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Google pulls the plug on uBlock Origin, leaving over 30 million Chrome users susceptible to intrusive ads
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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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This has never worked so far lol. Their "invisible watermark" always ruins the media even beyond treathog consumption levels.
Otherwise is there anything the individual user should be doing, short of not buying smart TVs (me) and not buying TPM chipped computers?
I guess put money you would have spent on streaming sites on hard drives and data horde before they stop you.
Support libre software and projects like Firefox and invidious
IPFS is an internet protocol that lets you the user help host things that you consume in a communal way, using some hard drive space you don't need right now, but I wouldn't recommend it yet because It has glaring problems. It's a better future vision for the internet but there are a lot of crypto bros involved trying to inject capitalism where IMO it isn't necessary.
You can't really get away from TPM computers for long I don't think.
In short; I don't even know
I data horde, and I don't pay for even one stream
I should donate to foss projects more but I am broke, alas.
IPFS sounds theoretically cool... As for TPM the newest PC in my house is a Zen Plus B450 machine that doesn't even meet the Windows 11 TPM requirments, and the last W11 install in my house is about to get swapped for a W10 LTCS install, for g*ming. When that dies I will just run Linux/W7 honestly.
You're interpreting the term watermark too literally
It will be a small unique arrangement of just a few pixels to identify the user
It can even be distributed across the screen pixel by pixel to make it less noticeable
All they'd have to do is make each pixel 1 hex code lighter or darker or something
Assuming each pixel can have no change, 1 step lighter, or 1 step darker, it'd only take 22 pixels to cover 31B accounts = 3^22
I believe there's 25B Google accounts in total out there atm
In every frame, easily identifiable by a shitty pinhole camera though?
I updated my comment with more details
It's plausible but unlikely I think, putting a lot of faith into shitty pinhole cameras to be able to see twenty two 4K pixels one hex value lighter or darker, when most cameras have atrocious definition/sharpness and get blown out by light, blinded by darkness. I dunno, this reminds me of the screaming around Microsoft Kinect in 2013. They had bad and shitty plans for Kinect but, cheap hardware everyone hated Idk.
I feel like if you just slightly turn up the compression ratio then all that nuance is lost making the watermark nonexistent or unusable
Yes especially since Netflix in particular has atrocious compression.
There exists a technology that takes elements in a picture, like a bird in the background, a character, a glass of water, etc and moves them just a few pixels. You can encode a lot of data like that and it's undetectable given just one example. They can encode your unique user identifier 1000 times in even a short video. A camera is bound to pick up at least part of it each time.
Quotin'
I guess if the TV itself was doing the DRM recognition? Idk though, I've seen alarmist posting like this before... seems to me evil tech shit usually gets done in more mundane ways?
Its definitely possible and even trivial to do there are a thousand ways to encode just a few bytes of data undetectably in a video and nothing but motivation stopping them from using every one every where. I think it's plenty mundane and even trivial for what they get.