• The_sleepy_woke_dialectic [he/him]
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    1 month ago

    Their endgame is hooking directly into the TPM chip on your phone/computer to ensure you can’t bypass ads, just like netflix, hulu, etc have done. Then the only recourse will be ripping all their videos to another hosting platform which they will then try to argue is a form of piracy.

    This TPM bypassing will eventually be done by essentially pointing a camera at a screen (modern TVs have encryption baked in so even the video in transit is DRM protected), at which point the video hosting companies will bake in small differences/invisible watermarks that uniquely identify which user’s account (which is linked to a real person who can suffer legal consequences) the video came from. Then we will have multiple cameras pointing at like 100 screens with an AI mixing them together to try to remove the differences/watermarks, at which point the hosting companies will create their own AI to counter and mislead the “piracy” AI pepe-silvia

    This is also why ISPs took away your ability to run a personal server on your home computer using NATs, firewalls, and dynamic IPs instead of just transitioning to IPv6.

    Also websites are going to start blocking firefox citing low user counts but you know what the real reason is nineteeneightyfour

    I 100% believe this will happen because making commodities do as many as possible between any given creator and end-user just so they can provide more “Services” no one asked for and thus extract more value for not actually doing anything is like the only trick capitalism has left.

    it-is-known

    • ashinadash [she/her]
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      111 month ago

      small differences/invisible watermarks that uniquely identify

      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?

      • The_sleepy_woke_dialectic [he/him]
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        1 month ago

        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

        • ashinadash [she/her]
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          51 month ago

          I data horde, and I don’t pay for even one stream screm-cool 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.

      • GaveUp [love/loves]
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        1 month ago

        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

            • ashinadash [she/her]
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              1 month ago

              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.

              • FloridaBoi [he/him]
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                21 month ago

                I feel like if you just slightly turn up the compression ratio then all that nuance is lost making the watermark nonexistent or unusable

          • The_sleepy_woke_dialectic [he/him]
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            1 month ago

            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.

            • ashinadash [she/her]
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              41 month ago

              Quotin’

              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 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?

              • The_sleepy_woke_dialectic [he/him]
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                31 month ago

                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.

      • hello_hello [comrade/them]
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        121 month ago

        I rate it a shrux out of torvalds-nvidia needs more no-fun-allowed

        On the flip side China is eventually going to transition all their computers to GNU/Linux once this happens.

    • CarbonScored [any]
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      1 month ago

      I still think this is a quite an unrealistically pessimistic outlook, so long as there are a decent handful of privacy-interested technerds, it’ll be effectively impossible. The DVD encryption code was initially hailed as the end of piracy, but it was broken about 7 days into being released.

      • TPMs are already very easy to crack.
      • DRM protection today can be overcome simply with OBS, and all the protection in the world won’t work against a DisplayPort cable and a recording card.
      • Identifying every stream to a physical person is not reliable, watermarks get reverse-engineered, accounts use fake details, shows get sold, video databases get hacked, pirates use hacked accounts etc.
      • Most ISPs haven’t used IPv6 because it’s impractical, not because they love cgNAT, plus having your own public address is still very common. Even if you couldn’t get your own public address, port tunnelling is easy and would immediately become the norm. Plus if anything, only having a public IPv6 address would make your server even less accessible than cgNAT.

      The adage remains true, to keep a thing secret and secure, you have to be perfect at security 100% of the time. To hack a thing, copy it a million times, and make it effectively public, it takes one lucky break. Perfect security is logically impossible, people will find a way.