You have no indication that it's not jpg compression. Take any image, from anywhere on the internet, and sharpen it in this manner. Different images will give you different intricate patterns, depending on the encoder used.

You have no idea if this strange visual effect is really just a compression artifact resulting from light variations due to shaders which WoW employs, causing very subtle differences in the colors in certain equally spaced locations. As long as it visually looks fine, it wouldn't matter if their lighting techniques were a bit of a hack job underneath. Hell, look at the one image they linked on the forum, where a guy with a much larger screen resolution had a different pattern entirely.

Given that the most vocal detractor of my comment is also an Anonymous Coward, likely in order to retain moderating points, we'll just have to take your word that you're not him or part of the group.

First of all, using a beta client as a basis, which is much more likely to watermark screenshots to begin with to make sure someone isn't passing around info they shouldn't be, is not an indication that the final client does or is doing anything. And I can't reiterate enough the uselessness of a watermark which is nearly impossible to use except in certain circumstances.

Second, I simply stated the facts. It's a group of 3-4 people who are "discovering" and dispersing all of this information. There is no correlation of this from anyone else of any reputable background. If you knew the definition of FUD, you would quickly realize that it's a group of unknown people shouting out something to fear based on unsubstantiated claims. Whoever posted this topic on Slashdot is completely irresponsible, and if it all turns out to be false, puts themselves at legal liability if Blizzard decided to make a stink about defamation.

So far, you effectively have a lot of coincidence and suspicions. Don't try to discredit me simply because I point out that fact. If you want to prove me wrong, then prove me wrong, and I will happily admit to being so. Otherwise, it all just appears like people want to hide and discredit my comment to keep the story alive for that much longer.

No, someone released a tool to "disable" the watermarking, within a very short time of all of this starting.

To anyone who is neither naive or stupid, the entire situation stinks of a scam.

Wow look how fast they hid my informative response as flamebait. Perhaps they want to keep this charade up a bit longer.

All of the claims made are extremely dubious. You have an incredibly small group of random people making these so-called discoveries. The very fact that you can't find the watermark in non-lossy JPGs is in and of itself a considerable dispute of the claim. The algorithms used in various JPG encoders can result in various natural patterns, because there really is no such thing as true random.

And the OP's post is very misleading. It's implies that they've decoded the watermark. I've been following the thread since before it ever ended up on Slashdot, and all they have is what they interpreted to be binary data, and then converted that into hex values. Their "confirmation" of the data being encoded player info is based on a single person's supposed reverse engineering of the WoW binary, which has resulted in an incredibly detailed code listing which you normally only come close to if there are debugging symbols present, which I severely doubt Blizzard would be foolish enough to do, as it would aid in private server creation.

I don't have WoW installed anymore to dig around in the binaries myself, but I did have my brother send me a screenshot. These artifact patterns can be revealed in various ways, from sharpening to gamma and levels adjustments. But when gathered from a non-solid color screenshot, they're nearly impossible to distinguish from the rest of the image, making their usefulness as a way of tracking anyone far less viable.

Until we have more than 3-4 people on some forum, where, conveniently, someone released a tool to disable this (which couldn't possibly be designed to steal your WoW account info!), then I call bullshit on the entire thing.

I don't see how anyone capable of understanding the technical aspects of a video game console would need to ask such a question on Slashdot.

When I wanted to know how these consoles worked, I Googled it, and I learned everything I needed to know. All of the earlier Nintendo consoles have been heavily documented by fans. I never had to ask anyone anything, and was eventually able to make my own ROMs for NES, SNES, GB, and GBA. I later took this knowledge further and made my own NES Flash cartridge, albeit only supporting NROM and UNROM games, and planned out some elaborate NES hardware mods on paper but never finished the physical construction (too many wires!).

In other words, if someone like myself with limited skills, equipment, and no formal education in any of these subjects can accomplish this much with just Google, I can't imagine why someone with four years of technical education is asking Slashdot for help.

This entire situation as as close to the birther argument as you can get in the technology world. The only people who still try to make Bill Gates out at a thief are the same anti-Microsoft clowns you see out there berating modern Windows when they haven't used a Microsoft product since Windows 95.

Everything is historically documented, but like with politics, the people slinging the mud hope that you never look at any facts. Microsoft obviously bought QDOS, which was initially much more like CP/M, and they modified it to give it a more modern feel (and eventually more features than CP/M). But more to the point, QDOS was x86-based, where as CP/M was primarily being developed around Z80 systems at the time. The assembly code is obviously not compatible. And if the original QDOS creator had written a PLM compiler to rip off the CP/M source that way, it would have been so easily identifiable that they would have discovered this even back in the 80s. But even then, the QDOS developer would have been the thief, not Microsoft.

And much to the chagrin of the Microsoft haters, it's the changes Microsoft made to QDOS which helped make MS-DOS such a success (combined with IBM hardware). If you've ever used CP/M, you would know that its commands were not very logical or self-explanatory to the average user. So what Microsoft did was essentially take an archaic OS and turn it into something that the average person could easily learn and use (not to mention the improvements over CP/M which would also come), and they were very successful for it. Not to mention, they did it on the x86 platform, which was the then-technologically superior platform over what had previously been a Z80-dominated area. Plenty of people will try to dispute that, mostly out of nostalgia, but try taking that up with a a developer, when they were the one having to cram a large program into banked memory on a Z80 compared to the freedom the x86 provided at the time. x86's segmented memory may have later been reviled, but at the time it was a great step forward, and one which helped Microsoft dig its feet in that much deeper.

Thing is, even with this information being released about DOS, it will still be disputed, people will still find ways to hate on Microsoft even if it's completely unjustified, etc. In another few years we'll revisit this subject yet again, since this is certainly not the first time the claim has been made, and it won't be the last.

Apple's just as sleazy as lots of other companies who are out there fighting patent wars, but I do agree that in this case Apple is attempting to monopolize the market against what it sees as a serious threat. If it weren't for them actually having bullshit patents to wave around, the government would likely be chewing their asses up for their behavior.

I mean come on, they're suing over the act of making phone numbers and URLs in text messages clickable. This is in no way an original idea from Apple, they just got the patent on it first, since apparently nobody else thought this was worth patenting to begin with. I've even written code which does the exact same kinds of things, just because it's stupid to not add such a convenience for users. So why does performing this task inside a text message make it patent-worthy?

Just flush the entire patent library out already. Obviously 99% of them were passed by people with absolutely no understanding of technology or common sense. I could write some long detailed explanation of a particular way to submit a Slashdot comment, and I bet I'd get the patent for that too.

Meanwhile, it's always funny to see Apple fanboys out in full force claiming Apple is just protecting their company, even though if the opposite had happened and Microsoft or Samsung had forced the iPhone to stop being sold, it would be civil war.

I don't hate new GUIs, particularly for mobile devices where it's still a relatively new area and companies are still learning how to do it best. But for desktops, where work actually gets done, I just see no reason to take away something that's worked perfectly for years. Microsoft nailed it with the start button/task bar/system tray interface. We've used it for over 15 years now, and it's been cloned countless times for its shear functionality. But for some reason, many Linux distros/software, particularly Ubuntu, thinks that cloning OSX is the way to go. You know, OSX, the operating system which literally hasn't changed its GUI in 30 years aside from adding a dock bar to it. A GUI which was designed to handle individual applications at a time due to hardware limitations. And a dock bar which, I might add, is one of the most uninformative task management devices ever created. It's fine for grandma to see if she has her email client open, but not for someone who wants to see how many web browsers, directories, or terminals they may have open, and displaying where or what those windows are currently doing.

Don't get me wrong, I'm cool with Microsoft trying something new, in an effort to bridge the desktop and the mobile device. But I want the ability to disable it on my desktop machine. Right now you can't without breaking shit. But this is Microsoft, and they're pretty well known for configurability and backwards compatibility, so I have a feeling nobody is going to be forced to use it on the final product.

When you buy a cheap product, you don't usually expect a lot of life out of it. But maybe that's all you could afford at the time, and not everyone wants to throw credit cards at everything beyond their means.

The point which people should be seeing is that it's possible to create cheap Android products to begin with. There's no such thing as a cheap iPhone. So when your iPhone breaks, it's a lot bigger deal than some fifty or hundred dollar clunker that lasted you a year or so.

You can certainly get quality Android products, some of which will be better quality than an iPhone, but that's beside the point of this article.

This just in: everybody disagrees with how the Linux directory hierarchy should be implemented.

That's because there is no truly good way to do it. You either try to split stuff up in some semblance of organization which makes it harder to locate things, or you throw it all in together which also makes it harder to locate things. It's like sorting music; maybe you have an instrumental of an album. Does it go in the same folder with the normal album? Does it go in an instrumentals folder for that particular artist or genre? Does it go into a separate instrumentals folder with all the other instrumental albums? There is no answer because everybody prefers a different layout. Hell, people can't really even agree on a single naming scheme for individual MP3s to begin with. Artist first? Song first? Album first? Include the year?

Unfortunately you can't use a bulk renamer on the Linux filesystem. The only alternative I can think of is to just create like an environment variable system or some other method of letting users choose where stuff will be stored by default. All future software installations would then abide by those rules.

But this is Linux we're talking about, so there aint gonna be consensus over doing it that way either.

This is such a ridiculous conspiracy that only Microsoft haters could have roused up so much in people. Microsoft doesn't have the control over PC manufacturers as people seem to think based on all of this nonsense. And manufacturers aren't idiots; they know that they sell plenty of hardware to corporations, networking/hosting companies, research labs, etc, and they know that those clients need machines which can run alternative operating systems without all of this implied dicking around.

What I think it boils down to to some degree is jealousy that Microsoft has taken security so seriously, and even doing some things that Linux is not, so they can't use that same old FUD/rhetoric about their operating system being the most secure or keep implying that Microsoft doesn't take security seriously. Because let's face it, this has been a big part of the pro-Linux fanboy campaign for years. What have they really got left now? Just the old "Micro$haft is for fags." I guess.

Don't get me wrong though, there's nothing wrong with honest Linux advocacy; I've used the operating system for countless things for over 10 years now, and still on a daily basis. For my particular server management/networking/development tasks, it's the best choice for those jobs, and I'd recommend it any day of the week. But, it's not as the main OS on my primary home PC. Nor do I really want it as such. We're not talking about Windows 95 here, even though that seems to be the last thing a lot of the hater camp has any experience with. Win7 is probably the best operating system that I've ever used, and I know a lot of people who agree. Windows 8 has the potential to be even better. So if they think they can better secure countless peoples' machines with a new technology, preventing them from infections which affects the internet for ALL of us, then for crying out loud let them do it without trying to get in a bunch of childish jabs to take their spotlight away.

Knowing Slashdot, a "how much is Microsoft paying you" sort of response to a comment like mine won't come as any surprise at all. But I don't need money to see right through this incredulous conspiracy scenario.

What difference does it make whether the attacks are detectable? DDoS for example is detectable, but that doesn't make it any less potent of a weapon. As someone who has dealt with blocking Chinese break-in attempts for years, and at one point blacklisted IP blocks from the entire region, I can tell you that China is a scourge on the internet at best, and a damaging force against major targets at worst. There's more than enough evidence of that.

While I'm all for an open-source Linux-based OS on handheld devices, the fact remains that it's not exactly the most battery and CPU-efficient operating system. When you start putting virtual machines and high-level languages on these devices to run cross-architecture applications, you only further diminish the device's capabilities. This has become commonplace now, focusing on ease of development over efficiency, and it's really rather disappointing considering the raw power available in these kinds of devices.

What needs to happen for phones, handhelds, and tablets is what happened with PCs: a single open architecture which allows anyone to develop software that will run on any other manufacturer's device. And the obvious choice is basing it around ARM. Then you develop the operating system to run solely and efficiently on that platform. At that point, applications can be developed in native code, and interface with the hardware through an API, which can then use drivers to deal with different types of hardware in the device (from display to wifi and whatever else).

Unless that ever happens, we're just going to continue to stifle the potential of devices, wasting so much battery power in the process, with companies focusing on throwing more hardware specs at it rather than fixing the core issue. Putting Ubuntu on handhelds doesn't fix any of this. In fact, considering how it's already layer after layer of code even on the desktop edition, it's only going to make the problem worse.

There is absolutely no excuse for a 500+mhz device to ever run sluggishly when attempting the same basic tasks that still run fine on aging desktop computers.

You do realize that since I've had nearly every pro-pot textbook answer shouted at me, usually angrily and disrespectfully, that I don't actually waste my time reading most of the responses again, right? I just skim them, looking for the key words which everyone uses, and then the insults. If there are no insults, I might go back over it and look for actual information I might have not heard, since they at least showed some respect.

Guys like you, however, make it much easier to go through them, because I have no idea what you even said.