's much less convenient and even mid-range home equipment can produce video and audio quality close enough not to mind the difference these days. However, I probably would sign up for a Netflix-style "big movies from day one" service if the price was right (as long as i
--SIGH-- (Score:1)
Guys... Some people are going to watch your shit without paying for it, or they're NOT going to watch it at all. Calling it "piracy" is sophistry. REAL, ACTUAL piracy deprives someone of the possession or use of a thing. So-called "piracy" on the other hand, only deprives the "rights-owner" of income he/she/THEY could have realized, if he, she, or they'd managed to get people to pay for it. This is NOT the same thing. If it WERE, REALLY the same thing, they could also argue that anyone offering a compe
Ironic (Score:1)
Reasons why this will never fly: (Score:5, Insightful)
2. Theatre industry will fight it tooth and nail.
Assuming he manages to get past #1 and #2:
3. His 'anti-piracy' ideas are HIGHLY invasive of people's privacy.
3a. Who the bloody hell told him it's his business how many friends and family I have over to watch a goddamned movie!? Bugger off!
4. All you'd need to pirate a movie in your house is an HD movie camera. His 'watermarking' can be defeated like all other anti-piracy can be deafeated.
5. After you've pirated a copy with your HD movie camera, you use Tor to upload it or bittorrent it to others, which makes it pretty much untraceable to you.
6. #4 is just for the technological neophytes. The more talented pirates will break all his anti-piracy tech and make direct digital copies anyway, then #5 happens.
7. If he manages to get past all the above unscathed: the cost per movie view will likely be higher than a theatre because of #1 and #2; who the hell wants to pay that for a movie shot to be seen on a theatre-sized screen? Sounds like a ripoff.
File all the patents you want, buddy, it'll get you nowhere.
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7. If he manages to get past all the above unscathed: the cost per movie view will likely be higher than a theatre because of #1 and #2; who the hell wants to pay that for a movie shot to be seen on a theatre-sized screen? Sounds like a ripoff.
That's the real killer - who wants to pay $50 for a movie; even if yo have a nice theatre setup? Sure, some people may but I doubt it will be enough to be profitable. Merely making the movie available at the same time doesn't replicate the theater experience.And before commenters get all snarky about people talking, texting, etc. in theaters do you think it will better at home?
File all the patents you want, buddy, it'll get you nowhere.
Yup.
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uh... they already have systems that do this, and it's more like $600 a movie, and not $50... also it's $35,000 to get it install.
who would pay "that"? people who "that" doesn't mean anything to. money is an illusion.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
First, this system's price is for those who already spent $30K+ on a theatre setup, so they are only targeting the few people who ha
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First, this system's price is for those who already spent $30K+ on a theatre setup, so they are only targeting the few people who have a really nice set up already.
Exactly - a very small market that probably will not be enough to sustain a business.
Second, $50 is not a lot of money to see a movie. With ticket prices already around $12 per person, that's only a little over 4 tickets (and most people who build theatres at home seat 6-8 in two rows). Add in parking, gas, snacks, etc, and you're looking at a good $60-80 for a night out with the family. If you have a few friends over for dinner and a movie, $50 is cheap to watch the latest movie as it hits the box office.
It boils down to "What percentage of the movie going population go to see movies in the theater, especially the first weeks, for the experience? You aren't going to get the same experience at home as you do in IMAX or even just a big screen. For some its a relatively inexpensive night out. Will such a setup replace the experience and entertainment value of going to the movies? I have a decent home theatre setup, as do many
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I would gladly pay $50 to avoid going to the theater.
Pro-tip: You can already avoid going to the theater for FREE.
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You can save by do it the Dutch way: bring your own snacks.
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I'm doubtful he will be successful too.
But then again, he's not trying to create a perfect plan. His plan just needs to be slightly better than the plan of movie theaters for fighting piracy.
And as long as movie theaters continue to pay their employees rock-bottom wages and continue to mistreat their employees in all kinds of ways, pristine copies of Hollywood movies will continue to appear on file sharing networks.
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Right, #6 pretty much sums it up. The thing about any form of passive media is that it has to come with the decryption keys. Obfuscate all you want, but the only way playback works is *if you are giving the end user the means to copy it into memory, in the clear*. You can hide the keys, but eventually somebody's going to find them.
The only situation in which I can foresee DRM ever truly working is with software that runs entirely on the server side: basically, the user is running a client program that ac
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The following story is apocryphal; I haven't seen an authoritative reference for it.
It seems that, ages ago, before the emergence of the Betamax and VHS VCRs, Ampex developed a consumer video playback deck that had no rewind function, and no easy physical access to the spindles that would allow a user to rewind the tape themselves. The idea was that the consumer would rent th
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These patent submissions make it seem like they're trying to count the number of viewers in the room, so they can charge "admission" for them.
Yep. And if they had their way and had the technology to do so, after some time had passed they'd wipe your memory of having seen a movie at all, so you'd have to pay to see it again and again and again. And they wonder why piracy is such a Thing like it is. They want to bleed everyone dry for goddamned entertainment, preferably screwing the actual content creators in the process. Yeah, this guy who wants to do this? He can go eff himself. All his 'patents' are going to end up about as useful and valuable a
Perhaps I'm getting old... (Score:2)
Wow gall of some people. (Score:4, Informative)
Are you fuckin kidding me you start a p2p music app more less based on pirated material and now you swung the complete opposite way on this project.
There's no nice way to put this but "Fuck you Sean".
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He also had nothing to do with the Napster idea or technology. He was a rich kid who knew a rich guy that could invest in some other guy's idea. He's the least deserving and highest rewarded person in tech history.
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and now you swung the complete opposite way
Getting your entire company sued into bankruptcy has this effect on people.
"Scans all nearby Devices" (Score:1)
Good luck with that. (Score:2)
Investors beware.
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Exactly.
The book analogy often works out best for digital entertainment.
Just because your friend has a book, that you would read if they lent it to you, or you were in their house with nothing else to do, doesn't mean you'll rush out and pay for a copy of that book for yourself.
Equally, NOT being able to borrow it from a friend doesn't mean you'll pay for it either.
It's also a victim of its own protections too. If you make a system where you can cut off people for one incident, kids are going to destroy th
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Not everyone would buy it, for sure. But the amount who would is absolutely non-zero.
I remember when I was in school, before piracy was huge. When a new big console game would come out, a bunch of my friends who go crazy distributing newspapers and mowing lawns or other ways to make small amounts of money just to be able to afford the game. You could rent it, but for big games you want to play a lot, that got expensive too. Pirate copies existed, but they were not free and often didn't work well.
These days?
Relying on mobile devices? Heh (Score:1)
Did anyone tell this guy that you can work around all his patents by leaving your phone at home?
Sounds like a pain in the ass for non-pirates (Score:4, Interesting)
Why pay these guys for a movie that has lots of ways to break, most of them totally unrelated to piracy attempts? Save yourself some hassle and just download a pirate copy. Not only will you be able to watch the whole movie (a feature unavailable to most paying customers), but get this: it's also FREE!!
Face it, Sean Parker is still a pirate. He is creating a service whose entire purpose is to further encourage piracy and educate the public that piracy is the only convenient and reasonable way to get to see movies. I hope MPAA's members falls for it. They're just the kind of people who are dumb enough to.
It'll still be about as secure as any computer... (Score:1)
Pirate could also just defeat random subscribers' security, download [to subscriber device] whatever the subscribers have access to or can afford, transfer it to Pirate's computer, then publish without caring much about the watermarks (except perhaps to avoid creating too obvious a pattern which can be traced back to the Pirate).
Faraday (Score:2)
1. Buy system.
2. Install system inside Faraday cage.
3. Profit.
Fairness (Score:2)
Well, in all fairness, it's quite likely that the guy would never be able to close deals with any studios if he didn't go overboard in showing how many measures against piracy he's doing NOW... xD
Why he's even trying, that's an entire other question.
Interesting (Score:3)
Stapler mark! (Score:2)
For one movie as soon as the pirated version hit the streets they zoomed into the theat
So it spies on you (Score:2)
This sounds like something where I will have to pay for a physical piece of hardware.
And it will spy on me continuously, whether I am using the pay-per-view or not?
And I'll probably have to pay for a monthly 'base' subscription?
Where do I sign up? I'll take three!
sed has the truth (Score:1)
$ echo "Screening Room" | sed 's/n/w/g'
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Screewiwg Room?
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my bad. It should have been 's/en/w/g'. FTFY.
Apologies. My sed-fu is kinda rusty nowadays.
Nothing to see here (Score:2)
It's essentially flaw is the more it catches on. It's will be trivial to infect home users and eventually copy the stream only to re transmit it to the pirates later. The watermark essentially becomes worthless.
A hacker subscribes to the service and finds a flaw to copy the stream. He then uploads a stream grabber to a botnet of thousands of subscribers.
Alternatively someone can use stolen credit cards and subscribe for more than a year before simply using a video camera pointed to a screen and simply captu
An analog solution (Score:1)
Re: An analog solution (Score:1)
NSA wetdream (Score:1)