They are designed to survive being recorded by a phone at an angle. The embedding is only 1-bit per segment which can be multiple megabytes.
> Why?
Tardos codes scale as the square of the number of traitors times a constant. For example, a movie would typically have 2000 segments -> 2000 bits of encoding. By my calculation, at around 7 traitors some start to skate by detection. And there are ways to make detection additive across leaked content, so with another 2000 all 7 will get caught. This is because while they may not score highly enough to be reliably accused, they will be under suspicion, and that suspicion can later be enhanced.
To be clear, what the traitors are doing is pooling all the segment versions they have available to them, and adversarially choose a segment at random. This is the best strategy they have, a close second is to choose the segment that the majority have.
Trying to remove the actual 1-bit watermark from the segment isn't typically feasible. Every segment will have a unique adjustment to encode it. The embedding algorithm will take a secret key.
Any idea what this looks like? I assume it's not visible to the human eye, but being able to survive this level of degradation is quite impressive.
IMO fewer things should require ID (e.g. domestic flights) because it opens up the risk of personal data being leaked or misused for often not much benefit.
Meanwhile, I have never had any fraud, scam, identity theft or anything else as a result of, or with any connection to my country's national ID. But I can't avoid also having to hand over my details to private (and foreign to me) companies that only exist because Americans can't get act together.
Srsly.