lasticetea
New Member
- Joined
- Jul 31, 2013
- Messages
- 63
- Reaction score
- 2
Heyho,
since i am here, i noticed that a lot of ppl posted screenshots.
They edit their name to black or make a funny pic over it etc to hide their real char/acc name.
For all this ppl:
In your screenshot is your account id.
In your screenshot is a timestamp.
In your screenshot is your hardware id.(submitted to blizz if you play on ptr)
In your screenshot is the ip adress of your current realm.
From another forum:
Sources:
-Blizz forum self
-http://www.destructoid.com/world-of-warcraft-screenshots-contain-hidden-user-data-234830.phtml
and an other nice guide:
Looking inside your screenshots
since i am here, i noticed that a lot of ppl posted screenshots.
They edit their name to black or make a funny pic over it etc to hide their real char/acc name.
For all this ppl:
In your screenshot is your account id.
In your screenshot is a timestamp.
In your screenshot is your hardware id.(submitted to blizz if you play on ptr)
In your screenshot is the ip adress of your current realm.
From another forum:
1) Go somewhere where there aren't any (or a lot) of textures. I used the druid blink bug to go to the north end of the world but you should go below Dalaran in Crystalsong Forest, as bluesius suggested, because you will get a better screenshot if you stick your face in the pure white trees.
2) Type:
/console SET screenshotQuality "9"
Make sure you use 9, not 10.
3) Take a few screenshots of the clear, no textures, white area by zooming into a tree and hitting ALT Z, so that your entire screen is white.
4) Open this image in an image editing program like IrfanView (it's freeware), click CTRL+E, select the Sharpening filter, use the highest possible sharpening value (99) and click OK. Now do this two more times, again: CTRL+E, Sharpen 99, OK.
5) You are now looking at your character's WoW watermark / custom bar-code / qr code look-a-like / call it what you will.
Apparently, each character has a different set of these repeatable patterns, which contain account and realm information, and it looks like if they are scanned by software that recognizes them, they can reveal our character's account name/id, the time of the screenshot and the the full information of the realm, including its IP address (think "private servers").
The pattern, which consists of approximately 88 bytes of data, repeats itself many times depending on the resolution of your screen. See below for a colored representation: the account id and realm information are depicted in red and the current time (seconds not included) is depicted in blue:
Based on Blizzard's ToS, Blizzard is allowed to communicate information about our hard drive, CPU, operating systems, IP addresses, running tasks, account name and current time and date. It never mentions anything though about embedding some of these data into every screenshot we capture using the WoW printscreen tool.
The contained information can be easily recovered and decrypted by hackers, which compromises the privacy and security of our accounts! For example, someone could use this to identify which account holds which characters and perhaps stalk and annoy its user, or help perpetrators choose their phishing victims with a more targeted approach. Perhaps someone is already using this since the watermark has been around for at least four years already.
It looks like Activision Blizzard has teamed up with Digimarc (Digimarc (DMRC) - Discover Media the Digimarc Way) to provide us this wonderful service of secretly tagging our in-game screenshots with our account and realm information. Although it has not yet been verified, it is possible that Blizzard is using an automated monitoring service which downloads image files from various Internet sites and checks them for the presence of their embedded digital watermark data, kindly provided by Digimarc: Patent US7653210 - Method for monitoring internet dissemination of image, video, and/or audio files - Google Patents
_Mike, schlumpf and Master674 have managed to disassemble the watermark data and help us verify which pieces of information are contained inside. Do note that this covert watermarking has been confirmed, by multiple sources, to be going on since, at least (!!), 2008 (Patch 3+), which is the year Blizzard was acquired by Activision, so you may want to delete/remove from the public domain all your post-WotLK screenshots captured by WoW.
2) Type:
/console SET screenshotQuality "9"
Make sure you use 9, not 10.
3) Take a few screenshots of the clear, no textures, white area by zooming into a tree and hitting ALT Z, so that your entire screen is white.
4) Open this image in an image editing program like IrfanView (it's freeware), click CTRL+E, select the Sharpening filter, use the highest possible sharpening value (99) and click OK. Now do this two more times, again: CTRL+E, Sharpen 99, OK.
5) You are now looking at your character's WoW watermark / custom bar-code / qr code look-a-like / call it what you will.
Apparently, each character has a different set of these repeatable patterns, which contain account and realm information, and it looks like if they are scanned by software that recognizes them, they can reveal our character's account name/id, the time of the screenshot and the the full information of the realm, including its IP address (think "private servers").
The pattern, which consists of approximately 88 bytes of data, repeats itself many times depending on the resolution of your screen. See below for a colored representation: the account id and realm information are depicted in red and the current time (seconds not included) is depicted in blue:
Based on Blizzard's ToS, Blizzard is allowed to communicate information about our hard drive, CPU, operating systems, IP addresses, running tasks, account name and current time and date. It never mentions anything though about embedding some of these data into every screenshot we capture using the WoW printscreen tool.
The contained information can be easily recovered and decrypted by hackers, which compromises the privacy and security of our accounts! For example, someone could use this to identify which account holds which characters and perhaps stalk and annoy its user, or help perpetrators choose their phishing victims with a more targeted approach. Perhaps someone is already using this since the watermark has been around for at least four years already.
It looks like Activision Blizzard has teamed up with Digimarc (Digimarc (DMRC) - Discover Media the Digimarc Way) to provide us this wonderful service of secretly tagging our in-game screenshots with our account and realm information. Although it has not yet been verified, it is possible that Blizzard is using an automated monitoring service which downloads image files from various Internet sites and checks them for the presence of their embedded digital watermark data, kindly provided by Digimarc: Patent US7653210 - Method for monitoring internet dissemination of image, video, and/or audio files - Google Patents
_Mike, schlumpf and Master674 have managed to disassemble the watermark data and help us verify which pieces of information are contained inside. Do note that this covert watermarking has been confirmed, by multiple sources, to be going on since, at least (!!), 2008 (Patch 3+), which is the year Blizzard was acquired by Activision, so you may want to delete/remove from the public domain all your post-WotLK screenshots captured by WoW.
Sources:
-Blizz forum self
-http://www.destructoid.com/world-of-warcraft-screenshots-contain-hidden-user-data-234830.phtml
and an other nice guide:
Looking inside your screenshots
