Big Brother is at it again. Here's the complete transcript, including links to EURion constellations, Machine Identification Codes, and Reality Winner:
Today it was announced that security researcher Michelle Von Orrminn at Fordstan University has discovered that virtually all current cell phones have been embedding secret yellow tracking dots in all videos the phones record.
The hard-to-see dots encode the date, time, latitude, longitude, and phone serial number, indicating when and where the video was recorded and by what device. Apparently this has been happening to any and every recording that uses one megapixel resolution or more, since approximately August 2013, when the first generation of the Moto X phone appeared.
Von Orrminn states "There are over 100 brands of phones, with many hundreds of different models. I've personally analyzed videos from 43 different brands so far, and all of them generate the tracking dots. Although my tests have been limited to phones using the MPEG-4 recording format, I suspect that all video recording devices, such as cameras, tablets, webcams, and so on, also generate the dots, and probably in a variety of video formats, not just MPEG-4."
This is the third time in the past 20 years that different types of secret media encoding has been discovered.
In 2002, German security researcher Markus Kuhn, now a professor at the University of Cambridge, discovered color patterns on the 10 Euro banknote while experimenting with a photocopier that refused to reproduce currency. The so-called EURion constellations (also known as Omron rings or doughnuts) have been incorporated into a number of secure documents such as banknote and ownership title certificate designs worldwide since about 1996. The patterns are easy to spot on U.S. bills. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_...
In 2004 a PC World article by Jason Tuohey (now Managing Editor for digital content at the Boston Globe) revealed that Xerox and Canon printers had apparently been printing secret yellow dots (so-called Machine Identification Codes) for decades, supposedly to help track and prevent counterfeit currency. The dots encode the printer serial number and date and time of printing, and are repeated several times across printed pages. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine...
It is believed to be the method by which whistleblower Reality Winner was identified and convicted in 2018 of leaking an NSA report, leading to her sentence of five years and three months in federal prison. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality...
Von Orrminn states "I'm guessing that RU-vid is already using the dots to discover copyright infringement by uploaded videos, but I don't yet have any proof, so I'm currently developing techniques to remove the dots from videos that previously failed RU-vid's copyright detection to see if the dot-free versions then upload successfully."
31 мар 2022
