The new Greek government promised, tonight, that they would provide free food supplies, electricity and medical care to the Greek citizens who truly fell victims of the recent economic crisis. This means that people who literally can't afford to survive (e.g. jobless, really low-wage/low-pension, etc.) will be provided with this help because they actually need it to stay alive.
If someone starts a cloud-server farm in their basement, it means that their income will increase to a level that will actually allow them to survive on their own, without the government's help, so they won't have access to free electricity after this.
If someone does this without declaring it to the government, I'm sure the power company will notice the unusual power consumption and will investigate in order to find those who try to take advantage of the government benefits while also committing tax-fraud at the same time.
So, tl;dr: Catch 22. If you start a server farm, you won't be a poor citizen any more, thus won't receive these benefits. I hope this answers your "question".
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.
The new Greek government promised, tonight, that they would provide free food supplies, electricity and medical care to the Greek citizens who truly fell victims of the recent economic crisis. This means that people who literally can't afford to survive (e.g. jobless, really low-wage/low-pension, etc.) will be provided with this help because they actually need it to stay alive. If someone starts a cloud-server farm in their basement, it means that their income will increase to a level that will actually allow them to survive on their own, without the government's help, so they won't have access to free electricity after this. If someone does this without declaring it to the government, I'm sure the power company will notice the unusual power consumption and will investigate in order to find those who try to take advantage of the government benefits while also committing tax-fraud at the same time. So, tl;dr: Catch 22. If you start a server farm, you won't be a poor citizen any more, thus won't receive these benefits. I hope this answers your "question".
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.