this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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For years I've assumed there was some kind of invisible image manipulation that effectively encrypts the Netflix user ID in the video feed itself, so they can use leaked video to pinpoint users that share recordings.
Same type of thing paper printers do, and AI giants are trying to push now.
LoL I remember in the early 2010s a porn comic that actually did this and people were shocked because it seemed like a lot of work for a small niche thing.
And then we realized that converting to a png and then back to jpg killed the identifier. But the system was in place and I have seen so many versions of and workarounds for it. Someone even had a custom clipper software that just looked for the excess identifier data on the end of the file and would trim it.
I think it's wise to always think they might be doing this kind of stuff, especially big companies, but breaking it is pretty easy usually even by accident.
How would that work? And if it was being done I’m sure it would have been discovered already. I mean it is just video.
It's possible with stegenography!
Basically small deliberate changes to the brightness or hue of chunks or even individual pixels scattered across the frame. Netflix would have the original, and would know where to look for the changes that embed the user ID data, or whatever.
They just get a copy of the leaked video, locate the ID, and take the user to court or ban them.
I'm not great at explaining it, so look up image stenography to get an idea of what I mean.
Anyway, I don't have any proof they do that, but I guess I always assumed they did, because... why not?