New Technique For Making JPEG Images Copy-Evident 139
Gunkerty Jeb writes "The days of wondering whether those drunken sex party photos are indeed the Olsen Twins, or if they are just the Mary-Kate and Ashley's faces photo-shopped on the bodies of Lindsay Lohan and Amy Winehouse are OVER! A group of academic researchers at the University of Cambridge has developed a new technique for making JPEG images copy-evident, so that users can tell whether an image has been recompressed and copied."
Slightly Misleading (Score:2, Insightful)
Fail.
social problem, technical solution (Score:2, Insightful)
Sigh, another pointless arms race brought on by businessman-academics selling snake-oil.
I wonder how long it will take to overcome the "message appears when a particular specific combination of recompression settings is chosen" anti-fraud-or-something technique. I mean, it's such a novel idea and there are so few alternative combinations of recompression settings.
Re:Slightly Misleading (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're really serious about putting Mary Kate and Ashley's head on Lindsay Lohan and Amy Winehouse's bodies, like it says in TFS, you'd use RAW. Then, you can compress everything together. Besides, if you upload that to photo sharing websites (especially Facebook) there's a high chance your picture would be recompressed, so it would have the compression artifacts whether it's been altered or not.
Fail.
Have access to RAW files of the aforementioned act involving Lindsay and Amy, along with ideally angled shots of the Olsen's faces? Didn't think so. So, you go to google images and start digging. What you find (in the ideal world this paper is picturing (ugh no pun intended)) is that every content creator (from the pr0n guys to the papparazzi that took the olsen's picture) have applied this filter to their work, and as such your efforts are for not. Don't get me wrong, there are tons of problems with this whole idea, but saying "well raw doesnt have artifacts anyway" is a bit of a fail.
Re:Slightly Misleading (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're really serious about putting Mary Kate and Ashley's head on Lindsay Lohan and Amy Winehouse's bodies, like it says in TFS, you'd use RAW.
Uh, yeah, by 'use RAW' you mean: "take photos of these celebrities yourself".
...so it would have the compression artifacts whether it's been altered or not.
Unless you took the RAW photos yourself, there would still be different artifacts from each of the pictures you used to do the composite. More artifacts won't change that. Besides that, Facebook resizes the image THEN saves it, again altering the new artifacts in a not-so-subtle way.
You haven't shot this down at all and it's obvious that people with mod points don't understand this topic.