SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Pirates have apparently found a way to bypass the High-bandwidth Digital Copy Protection (HDCP) v2.2 DRM used on Netflix's Ultra HD (UHD = 3840×2160 resolution) content. The release group iON has uploaded a 17.73 gigabyte, 2160p/UHD copy of Breaking Bad's first episode:
The media info for the release shows that the episode has a bit rate of 41.3 Mbps and overall the video specs make it hard to play the file smoothly on the average computer. At the time of writing the 4K leak is only available on private torrent trackers but it's expected to eventually leak to public sites as well. It's currently unknown if the release group broke HDCP 2.2 or if they found another way to capture the stream.
Leaked drafts of the 4K copy protection agreement between Sony and Netflix reveals that the streams are generally well-protected. They also include a watermark so that leaks can be traced back to the source. "The watermark must contain sufficient information such that forensic analysis of unauthorized recorded video clips of the output video shall uniquely determine the account to which the output video was delivered," the document reads.
Netflix informs TF [Torrent Freak] that they are looking into the reported leak and the company will do its best to prevent similar breaches in the future. "Piracy is a global problem. We, like others[sic] content providers, are actively working on ways to protect content featured on our site," a Netflix spokesperson told us.
The torrent description mentions that the file is an "HDMI cap of UHD Netflix with a lossless capture card, encoded with x264." The use of H.264 encoding accounts for the relatively massive file size and bit rate, since Netflix uses H.265/HEVC to encode and deliver UHD streams at a bit rate of about 15.6 Mbps, far less than the 41.3 Mbps seen here.
Original Submission
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @01:43PM
This content is so insanely big that there would be a lot of space to hide watermarks in, without being obviously visible. Even if the pirates were to capture the same stream from multiple accounts, and comparing the streams in an attempt to remove the watermarks, it might be possible to uniquely identify the sources, because the watermarks will have some overlap (as in, identical watermark data), which will not be identified by the pirates as being part of the watermark. It takes only some tens of bits to uniquely identify an account, and probably a few hundred to do so with sufficient redundancy to be reasonably sure if some of the bits may be mangled, but such a stream could potentially contain megabytes of watermark data.
How Netflix could introduce that much watermark data is of course another question; I would think this would require them to modify and re-encode a large number of frames individually for each account, which would seem computationally prohibitively expensive. They need to introduce massive amounts of watermark data in hundreds of thousands of individual streams, in real-time, whereas the pirates only need to process a couple of streams, without the real-time requirement.
And all this assumes the streams would be captured with the consent of the account owners; if the capturing would be done using malware running without the owners consent, it would be difficult to hold them accountable, and identifying the source would be useless.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Sir Finkus on Sunday August 30 2015, @02:03PM
I could think of a method or two that might work. One idea would be to chop the file into a few dozen pieces, create a few different versions of each piece, then stream each user a unique set of pieces.
Assume a file is divided into 3 parts. Each part has 3 different watermarked version. To make things easy, just imagine they add a big letter to every frame in the scene.
Alice streams the first episode. Part 1 has a giant A imposed over the image, part 2 has a C, and part 3 is another A
Bob streams the episode too, but his part 1 is a C, his part 2 has an A watermark, and his 3rd part has the B watermark.
Bob uploads the episode to the pirate bay, netflix examines the watermark and traces the file with the CAB watermark back to Bob. Bob's house gets raided by a swat team, they shoot his dog, and sony's intellectual property is protected.
The attack for that kind of thing would be to determine where the parts are and combine them into one file using many different sources. I suspect this could be mitigated with a good amount of redundancy and periodic "checksum" parts. You could still get the file of course, but you'd need several different people to rip it and collaborate to create a final product that can't be traced back to your account.
Join our Folding@Home team! [stanford.edu]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Sunday August 30 2015, @02:06PM
The watermark is a token defense. Just get one Russian to do the downloading. You could use the watermark to identify and suspend the account, assuming you can automate the process of finding Netflix 4K files on torrent sites, downloading them, and checking them for the watermark. After all that, they will just move on to another account.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Sunday August 30 2015, @02:27PM
The watermark is a token defense. Just get one Russian to do the downloading. You could use the watermark to identify and suspend the account, assuming you can automate the process of finding Netflix 4K files on torrent sites, downloading them, and checking them for the watermark. After all that, they will just move on to another account.
There's something I don't get about that? Why do they do it? Why continue to sign up for account after account and pay for all this only to share it free online and bear the cost again when you need to sign up for a new account? Are they making and selling DVDs out of what they download? Or is it just for the thrill of it all?
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Sunday August 30 2015, @02:58PM
I think some of them treat it as a hobby. It isn't unusual for well-off people to lay down hundreds of dollars on their hobbies, and I doubt Netflix subscriptions will become an insurmountable expense for these uploaders. Furthermore, it only takes a handful of people to populate torrent sites with content. More than one person is ideal, since some of them may be more focused on quality/filesize than others. Theoretically, being in "the scene" gives you access to pirated media that you would otherwise pay for, offsetting some of the costs. I think that may have been more of a motivation circa 2000.
https://torrentfreak.com/former-movie-piracy-scene-member-speaks-out-101029/ [torrentfreak.com]
https://torrentfreak.com/interview-with-a-warez-scene-releaser/ [torrentfreak.com]
https://torrentfreak.com/top-pirate-reveals-warez-scene-secrets-071119/ [torrentfreak.com]
https://torrentfreak.com/i-was-a-member-of-centropy-the-worlds-leading-movie-piracy-group-120526/ [torrentfreak.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]