Audio Watermarking for Triangulation

This is an interesting thing that uses practical steganographic techniques to pinpoint the location where a recording device is in a movie theatre. It's not entireably unbelievable that this is possible, given that we have surround sound. I imagine the accuracy varies, though, not all theatres are equal and you may have the folks disapproately located.

The ways around this seem obvious to me: heavily convert the audio, and record from multiple locations, mixing it down. Of course, that likely affects the sound quality of the final bootleg product, but it would do the job. Or the bootlegger could mix in interesting signals that would skew the triangulation (like my previous post about how a certain sine wave prevents youtube.com from compressing the audio in a video).

Not to wave-off their work, but we really need to be moving forward and not lateral right now, like most security issues--it's an arms race.

The past week was good, enjoyed speaking at SecureIT. This week I'll be at TUG U2U then Charleston, NC for SANS Sec 504, see http://bluenotch.com/events for more info.