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Activision Blizzard Secretly Watermarking World of Warcraft Users
New submitter kgkoutzis writes "A few days ago I noticed some weird artifacts covering the screenshots I captured using the WoW game client application. I sharpened the images and found a repeating pattern secretly embedded inside. I posted this information on the OwnedCore forum and after an amazing three-day cooperation marathon, we managed to prove that all our WoW screenshots, since at least 2008, contain a custom watermark. This watermark includes our user IDs, the time the screenshot was captured and the IP address of the server we were on at the time. It can be used to track down activities which are against Blizzard's Terms of Service, like hacking the game or running a private server. The users were never notified by the ToS that this watermarking was going on so, for four years now, we have all been publicly sharing our account and realm information for hackers to decode and exploit. You can find more information on how to access the watermark in the aforementioned forum post which is still quite active."
This is what I think Blizz/Activision will say if you complain. What are you gonna do, go play another game? Even though they are losing subscribers, they have enough that they really don't care. I don't play WoW, nor do I even like it, but I have some relatives who are so addicted to it that Blizzard executives could break into their house and rape their children, and they would give it a pass. This is meaningless on that scale.
All of the claims made are extremely dubious. You have an incredibly small group of random people making these so-called discoveries. The very fact that you can't find the watermark in non-lossy JPGs is in and of itself a considerable dispute of the claim. The algorithms used in various JPG encoders can result in various natural patterns, because there really is no such thing as true random.
And the OP's post is very misleading. It's implies that they've decoded the watermark. I've been following the thread since before it ever ended up on Slashdot, and all they have is what they interpreted to be binary data, and then converted that into hex values. Their "confirmation" of the data being encoded player info is based on a single person's supposed reverse engineering of the WoW binary, which has resulted in an incredibly detailed code listing which you normally only come close to if there are debugging symbols present, which I severely doubt Blizzard would be foolish enough to do, as it would aid in private server creation.
I don't have WoW installed anymore to dig around in the binaries myself, but I did have my brother send me a screenshot. These artifact patterns can be revealed in various ways, from sharpening to gamma and levels adjustments. But when gathered from a non-solid color screenshot, they're nearly impossible to distinguish from the rest of the image, making their usefulness as a way of tracking anyone far less viable.
Until we have more than 3-4 people on some forum, where, conveniently, someone released a tool to disable this (which couldn't possibly be designed to steal your WoW account info!), then I call bullshit on the entire thing.