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posted by martyb on Sunday August 30 2015, @01:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the how-many-pixels-is-enough dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 30 2015, @01:18PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 30 2015, @01:18PM (#229818) Journal

    Yep, it's global. I've lost a gazillion dollars already to piracy. What's that? You expect me to justify that claim? Why would you expect that? No one demands that Hollyweird or the record labels justify their preposterous claims!

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @01:43PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @01:43PM (#229826)

      Attacking ships is indeed a problem. Maybe they meant something else. [gnu.org]

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @10:26PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @10:26PM (#229979)

        The FSF is no fun; they don't even observe International Talk Like a Copyright Infringer Day.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @02:54PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @02:54PM (#229845)

      I released a video that nobody watches on Youtube and so I blame piracy. I could have been rich I tell you, rich!!!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @06:41PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @06:41PM (#229926)
      That's why many of us are downloading porn for free- we're trying to kill the sinful porn industry.

      Too bad possessing child porn is illegal or we could all do our part to kill the child porn industry too- perhaps that's why some religious leaders have stashes of child porn, they feel morally obligated by their religion to break the law to fight the evil ;).
  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @01:35PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @01:35PM (#229823)

    I'm glad all the DRM that's been forced down our throats over the past decade, making our operating systems slower and more draconian and keeping our processors the same speed despite the advances in manufacturing that yield a tenfold increase in the number of transistors on a die, I'm glad all of that has finally worked to stop piracy.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @04:57PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @04:57PM (#229885)

      Its not all due to DRM. Its also due to sloppy coding that is the norm today, and end users demanding more 'fluff' features.

      ( well, that and antivirus... )

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @09:08PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @09:08PM (#229961)

        DRM was the primary reason that Vista was a bomb when it first came out. Everything -- from your video output to file copies -- was checked continuously by the operating system.

        https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/02/drm_in_windows_1.html [schneier.com]

        No idea what has changed since then, as Vista was the point at which I moved to Linux.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @01:43PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @01:43PM (#229827)

    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

      by Sir Finkus (192) on Sunday August 30 2015, @02:03PM (#229832) Journal

      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.

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Sunday August 30 2015, @02:06PM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday August 30 2015, @02:06PM (#229833) Journal

      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.

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      • (Score: 2) by jdavidb on Sunday August 30 2015, @02:27PM

        by jdavidb (5690) on Sunday August 30 2015, @02:27PM (#229840) Homepage Journal

        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?

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        • (Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Sunday August 30 2015, @02:58PM

          by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday August 30 2015, @02:58PM (#229848) Journal

          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]

          TF: Can you tell us a little bit about how you got into the movie piracy world?

          SC: I got into movie piracy after being an avid downloader. I distinctly remember in fact, getting a hold of my first movie over a 4 day leech on a 56k line. It was wicked. I loved it, and quickly realized there was some sort of underground in control of all of this. It piqued my interest, and I was determined to get to the top of it. Seemed a little far fetched at the time, and I cant really fathom still how far it snowballed, but its pretty cool none-the-less.”

          [...] TF: What was the main motivation for you to join the movie piracy Scene? What about the others?

          SC: Pride and ego was my main motivation. Most sceners are male, between 18-30, generally white and well educated. Most are middle/upper middle class, students and young professionals.. Pride and Ego fuels almost 90% of their motivations. You are able to achieve a level of status online that you probably could never in the real world; you are respected and feared, and the mystique of it all helps. Sounds foolish now; but at the time it didnt seem so.

          [...] TF: Are there any commercial interests linked to groups that you’ve been connected to or heard from?

          SC: Yes. Absolutely. Money and those accusations have gone on for years. I can attest with certainty that I know groups that have sold – but to sit here and spout their names endangers them and is just slander. Its unecessary for me to publically shame them all. Except maVen. He’s no longer here; and his motivation was money almost 100% of the time.

          https://torrentfreak.com/interview-with-a-warez-scene-releaser/ [torrentfreak.com]

          The Interview (loosely translated from German)

          Q: The scene is regarded of many people as the “Warez Scene”. What is the “scene” for you?

          For me the scene is like a competition, the best group has the highest status. The real scene is just a small elite group. Most of the “scene web sites” have nothing to do with the scene. They only try to make as much money as possible, and bring the real sceners in danger.

          [...] Q: Joe: Where do the programs and movies come from?

          They come to the hands of the Groups in many diverse ways. Either someone buys the things, or maybe they work at the manufacturing company or obtain it from a rental company.

          [...] Q: Denis: Why would someone be involved in this activity when it is such high risk? Is it money? Power? Fun?

          The latter. Money? No. This “power” does not bring me in my material life anything. Thus, it is the fun that makes this “hobby” makes so interesting.

          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]

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  • (Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday August 30 2015, @02:31PM

    by looorg (578) on Sunday August 30 2015, @02:31PM (#229841)

    Transfer speeds and storage space do increase all the time. But I would think that it's the 18 gigs for a tv episode that is the real DRM here. Breaking bad has a total of 62 episodes; 1116 gigs (or 1.1 tera) for all the seasons. Doubt I'll download that anytime soon even if I really wanted to and had not already seen Breaking Bad. I would think this is more of a novel concept; look we cracked something and could release it - yay for us! Not really sure if this is going to be a massive download hit with and for the masses. File size might have once again become the DRM in some regard.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Sunday August 30 2015, @03:28PM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday August 30 2015, @03:28PM (#229857) Journal

      If you go by the numbers I put in the summary, Netflix's H.265 storage of a 4K Breaking Bad episode is probably closer to 6.7 gigabytes. That brings the total down to 415 gigabytes.

      4K early adopters are likely to have the money to grab a 5 or 8 terabyte drive for throwing content onto. After years of drives being stuck at $30-33/TB, it seems 5 TB drives have dipped down to $22-24/TB [slickdeals.net]. As for 4K equipment, the $1000 and $700 price points for cheap 4K monitors are now old news. You can get one for as low as $350 [tomshardware.com] to $400 [tomshardware.com].

      4K is an interesting novelty, but the H.265 Netflix is using to stream it is a much bigger deal. x265 encoded 720p and 1080p rips are very small. If you ignore 4K and even 1080p and use 720p as your quality target, file sizes are dropping. That's the opposite of "size is the new DRM". Hardware decoding typically isn't needed for H.265 720p (it may be needed for 1080p and higher).

      Finally, there are number of successors to H.264/H.265 appearing that could lower filesizes even further:

      Google Claims VP9 Success as New Video Codecs Appear [soylentnews.org]

      Perseus... V-Nova said SD video can be delivered to mobile devices at bitrates as low as 125 Kbps, and that HD video can be live-encoded at 500 Kbps or less, but also notes that the codec's benefits increase as resolution and frame rates increase. "Good quality" HD can be broadcast at 2 Mbps and UHD at 4 Mbps using existing hardware and infrastructure, the company said.

      Since we ran that story, this appeared: Cisco Working On Next-Generation Royalty-Free 'Thor' Video Codec [tomshardware.com]

      Google says the release schedule for successors to VP9 will be accelerated to 18 months. Given the above contenders continuing to work on new codecs, it's probable that H.266 and comparable codecs will appear sooner rather than later. There was a 10 year gap between H.264 (2003) and H.265 (2013). Since the humble days of 2003, video consumption has exploded, video streaming has displaced fixed optical disc schemes, global Internet access has increased, and the use of power/bandwidth constrained mobile phones has increased. There's much more need and competition for newer codecs, even ignoring the adoption of 4K/8K display resolutions. Hardware support for new codecs is an issue, but that will happen faster too.

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      • (Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday August 30 2015, @04:58PM

        by looorg (578) on Sunday August 30 2015, @04:58PM (#229887)

        Going by the summary. It's in the first row, iON released ... The file we are talking about here is "Breaking.Bad.S01E01.Pilot.2160p.NF.WEBRip.DTS.x264-iON.mkv" and that was just shy of 18 gigs in size; 17.73 it says when I look at it without downloading. That is the only numbers that are interesting or even in the summary.

        The other numbers are from the mediainfo of the file and some hypothetical assumption that someone would want to re-encode the episode in some other way or fashion. A H265 re-encode of that would slash the size of the file radically, no doubt about that, but that isn't what they released. One reason for that could be that H265 just isn't "scene standard" as of yet. But with that in mind there already are re-encodings of it at H265 and it sized in at 4.66 Gb.

        All I noted was that as an 18 gig episode that is more or less it's own DRM by size alone. It's a novelty release at best. It might be interesting to see how many times that gets downloaded but I doubt it will be all that many - that might not be all about size tho but more about the fact that it's an old episode and people that wanted to see BB has probably seen it by now and the repeat viewing value is not that high. From the comments I have seen so far about the file the visual result was not all that impressive either even if you had all the right equipment. Clearly not worth an 18 gig download.

        • (Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday August 30 2015, @05:38PM

          by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday August 30 2015, @05:38PM (#229907) Journal

          Sure it's a novelty release. It's basically a proof of concept. But it is something that could become routine and a sign of an increasing amount of 4K content available in general and on torrent sites.

          and some hypothetical assumption that someone would want to re-encode the episode in some other way or fashion

          There's nothing hypothetical about it. Netflix uses H.265 for all 4K streaming... so it is content that was served up as H.265, captured "losslessly" using a capture card, and re-encoded as H.264. If the group had used H.265 instead, maybe the initial filesize would have been closer to 4 or 7 GB. The 17 GB filesize isn't the point. Cracking the DRM could lead to sudden growth of available 2160p content. Now that 4K displays have dropped from over $1000 to as low as $350 (for an admittedly mediocre spec 4K display), 4K viewing could become more mainstream.

          As for the scene and H.265, it is becoming more common, as I've noted. There will be H.264 releases for years to come, but it's not hard for the scene or others to upload both versions for each resolution. Especially when the file sizes are so low. H.265: 150-250 MB for 45-minute 720p, and maybe 500 MB for 1080p. You could basically fit 3-4 720p episodes of a show onto a CD, where DVD used to be necessary for under 720p.

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        • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @05:38PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @05:38PM (#229908)

          > From the comments I have seen so far about the file the visual result was not all that impressive either even if you had all the right equipment.

          Source material is pretty shitty. Breaking Bad was a sleeper hit, not a marquee production so they didn't have much budget for the first couple of seasons. A 4K rip of House of Cards is also floating around out there and is reported to look fantastic. HoC was also shot on digital which tends to make compression more efficient too.

  • (Score: 2) by Techwolf on Sunday August 30 2015, @02:42PM

    by Techwolf (87) on Sunday August 30 2015, @02:42PM (#229843)

    Wasn't the HDCP/HDMI master key leaked? When I heard that news, I knew that HDMI switchboxes was now possible and knowing China, would make this by the thousands on the cheap for stores to use.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @05:11PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @05:11PM (#229891)

      Yeah... I have it somewhere. It's basically a set of matrices and a method to generate keys with them.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @05:29PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @05:29PM (#229903)

      > Wasn't the HDCP/HDMI master key leaked?

      It wasn't leaked, it was cracked due to vulnerabilities in the protocol.

      The 4K content licenses mandate HDCP 2.2 which has a different protocol and a new set of keys.

      > I knew that HDMI switchboxes was now possible and knowing China, would make this by the thousands on the cheap for stores to use.

      Even before it was cracked HDCP strippers were available from China, they were nominally sold as HDMI splitters and they used official HDMI chipsets, its just that on the outputs they 'forgot' to enable HDCP handshaking so the signal was in the clear.

  • (Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @03:13PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @03:13PM (#229852)

    All of you dick-kneaders bitchin' and bitchin' and bitchin' and of course fail to overlook a very important fact --

    Netflix spoke to Torrentfreak in the first place. There's dialogue.

    Like that time Demon Dave decided to surf on the hood of his car, and that old nasty son of a bitch Jon saw us. Jon knew we were drinking and smoking pot in that apartment. Demon Dave after I hit the brakes on the car went tumbling off the hood and into the parking lot with a broken ankle. He couldn't handle rejection and listened to Alice in Chains' Down in a Hole all day while jump-kicking a metal folding chair, breaking the tack-welds on it. I socked that fool in the face, yo. Then the cops came to pick him up as a 5150 and let him have a cigarette in the back seat of the car.

    NIGGERS.

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Sunday August 30 2015, @03:31PM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday August 30 2015, @03:31PM (#229859) Journal

      TorrentFreak has been treated as a legitimate news outlet for years. They are regularly cited in mainstream media such as the BBC, Business Insider, Forbes, etc. They have interviewed anti-piracy organizations and lawyers frequently. There's nothing new in TF talking to Netflix.

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