Slashdot Mirror
Will JPEG's Next 'Privacy and Security' Features Include DRM? (davidgerard.co.uk)
David Gerard has concerns about the Joint Photographic Experts Group (the ISO working group handling the JPEG standard for image compression). "They seem to think they can advance the cause of DRM for JPEG images...with a bit of applied blockchain." He bases that charge on the fact that the JPEG committee organized a special session on blockchain, and then created an ad hoc group to define use cases.
After six months' collaboration, the group has produced a white paper -- "Towards a Standardized Framework for Media Blockchain" -- as announced in the press release following the 80th meeting in July. The Executive Summary declares, "Fake news, copyright violation, media forensics, privacy and security are emerging challenges for digital media. JPEG has determined that blockchain technology has great potential as a technology component to address these challenges in transparent and trustable media transactions... [T]he standardization committee continues to work on improving various components of the standard. This includes incorporation of new technologies addressing current challenges related to transparent and trustable media transactions such as JPEG Privacy and Security."
"JPEG Privacy and Security" is described later in the paper. "JPEG Privacy & Security aims at developing a standard for realizing secure image information sharing, capable of ensuring privacy, maintaining data integrity, and protecting intellectual property rights."
That is, "Privacy and Security" is a euphemism for Digital Rights Management (DRM) in JPEG.... Chair of the group Dr, Frederik Temmermans stressed to me that "JPEG is not working on DRM in particular but on a more generic framework that supports privacy and security features." But DRM is very much a significant part of this.
"JPEG Privacy and Security" is described later in the paper. "JPEG Privacy & Security aims at developing a standard for realizing secure image information sharing, capable of ensuring privacy, maintaining data integrity, and protecting intellectual property rights."
That is, "Privacy and Security" is a euphemism for Digital Rights Management (DRM) in JPEG.... Chair of the group Dr, Frederik Temmermans stressed to me that "JPEG is not working on DRM in particular but on a more generic framework that supports privacy and security features." But DRM is very much a significant part of this.
DRM is all about money and not about privacy.
Anyone noticed how we over time have been forced to give up more and more of our privacy? With GDPR we now have agreements where we have to give up even more privacy in order to retain our services.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Actually your mom prefers jism over jif
Just like you don't call a GIF a "âYgâY©if" because "the "G" stands for "graphics."
I don't call a GIF a "âYgâY©if" because that's unpronounceable smartphone-produced garbage. I'm taking you off my Christmas list until you get a phone with a functional keyboard. No jifts for you this year.
mandatory cameras that will check if you're not taking pictures of the screen and call a SWAT team to your location if you do.
Over here, "jif" is a brand of household cleaning products.
I'm typing this in a real computer, you dotard.
Kriston
The GDPR is great, if you are in Europe, but it is a toothless law. Because treaties supersede laws, the WIPO treaty supersedes the GDPR, so if a DRM mechanism violates privacy provisions, it can by the WIPO act.
If you really want to lose your customer base, add in unwanted DRM
Fuck DRM. Tired of the constant battles, tired of watching the shrinking public domain. Tired of rightsholders benefiting from technology and giving little back. Tired of the constant battle for an open Internet. Fuck 'em all.
Dotard? Oh, you're one of those people.
Definitely not getting a jift this year.
I'll have some of what this guy is smoking.
/sarcasm Because graphics is pronounced Jraphics, oh wait!
The bios will not boot, unless it can see you, citizen.
Not according to the folks who developed it.
See here
But that's what PGP is for!
Is that too hard, or do I need blockchain!!?
What we need is a blockchain technology which will make it possible to analyze and identify malware authors, spies, trackers and any other crap that infests the internet. Let's get those names out there!
There's no patent on jpeg. So who says people have to use DRM'd jpeg encoders?
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
I guess they didn't learn from their ill-received JPEG2000 format that not everyone appreciates messing with a near-universal standard. Maybe they will call the Blockchain version JPEG2020 so we can ignore it too.
---
JPEG? Is that still a thing?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
She did say that she was being sarcastic though.
geeks/nerds/whatever IMPLEMENT it. No group of corporate executives in any boardroom of any multinational corporation that believes in unending copyrights and wished to eliminate the concept of "public domain" can muscle this into web browsers; only code jockeys can do that. If it's not in web browsers, then the format will never take off.
Basic question of principles:
You folks at Mozilla decided to run a guy out of your company because he personally opposed gay marriage (a position even Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama publicly held while campaigning for president). Will you run out of your company anybody who tries implementing support for this into Firefox?
Hey Facebook: you killed-off the pages of the nitwit who runs InfoWars because he was a jerk with some harmful ideas.... are you willing to kill-off the pages of programmers who implement this spec and thus help close-down the internet (a FAR more serious act of oppression than anything some stupid conspiracy nut can force)?
There are a very limited number of people without whose work this can possibly ever become a "thing" and now that we are in an era where people can make an employee of the President's life hell because they hate the President, and where anybody and anything can be boycotted for being politically incorrect, are the social justice sorts going to go after the coders who try implementing this garbage?
I suspect not. I suspect that the very sort of young progressives who are in favor of all sorts of actions to enforce their version of "social justice" on everybody else, and who preen about moral superiority while demanding Google not cooperate with the Pentagon, will happily implement this.
DRM could be as simple as password protection, and others have said, just because it might be available doesn't mean that everyone will use it.
as in 'is this picture the authentic original'. digital signature and checksum could simply be embedded into the file.
resize, resample, crop, or otherwise alter the image and the checksum fails.
anything else is over-reaching that stated goal.
if jpg evolves into a drm-laden piece of shit, the format will die
Mockery is the best weapon.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Yeah, like Jraffic Park
companies don't get to choose how I pronounce things. I'm dutch, and pronounce it with a dutch 'g'.
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
It's pronounced "Jiff," like the peanut butter more moms prefer.
If you pronounce GIF as "jiff", then how do you pronounce "JIF" (JPEG Interchange Format)?
More about the submitter and blog post author can be found at https://encyclopediadramatica.rs/David_Gerard
A big one is a digital signature to verify lack of tampering (photoshop). Ideally, you'd like to be able to crop or redact some portions but still have a valid signature on the rest. (Some sort of tree hash seems the obvious way to do that.)
And blockchain is a good way to build a notary service, attesting to the fact that I took a picture prior to some time. Either for copyright registration ordocumentary ("this picture of Bad Shit was taken during the incident and not staged later") purposes.
Or Giraffe?
Oh no, how do you pronounce "eight" when "ate" already exists??? /s
Are you familiar with the concept of homophones?
Jury is still out on the "GIF" pronounciation.
Personally I say "graphics" with a harder "G" than that, like at the end of "dog".
So to me, GIF has always been the same "G" I say "graphics" with, just with "iff" on the end: "giff"
While we're wading in with personal accounts, I have always pronounced "JPEG" with two silly bulls. The first is "J" as in "jay" then the "peg" at the end: "jay"-"peg".
That's how I like to talk, and so far in life I haven't had any trouble being understood. If someone is talking to me and say "jiff" or "jayfeg" or any other variants (within reason) my brain is flexible enough to know what is being communicated and to roll with the flow.
I have noticed that most Americans have the habit of stopping a conversation when the encounter a new word or a word that is pronounced differently/strangely to them, and may become adversarial towards it. Certainly the flow is broken and the new word then becomes a new topic for the conversation. In contrast, most other English speakers (UK, Canada, Australia, etc...) will just absorb the new word, work out the meaning from context, and may even start using it themselves in the same conversation (a little "mirroring" is a great way to get along). Of course they will bring it up specifically if they are unable to understand the meaning at all, though in some cases it just doesn't matter - understanding in very few conversations will hinge on a single word.
Cultural differences are interesting, and are very real, even among English speakers. Can you imagine what it must be like for those with no English, or English as a second language, moving to a new country? I have a lot of respect for migrants and those that take that plunge, because it is not an easy thing to do.
Stupid people aren't going to make sure the pictures they look at have a proper paper trail, just like they don't fact-check things now. And groups seeking to spread fake-news either aren't going to use a traceable image format, or they will merely screenshot and resave the image before using it themselves to break the chain.
Here here!!
Something else I do is not use named places where the name has been purchased by some company. The best example of these will be a sports stadium or concert hall.
I refuse to let corporations buy my cultural landscape.
Instead, I just use the old name for the place, whatever it was called before any company bought the name. For example, the "Millennium Dome" in London will always be called that to me, not the "O2 Arena". Or, I just make a name up for it. Sure, it makes communication a little harder, but so do commercially named structures when the sponsorship changes from year to year.
It's weird, but I have never heard anybody, least of all someone from CompuServe, pronounce GIF with a soft G. It was as in gift with no deviations until only recently, at which point I don't care how the creators wanted it to be pronounced because it's too late now. If everybody was saying it wrong, why weren't they being corrected 25 years ago?
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
I hate j-peg, I prefer spelling the letters. Note that I'm not an English speaker but still people say "j-peg" instead of "JPEG" and I find that just ugly. Though "jay pee eee djee" might be cumbersome in English.
Obviously, that was exactly the point I was making.
If you want to have conversations like "Please send me that in jiff format. You know, the JPEG one, not the CompuServe one.", be my guest.
I'll avoid the homophones and call a GIF a giff...
Quite a few site I land on just plain tell" go away we cannot offer you any page view due to GPDR" (paraphrased the real message is : "We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time. For any issues, contact content@richmond.com or call 804-649-6000. )", you got to ask yourself what the heck of a shaddy thing they are doing that they cannot offer you a page view. I am betting on tracker getting a lot of info off you. Because there is no real reason otherwise to forbid due to "legal" reason GPDR area.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The GDPR is great, if you are in Europe, but it is a toothless law. Because treaties supersede laws, the WIPO treaty supersedes the GDPR, so if a DRM mechanism violates privacy provisions, it can by the WIPO act.
No treaties does not supersede laws.
Companies doesn't have to care about treaties, they have to follow the law, nothing else.
The treaty might require a country to change the law, but until that has been done the companies have to follow the law.
This might mean that the country is faced with steep fines for violating the treaty but you still have to follow the law.
There are thousands of cases where you have awkward situations where treaties and laws are in conflict with each other and the country keeps paying the fines because changing the law is problematic.
You see this happening in EU all the time.
There are also cases where the treaty would require laws that aren't constitutional. Again, there are usually fines to pay until the treaty is renegotiated.
GDPR is still toothless outside of EU, not because treaties supersede laws (because they don't) but because EU doesn't care about what companies in countries outside of EU does unless it impacts EU citizens.
Their power to dictate what companies outside of EU does is also limited. The only thing they can do is put political pressure on other countries to play ball.
If we were having a conversation and you were saying J-P-E-G, and I was saying "jay"-"peg" then we would get along just fine. After a while we might start using each other's pronunciation just to try it out! Ha, I might even stay saying "jay"-"pee"-"egg" just to mix it up a little! :)
At the end of the day it just doesn't mater. There are bi-lingual people who can talk to each other in entirely different languages, simply because that's what they prefer. A bad example.
"Save it as a YEE PEE GEE file."
To hell with an American peanut butter brand I've never heard of. As the G stands for "Graphics" with a hard G, it's potty to pronounce "GIF" with a soft G. I have never heard anyone pronounce it with a soft G, and if someone tells you should I guess they are testing to see how gullible you are, and if you fall for it they are laughing behind your back.
Are you familiar with the concept of homophones?
Yes, but no point in creating another unnecessarily for two things that can easily be confused, unlike "ate" and "eight" so much..
New cameras, new smartphones, etc could include DRM code for generating DRMed JPEGs.
It's not that the people want it!
I hope you give people advance warning so they can deploy their umbrellas.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Who still uses JPG/JPEGs?
Either its PNG or RAW, no reason do anything else.
I never heard anyone, least of all someone from Compuserve, pronounce mrbester as "mister bester". It was "cumdumpster" as in "a manwhore who will greedily lick the spooge from your crusty tissues that you wanked into last night" until only recently, at which point I don't care how the creator of the account wanted it pronounced because it's too late now. If everyone was saying it wrong, why weren't they being corrected years ago?
It's pronounced "GAY-peg."
To anyone who says "Rogers Centre", it's the fucking SkyDome and it always will be. Get the hell off my lawn.
"Jury is still out on the "GIF" pronounciation."
No, it's not and there is no jury. The author of the format stated the correct pronunciation so it's not up for debate. Since the day GIF was used it has been pronounced "jif", it's only recently that children feel entitled to ignore history because they can't be bothered to learn it.
"So to me, GIF has always been the same "G" I say "graphics" with, just with "iff" on the end: "giff""
When you create a format that the entire world uses, feel free to name it how you like. Meanwhile, your opinion on the work of others doesn't matter.
What was the guidance from the creators of the format, and why does that matter?
Imagine two words with the same pronunciation! How can we ever cope!
If a website is wholly supported by advertising, they probably aren't making enough money on ads that aren't based on heavy tracking data. So they refuse their operational expenses by blocking access from unprofitable areas. This doesn't mean it's good or right. Just more transparent than it was before
I've been saying it with a soft g for around 20 years now. There were no debates because nerds were not talking to each other out loud, only by electronic communication. When they had to add the word to their vernacular spoken English they finally had to think about pronunciation. Before that, everyone assumed we all pronounced it the same, if at all.
If it costs a website more to serve up a page with non-tracking ads to a European than to serve up a "blocked" page, then their web design must've reached new levels of absurdity with hundreds of gigabytes of javascript libraries.
This space intentionally left blank
I predate GIF. Been saying that G just as how it's pronounced in "graphic" since day one. It's not my fault the author of the format has a poor grasp on the English language and chooses to pronounce it as a "J".
I also say it with a hard G, creator's opinion be damned. But that doesn't imply a poor grasp of English.
The pronunciation of an acronym has literally NOTHING to do with the pronunciation of the words that make it up.
Static pages are less resource intensive than dynamic content. Also, people don't tend to browse around from blocked page to blocked page.
finally... someone asked the right question. How DO you tell a .JIF file from a .GIF file if you pronounce GIF badly?
Since the G in Graphics is pronounced hard I, for one, have always (since CompuServe created it) pronounced GIF the same way, with a hard G. And that became even more important when the .JIF file format came about, it's the only easy way to tell them apart when speaking of them. When you pronounce GIF badly by saying jiff I will always assume you mean the .JIF file format.
the post by ByteSlicer should be modded +5, Brilliant!
--
Steve (AC because I haven't bothered to register in all these years)
G is for giraffics.
It featured a lossless compression mode. Back around 2000, I used JPEG2000 to make archival copies of my scanned photos. They came out roughly half the size of an equivalent TIFF.
JPEG2000's drawback (and probably its undoing) was that it was simply too processor-intensive for the hardware at the time. It took my 300 MHz Celeron about 5 minutes to compress a photo into JPEG2000 format, nearly a minute to decompress (read) it. That meant that you still had to rely on TIFF to save your intermediate photo editing steps. So lossless JPEG2000 only ended up saving you about 5%-10% of the storage space if you kept those intermediate editing savefiles, rather than 50%. At which point you figured why bother? Just save the final result as TIFF like you always did.
JPEG was the same when it first came out. I remember downloading a copy of it way back in the late 1980s when it was still being beta tested. It took over a minute to decompress a 1024x768 photo on my 33 MHz PC. But the file size was only about 200 kB, vs over a megabyte for a compressed bitmap (GIF crushes images down to 256 colors). The difference was JPEG didn't have any competing formats which could get sizes down as small, and disk prices and slow network speeds (300 bps dialup) meant shrinking image file size was incredibly important. But by 2000, storage prices had come way down and a good chunk of the country had broadband Internet speeds, meaning the extra file size reduction of JPEG2000 simply wasn't worth the huge amount of time it took on contemporaneous processors.
The JPEG standard is done, adding more features to what it have to do is pointless and will burden implementers, there will be a moment in which programmers will stop supporting new JPEG features and stick with an incomplete "good-enough" implementation or just use a more simple file format.
To be fair, many smaller sites just can't afford a lawyer to tell them that what they're doing already is legal. You shouldn't assume that they're actually doing something vile, when it's plausible that they just don't know what the law means.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Same here, no lame jiff, just hard GIF. Also dont pronounce QT as cute but rather as Q T.
I went to the doctor yesterday. I didn't sign anything. I live in the EU.
No treaties does not supersede laws.
If you are in the US, as I am, you are absolutely incorrect. The US Constitution is quite clear that treaties do, in fact, supersede all laws written by any state. In fact, the text of the constitution does seem to imply that the constitution itself can be superseded by treaty. But that is a matter of some debate. I, myself, have studied this particular clause and can't make up my mind on it.
Here is the relevant text:
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
I know this particular debate is in regards to the GDPR, but to some extent, a treaty will at least supersede any local (non federal) laws no matter what nation is involved. I think a reasonable person would agree that a treaty would be worthless if any local or regional governor, mayor, etc could override it.
So the blanket statement that treaties do not supersede laws is, at least, in need of clarification.
> have never heard anybody, least of all someone from CompuServe, pronounce GIF with a soft G.
Same. Guess it depends on location: east/west, US vs UK, etc.
> why weren't they being corrected 25 years ago?
Because no one really gives a fuck except the pedantic. A similar argument arose over how "gib" was pronounced in the Quake 1 days:
* Hard G, like "gift" (with near-close front unrounded vowel) (/g_ft/), similar to gibbous; rhymes with "rib",
* Soft G, like "jive" pronounced "jib", (with tailed z, /d_rb/) a boom used in Crane (machine), Jib (crane), or Cinematography, or Sailing -- a triangular sail that sets ahead of the foremast on sail boat. Ironically, in 1847 "jib" was spelled "gib".
Notice how even "b" is getting hijacked: gibibyte is pronounced like gigabyte acording to the Cambridge dictionary.
Maybe they learned that enough people on corporate repeater sites like these will dance the DRM (digital restrictions management because I side with the user class) two-step: when something isn't yet implemented, push for its need absent any evidence that such need exists. Ignore that we need not think above business above all else, and ignore that even within that all-too-limited business-first framing businesses existed and worked at least as well without DRM. Later, if the DRM is implemented but not yet popular, talk about the DRM as if it were a well-established standard only fools speak up against (the "deplorables" of the tech world). People who seek to control the computers they own, perhaps, but people who have a long history of seeing how badly DRM recipients are treated. Thus DRM ends up being given the red carpet from mere idea to early implementation as if it were always in our interest (DRM is never in our interest) and we'd be wise to accept yet another loss of software freedom (as DRM implementations require proprietary, nonfree, user-subjugating software).
Digital Citizen
A real ... Apple computer?
It's not my fault the author of the format has a poor grasp on the English language and chooses to pronounce it as a "J".
He learned how to say giraffe in his ESL class and it just stuck from there.
Giraffics Interchange Format.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What about GIMP, then?
> that's unpronounceable smartphone-produced garbage
You idiots still refuse to admit that the problem is Slashcode?
Not according to the folks who developed it.
See here
I could create something, and call it "ass" and say that it is pronounced "butt".
You could then say "the creator pronounced it butt".
While your statement would be correct, we'd still both be pronouncing it wrong.
And blockchain is a good way to build a notary service, attesting to the fact that I took a picture prior to some time.
So we'll blockchain an atomic clock too?
You must be a rapefugee then. Set fire to a pile of shit tben throw yourself into it so you can die in a shit fire, you shit rapefugee.
Here here!!
Something else I do is not use named places where the name has been purchased by some company. The best example of these will be a sports stadium or concert hall.
I refuse to let corporations buy my cultural landscape.
Instead, I just use the old name for the place, whatever it was called before any company bought the name. For example, the "Millennium Dome" in London will always be called that to me, not the "O2 Arena". Or, I just make a name up for it. Sure, it makes communication a little harder, but so do commercially named structures when the sponsorship changes from year to year.
Skydome forever!
Oh don't be such a twit and laugh at the unicode failure of slashdot.
Oh no, how do you pronounce "eight" when "ate" already exists??? /s
Are you familiar with the concept of homophones?
Context sorts that out. GIF and JIF would be used in similar context, making differentiation difficult.
How is blockchain a better solution than signing?
Its more buzzwordy! Its more trendy! Its more blatantly indicative of the promoter's technical incompetence! Its more inapplicable! If forced onto things it doesn't belong will cause great havoc!
What's not to like?!
Except they didn't, of course. Much like they didn't invent the telephone...
Otis might have invented the safety elevator, but he built on an invention that has been around for over 2000 years.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"