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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.

3 of 155 comments (clear)

  1. Re:DRM is all about money and not about privacy. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    You don't have to give up more privacy with GDPR, you're starting to see how much privacy you were already giving up because services have to be more specific about what they are doing.

  2. Re:DRM is all about money and not about privacy. by Z00L00K · · Score: 1, Informative

    You have obviously missed all the updated agreements that now have appeared with writing circumventing GDPR.

    --
    If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
  3. Re:JPEG? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    "WebP is better in every way."

    Except for browser support.

    No thanks, I'll stick with PNG. For web page graphics it is a perfect little format and has great browser support. If I am truly optimising page load times then I can put all my little graphics in one big PNG and use CSS sprites.

    For those wanting a comparison of PNG vs WebP you can get one here. The main advantage is alpha transparency with lossy encoding, e.g. transparent backgrounds for JPEG images. This is actually a pretty good application, as I once had to code my own in Javascript using two images: a JPEG and a greyscale PNG of the mask.