Jump to content

A warning for anyone re-streaming


Recommended Posts

13 hours ago, Dronfield Blue said:

 

The good ones are usually AES encrypted. Split tunnelling on top and you are as safe as can be with current technologies.

 

Taken from a well known quality VPN which does not keep logs and is registered in a country that does not subscribe to the 'five eyes' agreement.

 

Besides hiding your IP address and mixing your traffic with that of other users, XXX VPN also encrypts your traffic between secure VPN servers and your computer, so that it can’t be read by third parties in between, such as your internet service provider or your local Wi-Fi operator.

 

XXX VPN uses AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) with 256-bit keys—also known as AES-256. It’s the same encryption standard adopted by the U.S. government and used by security experts worldwide to protect classified information.

256-bit keys means 2^256 or 1.1 x 10^77 possible combinations. That’s 115,792,089,237,316,195,423,570,985,008,687,907,853,269,984,665,640,560,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 combinations! A brute-force attack on a 256-bit keyspace is simply infeasible, even if all the world’s most powerful supercomputers ran for as long as the universe has existed so far, billions and billions of times over.

 

 

 

 

Is expressvpn ok?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 minutes ago, Sultan_Pepper said:

It's not a mac address. It'll be a GUID for the id of the user account you are logged in with so they can identify your account rather than your hardware

 

Fairly sure this happened with the stream I was watching, the strings started to appear, then the stream completely froze and he had to create a new account to pay and watch and stream it again.

He just paid straight away again with paypal, can only imagine payment is fraudulent somehow, can't imagine streaming our matches can be really profitable for these sites if they were having to pay £10 twice a game.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

25 minutes ago, Sultan_Pepper said:

It's not a mac address. It'll be a GUID for the id of the user account you are logged in with so they can identify your account rather than your hardware


I meant the MAC address of the machine that’s doing the encode rather than the client machine—however you could be right! I’m just surprised they’d go to the length of doing that since you’d have to dedicate some resources to watermarking the individual streams before they go out (I mean, it looks watermarked pre-delivery to me since it appears to be subject to the same compression artefacting). Maybe there’s a cheap way to do it though? I’d be interested to find out!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

16 minutes ago, dr. benway said:


I meant the MAC address of the machine that’s doing the encode rather than the client machine—however you could be right! I’m just surprised they’d go to the length of doing that since you’d have to dedicate some resources to watermarking the individual streams before they go out (I mean, it looks watermarked pre-delivery to me since it appears to be subject to the same compression artefacting). Maybe there’s a cheap way to do it though? I’d be interested to find out!

Yeah it seems an odd one re-encoding on an account by account basis especially if they've got any sort of caching or cdn style delivery to save on their bandwidth costs let alone the processing involved but I can't see what else it's doing. I'm assuming it's in the video feed and not layered on top in the web player which would make a lot more sense but is far easier to get around. If we get a really boring match v Swansea I might do some digging

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Sultan_Pepper said:

Yeah it seems an odd one re-encoding on an account by account basis especially if they've got any sort of caching or cdn style delivery to save on their bandwidth costs let alone the processing involved but I can't see what else it's doing. I'm assuming it's in the video feed and not layered on top in the web player which would make a lot more sense but is far easier to get around. If we get a really boring match v Swansea I might do some digging

 

I'd gone with incompetence over malice and assumed that it was an accidental overlaying of the machine's MAC address, but the more I'm thinking about it then maybe there is something deliberate about it. I confess I saw a hex string of about the right length and assumed it was a MAC address, but never actually verified the number of digits etc...

 

I'd be shocked if they weren't using a CDN of some kind.

 

I'm sufficiently interested now that I'd be glad to do some digging myself, but unfortunately can't this Sunday as I'm on the normal subscriber plan for overseas folk so can't watch the iFollow stream.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, @owlstalk said:


So they're basically sending out individual mac addresses to the screens in case someone re-streams it or makes a copy of it so they can trace it back?

 

We're not sure exactly (and it may not be a MAC address, that's possibly me misinterpreting), but that's pretty much what we're wondering.

 

I'm getting the keys to the Mystery Machine as we speak...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, dr. benway said:

 

We're not sure exactly (and it may not be a MAC address, that's possibly me misinterpreting), but that's pretty much what we're wondering.

 

I'm getting the keys to the Mystery Machine as we speak...

 

Let us know what you find out, I would be interested.

 

I would have thought that it is highly unlikely to be a MAC address as they are allocated to a specific user on a one for one basis.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

22 hours ago, Dronfield Blue said:

 

Not as much as you think.

 

I have to use one for my job, but I also use it for private browsing.

 

 

 

 

 

Ahh!

 

Now we understand.

 

Pornhub!  Redtube,  Taxi 69.WTF:

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, metaframe said:

It’s a watermark to see who is leaking the stream. 
 

hollywood do this on screeners for the oscars 

 

Absolutely.

 

Not sure why people are talking about VPN's or Mac addresses, neither are pertinent to this discussion - it's a unique code specific to your user account, I think a series of hexadecimal numbers but didn't do a screenshot to check.     You can have the best VPN in the world but if a unique code is on your screen and you re-stream it, it's absolute that it has come from your account.

 

 

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest Bulgaria

I can categorically say, and with the upmost respect, that I have absolutely no idea what any of you are going on about.🤔

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, HarryPlopper said:

Not sure why people are talking about VPN's or Mac addresses, neither are pertinent to this discussion - it's a unique code specific to your user account, I think a series of hexadecimal numbers but didn't do a screenshot to check.


It’s definitely a hex string, there’s a screenshot upthread and every time I’ve seen it it’s been hex. Do you know more about it? Is it definitely a fingerprint? I’d love to read more about it and how they’re doing it. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If I were to hazard a guess, I would say that it’s not a MAC address as such but a unique identifier that uses hexadecimal. Not sure what the identifier is directly referencing but it will certainly be iFollow’s way of working out who’s stream it is.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...