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Re: [Dailydave] Applied watermarks explained to moronic profs worldwide.

From: Mordy Ovits (movitsbloomberg.com)
Date: Tue Jan 13 2004 - 09:56:41 CST

On Monday 12 January 2004 10:51 pm, Dave Aitel wrote:
> It would be funnier, but there are Ph.D.s and
> information security professionals making the exact same mistake and
> publishing papers and giving courses in steganography and digital
> watermarking everywhere you look.

While your point about about their efforts addressing the wrong threat model
is valid, there are purposes for watermarking other than proving who
purchased a file. For example, Playboy watermarks their images to allow for
easy robotic crawling of the web looking for infringing copies of their
photos. This is, of course, mostly futile and as effective as pushing back
the tide with a spoon. But it did cause some webmasters to split up their
images into separate files and reassemble them on-screen using HTML tables to
avoid the ever-watchful Sentinel:
http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?name=Sentinel+Returns

Hey, if you can read erotica for security research, I can peruse Playboy for
the same purpose :-)

Mordy
--
Mordy Ovits
Network Security
Bloomberg L.P.