Posts: 147
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Joined: May 2003
I played for over 5 years and enjoyed my time. I'm not trolling, just trying to be informative if people have potential concerns over this stuff or just want to know what's going on.
Basically any posted screen shots from WOW contain a watermark pattern with your user IDs, the time the screenshot was captured and the IP address of the server you were on at the time. This has been happening since at least 2008.
links:
http://www.ownedcore.com/forums/world-of...shots.html
http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/09/11...raft-users
-< You can only be young once, but you can be immature forever >-
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Is it decipherable by hackers? I mean, it's a pretty large leap to say that it's a "hackable" exploitable piece of information. I can't get any of the images to come up large enough to actually take a look at it, and see if the patterns mean something. I'm not signing up for an account so that I can see the "large" pictures.
If it is like a QR code in its makeup, wouldn't that mean that it's probably something that only Blizz has a "thing" for?
And the next question, is why does setting your screenshots to max quality make it go away?
nobody ever slaughtered an entire school with a smart phone and a twitter account – they have, however, toppled governments. - Jim Wright
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If you use a screen shot to document some abusive action to report to Blizzard it would certainly help to have the information embedded. It does not bother me that they do this. However I believe they should have documented that they embed the information.
"I may be old, but I'm not dead."
Posts: 147
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Joined: May 2003
Well if interested players can discover this then hackers can too. If they didn't before, then they most certainly have now. Maybe Blizz did this for a good reason, but this information has the potential be abused.
For example:
Not that I'm affected, but I know plenty of people who played at work. Fire up a matching script and you have a list of user IDs with timestamps documenting poor conduct. I'm sure with the right circumstances that can be monetized.
-< You can only be young once, but you can be immature forever >-
Posts: 4,842
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Joined: Aug 2008
Well, there are plenty of ways to determine the "arrangement" of the data, but until someone is able to provide me with a readout of the data, there isn't much that can be done, as what it looks like does indeed seem to be more of a QR Code base.
nobody ever slaughtered an entire school with a smart phone and a twitter account – they have, however, toppled governments. - Jim Wright
