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Comment by zwdr | Hacker News Reader

The only problem here is that Blizzard didnt encrypt the information in the screenshots. I can understand why they would embed this info, and 9/10 of those cases are ethically sound, but I wouldnt want some random skiddies get this information.

So why wouldnt they encrypt it? Not enough space?

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probably due to wanting to recover as much information as possible in the event of data loss such as cropping, competing watermarks, compression, etc.

I don't feel like encrypting it would make it acceptable. Keys can be leaked.

I just don't feel like it's okay to secretly store someone's private information in a file they believe is safe to share publicly, no matter how well you think you've hidden it.

Um, this is done client-side, no? How would they protect the encryption key?

Public key cryptography.

Public/private key-pair. It wouldn't stop people from faking values, but at least only Blizzard can read them.

They don't really have enough bits here for asymmetric crypto.

How many bits are they able to reliably recover from the screenshot, especially if they want to survive simple downsampling? I would guess not more than 500, probably less than that given the patterns we're seeing.

You can't generate a ciphertext smaller than your key size. And 500 bits is really not enough to do typical asymmetric crypto safely.

"The pattern, which consists of approximately 88 bytes of data..."

Actually seems like more than enough room to be encrypted. They probably just didn't think of it.

Use public key cryptography.

Edit: Jinx

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