Looking inside your screenshots

[Sendatsu]

Hello saillaw

I really liked your comment, I was hoping for a lawyer to participate in this thread

I never said "we had them", ever. Nor did I say that we should all be breaking the law and getting away with it. I just said "hey, I discovered this and it's interesting that we didn't know about this before, even though I thought we should".

Indeed Blizzard can argue all these things you mentioned and life will go on. I just need to make one comment:

the issue of whether or not Blizzard has the right to control what information ends up in the file dump that is created when you hit the screenshot button. The fact is that all the information that goes into the screenshots is dictated by Blizzard’s programing and this watermark information is just a small part of what their program creates. It would be very hard to argue that they are free to control all the other information (color info, etc) but not this information, since their program “makes it all”.

Activision Blizzard has every right/capability to control what is included in the screenshots, both technically and legally. It is a programming choice that this watermark is included in the final output; a choice they can just set to off, like they did for high quality images. And it is not mandated (as far as I know) by any government agency to add these watermarks, so they are free to do as they please.

Apart from that though, I'm afraid you are absolutely right, it will be really hard for anyone to make a case that will reach the court.

As far as technical aspects are concerned, at least now we know what information we have been unwillingly sharing all this time, and I hope we now know better than sharing low quality watermarked shots

[saillaw]

I never said "we had them", ever. Nor did I say that we should all be breaking the law and getting away with it.

Yes you are right, sorry I didn't mean to imply you had said that, I was trying to paraphrase the general feel of the thread rather than you in particular.

I just said "hey, I discovered this and it's interesting that we didn't know about this before, even though I thought we should".

A very cool discovery, its really amazing to me that it remained undiscovered (or unleaked) for so long. In fact that is part of why I originally thought it was BS. I thought, surely someone from Blizzard or Digimarc would have let people know they had this information by now if it is true? Or surely during one of the enforcement cases you linked it would have presented as evidence.

The fact that they successfully were able to keep this quite for so long is really quite impressive, IMHO.

[Jaerin]

This thread makes me very curious if it could be a similar system GW2 used during their closed beta where people allowed in had to sign an NDA. As far as i remember, they banned several accounts even though the character and/or account names were never visible.

Having one of those accounts I can tell you that it was not nearly so obfuscated. The Dev client had your account name watermarked very clearly while you were playing. It looks like they used some kind of shader over the entire game.

[thedruid]

a choice they can just set to off, like they did for high quality images..

Was that a choice?
Sounds like a bug for me, haven't researched this on a deep level tho.

Anyway your point is correct and +rep for finding this and informing us about this hidden watermark so we can avoid it.

[Sendatsu]

So, our findings have been mentioned in WoW Insider now too Blizzard may be hiding information in your screenshots, but it can't hurt you

Funny fact: I feel like I'm reliving our deleted troll conversations in the comment section below that post hehe

I'm really tired already from all the reddit trolling, I'll try to take a break until the AMA session. Let's see if we manage to get Blizzard to confirm it


Edit: Also on Kotaku! http://kotaku.com/5942274/theres-mor...ft-screenshots

Edit#2: Plus, a quite sober article over PC Gamer: http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/09/11/wo...n-screenshots/

[niguz]

I made a little tool for those who want to play around or experiment with the watermarks. Only works for the current (16016) 32-bit windows client.

Crashes when starting in my sandboxie; anyone else having this problem? No error message.

Anyway; is this <quality10 speculation because you couldn't find it with sharpening or is there real evidence from the assembly that there is a function that checks for imgquality and only watermarks then q<10? Becaus the latter one seems not convenient and rather stupid tbh from blizz side.


EDIT: For the people wondering if opening your screenshot in irfan view or anything and then doing another screenshot of it the watermark will also be in this picture too.

[stoneharry]

Crashes when starting in my sandboxie; anyone else having this problem? No error message.

Anyway; is this <quality10 speculation because you couldn't find it with sharpening or is there real evidence from the assembly that there is a function that checks for imgquality and only watermarks then q<10? Becaus the latter one seems not convenient and rather stupid tbh from blizz side.

Read the full thread.

To clarify, yes there has been code posted from the assembly detailing the function that handles this and showing that it is true. There are 4 related posts quoting direct code/memory addresses if I remember correctly.

[Sendatsu]

Crashes when starting in my sandboxie; anyone else having this problem? No error message.

Anyway; is this <quality10 speculation because you couldn't find it with sharpening or is there real evidence from the assembly that there is a function that checks for imgquality and only watermarks then q<10? Becaus the latter one seems not convenient and rather stupid tbh from blizz side.

As mentioned by _Mike here: http://www.ownedcore.com/forums/worl...ml#post2491687 (Looking inside your screenshots)

His code "forces watermarks to be added to lossless TGA" and JPEG images.

wow.exe+18DCAC: // TGA patch
nop
nop

wow.exe+18DCB5: // jpeg quality patch
nop
nop

I myself took high quality screenshots and using a Hex Editor had a look inside and saw that indeed the specific watermark wasn't present.

Feel free to experiment more on this, we still don't know why they didn't include it in the high quality images.

[niguz]

Ok maybe I didn't find it but none of the codes showed that there is any check for img quality setting; so I suppose it's also in quality10 jpegs, you just cannot find it that easy with the method.

wow.exe+18DCB5: // jpeg quality patch
So it nops the memory adress here; this was a quality check?

For the people wondering if opening your screenshot in irfan view or anything and then doing another screenshot of it - the watermark will also be in this picture too.

[allesist]

On lower resolutions the pattern looks different. But i think it's possible to read it the same way.

Example 720x576 (Feralas night sky, unedited, you can see the pattern without editing the image): http://img853.imageshack.us/img853/4747/otherrr.jpg
(Try to press SHIFT+U (auto adjust colors) in irfanview on this image).

// Edit:
The hardest thing to do is to detect this watermark on "normal" random screenshots (without extracting the raw watermark pattern).
I think it would be possible to detect this pattern by extracting each pixel's RGB value in a screenshot. There have to be an algorithm for this to detect such a pattern (an specific range of differences in the rgb values which indicates them).

[iFarmer]

Wow. This thread really blew up. It's even linked to on the front page of r/gaming.

[spoutnik]

If the malicious hackers who recently attacked Blizzard (http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/securityupdate.html Important Security Update FAQ - Battle.net Support) also managed to grab the account names (it is not clearly stated in the official report, it only says "emails"), then they could combine the two to create a really comprehensive database of battle.net ids and characters, for anyone who is interested in buying it.

Email != account name.
They managed to stole encrypted passwords, and in the slight probability that they managed to decypher those encrypted passwords, there's nothing that they can do, unless of course if you haven't changed password since the attack, then this is your fault, and your fault only for being hacked. And the authentificator provides enough security.

So... There is absolutely nothing to fear with those watermarks, you won't be hacked with this.

[Sendatsu]

Email != account name.
They managed to stole encrypted passwords, and in the slight probability that they managed to decypher those encrypted passwords, there's nothing that they can do, unless of course if you haven't changed password since the attack, then this is your fault, and your fault only for being hacked. And the authentificator provides enough security.

So... There is absolutely nothing to fear with those watermarks, you won't be hacked with this.

Seriously, when did I ever say that someone will hack your account?? It's like the zillionth time I hear this today!

I said: hackers can figure out which alts belong to an account id and then perhaps use this information to carry out targeted spam or scam attacks.

If they manage to scam you into giving them your password, it's not the watermark's fault; it's yours.

I just wish people actually read what I've written instead of making things up (and spreading false rumors). How can someone even spread false rumors when everything is written down, stored and openly available right in here?

Anyway, enough rage

[yxcvk]

uhm sorry but realy?


i dont mind poeple playing around tring to find "easy ways" to get things but this hard cheater hunt is just <3


Finding an awsome way out of the box to achivement something is fun , creatif and all , but i think there is a limit no to cross i dont like "cheaters" botters and stuff like that .


shit i love blizzard for this action !

they got my respect for that action , showing us how serious they take the hunt

[Lunera68]

I wonder if it still works if you take a screenshot with fraps,