Blizzard is secretly watermarking WOW screenshots

Some speculation in the thread about whether or not it's JPG artifacts, but if you make it to the 2nd page (post #21) someone included some information proving it's intentional: <a href="http://www.ownedcore.com/forums/world-of-warcraft/world-of-warcraft-general/375573-looking-inside-your-screenshots-2.html#post2489452" rel="nofollow">http://www.ownedcore.com/forums/world-of-warcraft/world-of-w...</a><p>Edit: Page 6 includes confirmation from a (supposed) Blizzard representative that this is for NDA leak tracking: <a href="http://www.ownedcore.com/forums/world-of-warcraft/world-of-warcraft-general/375573-looking-inside-your-screenshots-6.html#post2493282" rel="nofollow">http://www.ownedcore.com/forums/world-of-warcraft/world-of-w...</a>

One reason Blizzard would do this is to combat RMT + selling your account to a third party. All they would need to do is set up a crawler on eBay or any other website where somebody has posted a screenshot of their account for sale, then dole out a warning / suspension / ban.

We'll add this one to copier watermarks, printer watermarks, and fax machine watermarks.<p>So your account id and realm is available as a watermark in the screen shots, what nefarious problem does that cause? (I can imagine it helps identify griefers and people who cheat and brag)

The only problem here is that Blizzard didnt encrypt the information in the screenshots. I can understand why they would embed this info, and 9/10 of those cases are ethically sound, but I wouldnt want some random skiddies get this information.<p>So why wouldnt they encrypt it? Not enough space?

I'm growing increasingly tired of technology being used by the large to monitor the small. I'd like to see an RFS from YC for companies that use data mining, machine learning, etc. to the advantage of the individual.

<i>'in order to avoid any further watermarking, type: /console SET screenshotQuality "10" which will set the quality of your screenshots to the maximum and create screenshots that do not include the watermark.'</i><p>If this was nefarious, I doubt they would give you such an easy way to disable it. Though I am curious what the default value of screenshotQuality is.<p>In any case, steganography remains awesome, as ever:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography</a>

So it looks like Glyph Lefkowitz's "extremist" opinion on software ethics <a href="http://glyf.livejournal.com/46589.html" rel="nofollow">http://glyf.livejournal.com/46589.html</a> was completely right. When a program does something the user doesn't want, the programmer is in the wrong. Programmer is to user as lawyer is to client. We need a recognized and binding way for programmers to submit to this code of ethics.

Being a former player, I can think of some <i>good</i> uses for this technology.<p>1) Automatically attaching image galleries to the Armory* profile of characters based on account id<p>2) Easy to give credit to players providing screenshots for Blizzard run contests<p>3) Opens the Armory API a bit more<p>Obviously, these can all be exploited due to the "openness" of the screenshot format.<p>*For the WoW illiterate: The Armory is a public database of player's characters, items, achievements, etc...

Clever, although I believe it's unethical.<p>It starts like this. How far from the day companies do this with the images you take with your mobile, with the videos you stream, etc.? The world will turn into a DRM fest.

Very interesting technology. Would be cool to see this put to good use. It's a lot easier to get someone to post a screenshot than it is to get them to email a dump.

I don't see the huge issue here. There's no real private information given by this, it's just character name and realm.

Why would Blizzard want to watermark their own screenshots?

Curious question here: If you take the screenshot you get from WOW and open it up with photoshop/gimp/paint and save it now as PNG or different format, would it be possible to degrade the quality of the dots rendering it useless to be tracked?

Secretly seems a little strong... is there any sort of effort to cover this up, or did they just not mention it in the patch?<p>I don't fault them for not mentioning it in release notes - if I make a change to my apps that the user won't notice, I don't mention it in the release notes.<p>To the extent that they introduced a security bug, they should admit it and fix it. But that's a technical lapse, not a moral lapse.

I can see this being partially helpful when verifying that in-game screenshots have not been tampered with (for example. for support, when you claim you had an item and it disappeared etc), but I don't know if there are that many copies of it duped across the image.

Is it just on my machine or does every single part of that web page start off a Amazon referral pop-up to Mists of Pandaria on click?

He give instructions on how to find the watermark. Am I missing what you mean?

Not sure whether to be upset about this or proud of the technical achievement

Textbook example of why proprietary software is bad for users.

I find the title inflammatory and ignorant; I would downvote this if I could.<p>While I applaud the tenacity in prospecting and divulging the methods at which Blizzard has employed to create such "tracking" "watermarks," I highly doubt this is to discourage or indict anyone. Quite frequently, screenshots are used during support requests.<p>As the author states, "we [...] verified that there is no pattern included in high quality screenshots." I find this highly suggestive that Blizzard was rather interested in an easier way to debug their program, and the mode slipped out in production.<p>There's a work around, please remove your tinfoil hats.

All speculation, guess work, no external sources, no reproducible results.<p>Paranoid stoners is my guess.