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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."
Is this known to be the case for any other games? IE: Diablo III?
There was an infamous cows shot from a hell level of diablo2 from years ago that my character surrounded by hundreds of cows. Wonder if that if that was watermarked?
It's not actually a watermark on the picture. It's a watermark encoded in your brain from playing too much WoW.
Ouch. That's gotta hurt. I think there's a case for even places like the EU commission there, if people are unknowingly distributing other's data.
That said, I don't really care because I've never touched WoW. But, yeah, I can see the problem. 4 years of IP -> client records, plus things like date-time stamps. If nothing else, that's a whole host of web-crawling to link people to IP's, accounts.
You kind of expect it in pre-release reviews or betas or something but in the full client and in every screenshot? Bit nasty.
More interesting - what other games do that?
HP (and others) used to, or maybe still do, use watermarking in printers to hide data revealing time, printer type, etc.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-5811739-7.html
https://www.eff.org/issues/printers
~ Meta data is watching
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
"Watermarks do not work that way!!! Good night!"
Their TOS describes how and what info is SENT to them by the client. This is information on your own computer. They don't have to tell you all the places they store your information. Think copy protection. There's a good deal of sneaky things they're doing on your computer to make sure you're running a legit license. They don't have to tell you about any of that. If you take a file that their client makes, and upload it somewhere, it may contain identifying information in it. This just happens to be a screenshot / image, that you wouldn't normally expect metadata to be in.
It's not too different than say, your digital camera embedding metadata. And it does. A lot. Usually common things like date/time, fstop, exposure, etc, but also can include model of camera, CAMERA SERIAL NUMBER, gps location, firmware version, total number of shots taken, etc etc.
So you can take off the tinfoil hat. It's too late. They're already in your head.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
No it's a sail boat!
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
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.
it's a pretty far done troll if so, if you read further to the thread(there was some disassembly from mac client).
(it would be entirely feasible that they remove the watermark at full quality.. because it would be obvious then).
this is blizzard we're talking about after all. (I don't think jpg artifacts would position themselves like that, not on any of my pron pics anyways)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
One may also ask 'Why would you play WoW?' but the answer is not a pleasant thing to say.
If you read the thread, other people have actually decoded those "compression artifacts", and even wrote a tool to do it so, no, those aren't just artifacts.
How do you account for the pattern then?
Same reason they want to add your Facebook, twitter, game stats & time played/pissed away on line. A really shit reason.
Guild Websites, How To guides etc
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Has anyone actually done some work on the quality 10 screenshots to ensure that the pattern isn't actually still in the structure of the file?
It was my understanding that digimarc's tech was supposed to make their watermarks essentially invisible to the human eye, and perhaps it is a biproduct of lossy compression that's actually showing the pattern on lower qualities.
Has someone taken the eye-dropper tool to a large section of a quality 10 screenshot to verify that there aren't pixels that have a different color by even one bit?
This post has a script to save the watermark only
Next time, actually read the thread before posting.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
From reading the thread, the artifacts do not appear when JPEG quality is set to 10 (i.e. maximum) or if a non-lossy algorithm is used (like TIFF or PNG). If this was meant to be a watermark, the programmer who wrote the algorithm should be fired.
These are most likely JPEG compression artefacts.
They did this on purpose, in order to avoid having their watermark identified when viewing the images in really high quality. An Assembly expert wrote some code that allows you to add this watermark on purpose in the high quality images: http://www.ownedcore.com/forums/world-of-warcraft/world-of-warcraft-general/375573-looking-inside-your-screenshots-4.html#post2491687 We also decoded the content of the watermark and it indeed contains the account information, as mentioned. It is NOT artifacts. Please read the full forum post before posting dis-informative comments. Thank you.
JPEG compression artifacts? That's absurd! How would a random compression artifact contain the UserID, Time, and IP address? I'd be more likely to believe that was an actual picture of Jesus in my Sandwich. The reason the lossy compression just reveals the pattern.
Yes, strategically place JPG artifacts caused by known compression techniques to create a readable barcode.
I'm not surprised the commenter above didn't read the posts following the first post of the source.
What's important are these posts:
1.) Disassembly from the Mac OS X client, which shows watermark functions triggered in the screenshot routine.
http://www.ownedcore.com/forums/world-of-warcraft/world-of-warcraft-general/375573-looking-inside-your-screenshots-2.html#post2489452
2.) Using a memory modifier, the client is edited to only save the watermark (discarding the actual screenshot) even in JPEG 10 and Lossless formats. Completely disproves compression artefacts theory.
http://www.ownedcore.com/forums/world-of-warcraft/world-of-warcraft-general/375573-looking-inside-your-screenshots-4.html#post2491687
3.) Further disassembly shows the following are included in the watermark: Account Name, Realm Info (Serialized, unknown content), Realm IP, Timestamp
http://www.ownedcore.com/forums/world-of-warcraft/world-of-warcraft-general/375573-looking-inside-your-screenshots-5.html#post2492494
You really should read some of the posts in between as well, linking Digimarc to Blizzard Activision, patents filed by Digimarc describing precisely this watermarking technique (and possible predecessors), and how the payload (88 bytes) is repeated multiple times exactly to 5808 bytes in order to survive anticipated resizing and further compression.
Whilst I'm sure they may have good intents (for support maybe? giving benefit of the doubt here), it's these kinds of tricks being pulled by digital companies whilst keeping consumers in the dark that really turns me off.
If you look at the JPEGs in a mirror you can see a hidden message "Hello, hunters. Congratulations. You've just discovered the secret message. Please send your answer to Old Pink, care of the funny farm, Chalfont."
They claim it's been successfully decoded, but that code rule and examples are not provided. As they give the steps to generate such a picture, it would be otherwise easy enough to verify.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Okay, so there's some pattern that shows up against a completely untextured view of the world. How would they recover such a faint watermark from an ordinary view of the world, complete with complex textures in the background? For that sort of thing, you need a copy of the image without the watermark so that you can take the difference between the two, and that doesn't seem to be the case here. And if you wanted to covertly record someone's data, why go to this effort when you could just send it to your server without telling them?
Sigh. This kind of story makes me miss ignorant Ask Slashdot questions. I wonder if the OP would mind if I told him how to select the best network cable for use at home.
I'd like to know - the cheap cables I keep buying on eBay often fail after a few plug/unplug cycles, and the $20 Systimax patch cables seem like overkill.
and ask him wtf is going on? MMorhaime@blizzard.com
At some point we are going to start showing a little respect for ourselves as consumers, and stop supporting companies like this, right?
Wrong, unfortunately.
That will never happen. Shit, I thought it might when companies started controlling what you're allowed to run on your own device and prohibiting things that were "inconvenient" to their business model, but no... people line up to buy that shit. I thought it might happen when companies installed rootkits on people's computers, but no, people continued to buy things from the same company.
There IS no level of abuse that people won't accept if the toy is shiny enough.
From the frequent "how to I open a screenshot" posts that used to appear in the WoW TS forum, I suspect it was changed to lower support calls.
I'm assuming you're just being sarky, but the question sort-of merits a proper answer in case anybody is actually interested. There are a few reasons:
1) Proof of a particular achievement. Guild websites etc frequently post screenshots of kills of new bosses (or of Arena victories if they're PvP focussed) to demonstrate the level they're playing at as an aid to recruitment. You see less of this these days, since the game added an actual achievement system, along the lines of that seen on Xbox Live or Steam.
2) Guides and walkthroughs for particular parts of the game (generally boss fights). There's a trend these days towards using youtube videos as a substitute for more traditional text-and-pictures guides. Now, youtube videos can have their place in describing MMO encounters (though I hate, loathe and despise them as a susbstitute for walkthroughs for offline games), but text-and-pictures is still much more convenient for a quick-reference guide and people are still making them.
3) Requests for technical help. Something along the lines of "hey, guys, I installed addon x, but it doesn't seem to be working properly - here's a screenshot".
4) Random silliness - either "look, I managed to get my character somewhere that's supposed to be inaccessible" (which you see less of these days) or "look, we used 500 dead gnomes to spell out "bumpoo" in giant letters across the Barrens".
Got fed up with all the BS and emailed privacy@blizzard.com to have my account and all my games perma-deleted from their system. Took an untold number of weeks for them to finally follow through on it but I'm now no longer a zard-tard.
Doesn't look like many slashdotters here care, but if you actually do then claim your info back and stop affiliating with this once decent company.
Wait, they added un unencrypted watermark? Why on earth would you NOT encrypt a watermark of this kind?
Why? What did it say?
rewriting history since 2109
More people should read my post's parent.
If someone ever actually manages to find Mankrik's wife, they need to know who and when so they can send the prize.
The thread indicates it may have appeared during WotLK alpha builds and only contains:
- Account name that was used pre-BNET or otherwise a post-BNET numeric account name. (email address is NOT included)
- IP address of the realm you are connected to, NOT the client IP. (However, this could be used to identify pirate servers).
- The time the screenshot was taken
I suspect it was most likely used to catch people leaking imagery of alpha builds which were not allowed to be made public. WotLK was the last WoW expansion Blizzard tried to keep secret for the alpha, but everyone was leaking it despite very clear NDAs having to be agreed to by all who participated. With their next expansion, they didn't bother with an NDA outside of a very small group of initial internal testers.
I wouldn't call this any kind of breach of privacy as none of the information is personal. An account name can only be matched to a real name by Blizzard and only if you play on their servers.
Of course privacy zealots will say otherwise, but each to their own.
What a retard you are. Just read the first few sentences, then click on the link.
Or do you actually need someone to come and fucking click on the link for you?
The only people who'd need to worry are those exploiting the game who've distorted their toon names thinking that's all they need to do hide their identities.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Online Games, it is the game makers best interests to be hard against cheater. Because if left uncontrolled they will ruin the game for everyone.
So if you are going to be taking screen shots of your cheating. Might as well get tracked down and banned because of it.
I remember back in them olden days of Lan Parties. A professor in my college actually hosted a WarCraft II Lan Party. So we were on two teams, One side had the professors 8th grade kid. He found a cheat that worked online. Once we found out both sides of the players (including his own team) in general told him that he cant play anymore. We wanted to play using our own skills if we won we won, if we loss we loss no big deal, not cheat, just to win.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Dude have you ever tried to support clueless users? I would remind everyone this is WoW, a game that has everyone from Mr T to soccer moms playing the thing.
In hindsight was it a good idea to put this data in there without it being encrypted? Probably not but oh Lord I can see why they did it! Personally i wish I had an easy way to have the relevant data on the system just handed to me in a screenshot by the user pushing a single button than playing twenty questions like "What OS are you running?" what's an OS? "What version of Windows is on the machine?" Windows "Windows what?" Huh?
Now picture that conversation going on for a half an hour or more and you can see why tech support would want a way to have the facts just handed to them, because I can imagine with the volume of support calls with issues like "My Warcraft looks funny!" cutting through the bullshit would seriously cut down on support time.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
To prevent additional artifacts when you resize and save the image to JPG again. If you're doing anything to the image before publishing it, you don't want anything wrong at all with it.
"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."
And, without a password to go with that user ID, none of these are what one should reasonably consider "personal" or "sensitive" in the first place.
IMHO, in terms of privacy concerns, this is a non-story. Simply presenting it to Slashdot as a neat graphical hack would make more tinfoil-free sense.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Because depending on how the screenshot looks, png may actually compress better?
But by the end of the 1990s, Windows 98 had become the standard operating system for personal computers not manufactured by Apple. I imagine that since the release of Windows 98, most major home broadband ISPs have changed their standard practices to assume the presence of IE as a system requirement unless the computer is manufactured by Apple, in which case Safari is assumed.
Is the game still a loss if IE is demoted to "Firefox and Windows Update Downloader"?
Some years ago I developed my own steganography techniques and those pictures reminded me of that.
You only need such patterns to encode information in lossy formats due to the compression artifacts. If you use a lossless picture, where every bit of every pixel is perfectly preserved, there are much more efficient ways to hide any information in the picture.
Most likely the TIFF, PNG and other lossless formats contain the same information or even more, just encoded in a different way.
So, if you want to avoid leaking your account details, save screenshots in a lossless format and then convert it to a lossy format.
I once saw someone post a "link" to a screenshot on the forums that was something like "c:\documents and settings\username\desktop\World of Warcraft\screenshots\WowScrnShot_2353.tga." He didn't understand why nobody else could see it.
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.
They released tools to get it alone out of the image and decypher it, so what the fuck else do you want?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Uh just read that thread guys, it's confirmed. Already with POC in several languages.
Can I light a sig ?
Cool discovery.
This is a minor privacy leak, when someone creates a program to decode the watermarks. It will also be worthless for authenticating screenshots, because when someone can read the watermarks, it doesn't take much to fake one. Blizzard should have encrypted the info with a public key to solve these problems.
As it stands, it may be useful for others than Blizzard, to identify the origin of a screenshot (in a non-adversarial situation)
I wouldn't call this any kind of breach of privacy as none of the information is personal. An account name can only be matched to a real name by Blizzard and only if you play on their servers.
Or you have a dump the hackers made of their client list, which contained screen names as well as other info. They could then use this hacked info to get to any of the other data, especially by someone who posted a screen capture online. Using the leaked DB could tie that screen capture to MUCH more data.
today is spelling optional day.
Rarely, unless it's an extremely small screenshot like 16 pixels by 16 pixels, but it'd be hard to play WoW on that.
It would be possible to use that information to get the first part of what is needed to actually log into an account. You've got the player name and realm, with that alone its easier to compromise an account. Although it is of course easier just to take the whole user list from Blizzard....
Blatant Advert: Android Apps!
Yes, because the majority of users who take screenshots are reviewing graphic cards.
Also, whoever decided that screenshots should be saved as jpeg by default (assuming it is default) should be fired.
From a cannon.
Into the sun.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Because compression artifacts look terrible on most CGI
What?
This is pretty interesting, but I think the OP is trying to spread FUD about what the implications of this data are. There is no personally identifying information contained in this watermark. It contains the server IP, server time, and account name. That's it. Now there's a lot of confusion about what "account name" means, so let me explain it for those who don't know.
About the same time that this watermark apparently showed up (2008, the 3.0 patch associated with the WotLK expansion), Blizzard converted the WoW login system so that it was integrated with their new Battle.net 2.0 login system. At this time, it became necessary to login to WoW using your account's email address instead of your traditional account name. That traditional account name is what's being encoded into the watermark, not your email address login. If you created an account after the Battle.net 2.0 merger, then your "account name" is a unique string that isn't even display to its owner. Anywhere in the account management webpage or login screen that this string would appear, it instead displays "WoW1", "WoW2", etc. (if you have more than one account).
So there's basically no way to associate this "account name" with your login information, real identity, etc. If you play on a private server, that account name is going to be based on the private server's login system, not Blizzard's login system.
It's pretty obvious what the real purpose of these watermarks were: to identify users who violated the NDA of their closed betas and ban them from the beta, identify users attempting to sell their account, and possibly to identify the IP address of private servers to assist in attempting to shut them down.
Further, the probability that these info could be used to help harvest accounts for gold selling or to phish for accounts seems ridiculous. It'd be highly inefficient to spend so much time on a single user when for far less effort you could just spam a million harvested email addresses.
Their compromised database is indeed a very serious privacy issue. From a security point of view, fortunately they used a good enough password hashing technique that it is largely impractical to extract passwords from the dump.
From my experience, with almost all people who have their accounts compromised, it was due to phishing or malware. Consequently, account names in screenshots will probably not make any difference to how many people have account security issues.
They were originally TGA, and you can still create TGA screenshots. They changed them to JPG by default for user convenience. Most WoW users are not computer savvy enough to convert their own screenshots.
No, someone released a tool to "disable" the watermarking, within a very short time of all of this starting.
To anyone who is neither naive or stupid, the entire situation stinks of a scam.
Oof. You have no idea how many times I've seen people blame Exchange/Outlook because a link like that in an email didn't work. "It's all Microsoft's fault!" Well, I guess in a way it is, since MS enabled even idiots to use a computer.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
First of all, using a beta client as a basis, which is much more likely to watermark screenshots to begin with to make sure someone isn't passing around info they shouldn't be, is not an indication that the final client does or is doing anything. And I can't reiterate enough the uselessness of a watermark which is nearly impossible to use except in certain circumstances.
Second, I simply stated the facts. It's a group of 3-4 people who are "discovering" and dispersing all of this information. There is no correlation of this from anyone else of any reputable background. If you knew the definition of FUD, you would quickly realize that it's a group of unknown people shouting out something to fear based on unsubstantiated claims. Whoever posted this topic on Slashdot is completely irresponsible, and if it all turns out to be false, puts themselves at legal liability if Blizzard decided to make a stink about defamation.
So far, you effectively have a lot of coincidence and suspicions. Don't try to discredit me simply because I point out that fact. If you want to prove me wrong, then prove me wrong, and I will happily admit to being so. Otherwise, it all just appears like people want to hide and discredit my comment to keep the story alive for that much longer.
I am sure that WoW's EULA covers this watermark, as it does the installation of The Warden service which actually tells Blizzard all the apps running on your computer at the time that you play their game. This is extremely intrusive, much more than this watermark.... I therefor suspect the wording used to perpetuate this EULA to encompass the warden would also apply to the watermarks.
Long Live WoW!
"Activision Blizzard Secretly Watermarking World of Warcraft Users"
Cool man!
That explains why I've seen all these people on the streets with that appears to be a photoshopped watermark on them.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
A schooner IS a sail boat stupid head!
Well, as a former WoW player, I decided to do due diligence and check my old screen shots. Any screenshots taken after WotLK due indeed have these watermarks. No they aren't jpeg compresion.
I am not affiliated with the researchers in any way.
It is easy to verify that screenshots have some kind of watermark by simply using a sharpen filter.
I believe Blizzard now requires user IDs to be a valid email address.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
I stand corrected. It's not the email address; it's the old user name that A) was supposed to be secret, and B) can't be changed.
I very much would not want it associated with my character's name, as it could tie together different online identities that I have, as a privacy concern, a desire to keep separate.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Hmm, my browser failed to render your sarcasm tags.
Forget diamonds, copyright is forever.
You have no indication that it's not jpg compression. Take any image, from anywhere on the internet, and sharpen it in this manner. Different images will give you different intricate patterns, depending on the encoder used.
You have no idea if this strange visual effect is really just a compression artifact resulting from light variations due to shaders which WoW employs, causing very subtle differences in the colors in certain equally spaced locations. As long as it visually looks fine, it wouldn't matter if their lighting techniques were a bit of a hack job underneath. Hell, look at the one image they linked on the forum, where a guy with a much larger screen resolution had a different pattern entirely.
Given that the most vocal detractor of my comment is also an Anonymous Coward, likely in order to retain moderating points, we'll just have to take your word that you're not him or part of the group.
IP address of the server, that seems harmless. Time, harmless.
Is the User ID secret or something that other players could see anyway?
(it would be entirely feasible that they remove the watermark at full quality.. because it would be obvious then).
Not just entirely feasible - someone later in the thread claims to have found the code that disables the watermark on full-quality images and figured out how to patch it out, so that the watermark is present even in uncompressed TGA screenshots.
Blizzard has to deal with cheaters on a scale never before encountered by any game company. Even at the CS cheating peak when it rolled out PunkBuster, Valve never had to deal with as many cheaters in one game. Because of the economic incentives, gold farmers and others have tried with varying degrees of success to get past the protections in the game. Blizzard has made it reasonably clear that it takes certain actions to find cheaters, some of which are fairly rootkit-like in their implementation and ability, and that it does not disclose all of these methods to the end-user.
Personally, I don't see a problem with this. I find the rootkit behavior a much bigger issue, but I'm willing to live with that in part because I know so many people at Blizzard (and I'm not just talking about a few customer service or QA people) and I trust that they're not going to do evil things with that ability. If they're willing to have that level of inspection on their computers, I don't see why there's so much fuss over the watermarking.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Information which can be used to distinguish or trace an individual's identity, such as their name, social security number, biometric records, etc. alone, or when combined with other personal or identifying information which is linked or linkable to a specific individual, such as date and place of birth, mother’s maiden name, etc.
An account name or server IP address does not meet these requirements. The only way for it to be linked up with an individual is with the help of Blizzard. From their privacy page:
For some activities, we may ask you to create a username and password and/or to provide other, non-personal information such as your age, date of birth, gender, and/or game and platform preferences; and, combine such information with your personal information.
And what, exactly, is it in the TOS that they might be breaking that warrants this anyway?
Since the account name feature hasn't been used since the launch of the Real ID service (enabling you to communicate with your friends across all* of the Battle.net games instead of having to add them per character per game). Older titles such as Diablo 3 wouldn't feature this for example. This would apply to Wrath (2008/9ish) NDAs and perhaps situations involving pirate servers.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
That's not actually true. jpg images can contain steganographic data in them just fine. For instance, there is a steganographic message in this image using steghide:
http://www.climagic.org/images/mystery-developer1.jpg
It could be that steganography didn't survive post processing. I just tested the image above by posting it to Facebook and the stego data didn't make the transfer. Maybe Blizzard developed a more hardy watermarking technique.
Blizzard can easily monitor a users activeity outside of their network by "scraping screenshots". You don't think there's a privacy issue with that?
Especially since they've kept it under wraps for years and failed to mention it in the privacy policy?!
Hey by the way every time you post a screen we will track you. And be warned that anyone else who views your screenshot could potentially figure out what your User ID is. And if you upload the screenshot to a forum there is a chance that the forum software might have a vulnerability that allows virtually anyone to connect your WOW UserID to your Email Address on the forum and your IP address at which point they could figure out where you live, who your ISP is and pretty much everything else ...
Most decent DSLR do that. My Nikon D800 does it. My Nikons D700, D300, D300S and D7000 did it before and my friend's Canon 5DMKIII and 5DMKII do it too. I see it just by looking at my library in Lightroom.
I have a smaller Fuji X10 and a Nikon P7000 abd they do not insert their serial number in the EXIF data.
ftp.mozilla.org uses "round robbin" style mirroring. You connect to that host, and it automatically directs you to an ftp server.
That's how I do it, anyway:
230 Login successful. /pub/firefox/releases/15.0.1/win32/en-US
Remote system type is UNIX.
Using binary mode to transfer files.
ftp> cd
250 Directory successfully changed.
ftp> ls
200 PORT command successful. Consider using PASV.
150 Here comes the directory listing.
-rw-r--r-- 1 ftp ftp 17790056 Sep 05 18:41 Firefox Setup 15.0.1.exe
-rw-r--r-- 1 ftp ftp 189 Sep 05 18:41 Firefox Setup 15.0.1.exe.asc
226 Directory send OK.
ftp> get "Firefox Setup 15.0.1.exe"
local: Firefox Setup 15.0.1.exe remote: Firefox Setup 15.0.1.exe
200 PORT command successful. Consider using PASV.
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for Firefox Setup 15.0.1.exe (17790056 bytes).
226 Transfer complete.
17790056 bytes received in 4.45 secs (3.9e+03 Kbytes/sec)
ftp> bye
221 Goodbye.
>pedophile
Okay, troll confirmed, moving on to factually accurate articles.
How about png? All modern OSes has png support, right?
What?
son,
u r the h4x
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
So when google spiders stuff on the internet with the "default allow" of the internet requirement, this is real bad to copyright content owners.
A web server responds to requests. The act of putting files in a shared directory on a web server is authorization. Barring any exploits if I ask for information and "you" provide it, how is than anything but stupidity and/or incompetence if you're upset that I have access to it? This doesn't address if the publisher (the entity who put the files online) is authorized to release the information, medical records or something for example.
TL;DR
Don't put files in a shared directory you don't want shared.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
So if you are going to be taking screen shots of your cheating. Might as well get tracked down and banned because of it.
And if you *haven't* actually been cheating, but you've posted pictures of your WoW game for whatever reason over the years anyway, it's okay that identifying information was embedded without your knowledge (possibly to be used against you years later in circumstances like, oh... *this case*) even if you had good reason to want to remain anonymous?
Actually, I don't care whether the person *was* cheating, it doesn't excuse this sort of thing. If Activision had wanted to do this, they should have been open about it happening, if not the precise mechanics of how it was implemented.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
FTP which on windows workstations is handled, by default, by IE and to get a ftp client like filezilla you will probably use a browser, - chicken vs egg
or you could pop out the old linux disk and have any non IE/safari browser you want with a simple apt-get install, or simply while live booted grab the windows version of Firefox, Chrome, Konquerer, Opera, Seamonkey, elinks, whatever copy it you your windows partition reboot into windows install the new browser set all web related stuff to be handled by the new browser and kiss IE goodbye.*
*until the next windows update when it resets the default program for hyperlinks to IE again.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
You confuse explaining a rational for doing sometime, with an endorsement for the practice.
The gaming company know that cheaters are a problem, then they need to figure out where to draw the line.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
So, like I said, it can't be used to identify THE PERSON who is breeching the ToS.
Well that's arguable. If you're doing something you're not supposed to be doing (say breaking an NDA) why would you take pictures and distribute them? Unless their machine was compromised (then there are bigger issues at stake) or someone else has access to the machine and the contents within.
If it isn't personally identifying, they can't tie the image to you.
It contains information (an account name and a server IP address etc.). When paired with information only Blizzard has, they're able to identify the account. None of the information included in the screenshots is personally identifiable information. It is not a name, date and place of birth, mother's maiden name, social security number, or biometric record. I learned a lot about what personal information and cardholder data is when implementing a payment system. There are very clear definitions of what is and isn't personal information. I don't profess to be an expert, all of what I've stated is available online.
So why is it there?
Seems like a great method to identify NDA breakers and identify pirate servers among other things. Perhaps instead of speculating we'll have an official response?
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
I clicked the damn sailboat.
It contains information (an account name and a server IP address etc.). When paired with information only Blizzard has, they're able to identify the account.
This should read: It contains information (an account name and a server IP address etc.). When paired with information only Blizzard has, they're able to identify the account holder (the one who is responsible and agreed to certain things etc.)
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
You confuse explaining a rational for doing sometime, with an endorsement for the practice.
My apologies- I thought your comment came across a bit like you (personally) were trying to excuse the company with that rationale, rather than merely explaining their position. I'm happy to accept that this was a misinterpretation.
The gaming company know that cheaters are a problem, then they need to figure out where to draw the line.
Systematically compromising *everyone's* anonymity without telling them so is (IMHO) quite clearly over that line.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
FTP which on windows workstations is handled, by default, by IE and to get a ftp client like filezilla you will probably use a browser, - chicken vs egg
[Start] => Run => cmd.exe
>ftp ftp.mozilla.org
A native CLI FTP app has been included in Windows since (iirc) Win95.
No, you have to be at 10, the highest quality to avoid watermarking. Setting quality to 9 (and presumably lower, but that's not indicated in the post) enables watermarking. What's important is what the default is, which I haven't seen mentioned anywhere.
Of course you don't see the fuss about watermarking. You just said you're fine with Blizzard installing a root kit on your machine! Waht the heck is a measly watermark compared to that?
More people should read anything before commenting. Seems half of the people here post by gut-reaction, not any fact they have observed. The thread linked in the story is conclusive for anybody with half a brain. Of course that assumes that half brain is actually put to use...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
In my defense -- the first page of the linked comments was heavy on insinuation, light on actual decoding work.
What? No, dude, that's not how Internet debates are supposed to work! Dig in your heels, accuse the GP of backpedaling, and burn that strawman to the motherfucking ground!
That's exactly my point, much as you might attempt to trivialize it. I don't have a problem with the watermarking because the rootkit behavior is so much more severe in comparison. I don't see why anyone else would get bent out of shape over the watermarking if they're willing to put up with the rootkit.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
My kingdom for a mod point.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
You forgot and c) can no longer be used to log in anyway.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
The reason why the watermark is not mentioned in the TOS is because there is no moral, ethical, or most importantly legal reason to do so, because nothing in the watermark payload is information that can compromise a user's privacy. Blizz started using the watermarks to enforce NDAs with its beta testers, and probably also to locate non-licensed private game servers. Hard to see how you could get your knickers in a twist about this, unless you are a paid shill for one of Blizz's competitors, in which case you've now outed yourself and will be hitting our plonk files in short order.
For future reference, the phrase usually involves a pot, not a pet.
I haven't seen anyone mention why this matters. If you get a kill in the game, you used to be required to post a screenshot to prove it in the online forum, although this isn't necessarily de rigueur anymore with the advent of the achievement system. Thus, SSDD, screenshot or it didn't happen. It could still be important though to back up your argument in some type of situation.
Doesn't matter. My account is disabled and I don't care if someone tries to log in. I care that my old user name, which I have entrusted with Blizzard to be tied to my real name and my character name, not be released to the public in a way that ties it to either my real name and/or my character name.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
what's wrong with wget?
What's wrong is that "'wget' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file." In order to download, install, and use Wget without ever opening IE, one has to already know on what FTP server the Windows binary of Wget is stored.