[opendtv] What's in the Secret VEIL Test Results?
- From: Monty Solomon <monty@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: undisclosed-recipient: ;
- Date: Thu, 2 Feb 2006 22:48:08 -0500
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=968
What's in the Secret VEIL Test Results?
Wednesday February 1, 2006 by Ed Felten
I wrote last week about how the analog hole bill would mandate use of
the secret VEIL technology. Because the law would require compliance
with the VEIL specification, that spec would effectively be part of
the law. Call me old-fashioned, but I think there's something wrong
when Congress is considering a secret bill that would impose a secret
law. We're talking about television here, not national security.
Monday's National Journal Tech Daily had a story (subscribers only;
sorry) by Sarah Lai Stirland about the controversy, in which VEIL
executive Scott Miller said "the company is willing to provide an
executive summary of test results of the system to anyone who wants
them."
Let's take a look at that test summary. The first thing you'll notice
is how scanty the document is. This is all the testing they did to
validate the technology?
The second thing you'll notice is that the results don't look very
good for VEIL. For example, when they tested to see whether VEIL
caused a visible difference in the video image, they found that
viewers did report a difference 29% of the time (page 4).
More interesting, perhaps, are the results on removability of the
VEIL watermark (page 2). They performed ten unspecified
transformations on the video signal and measured how often each
transformation made the VEIL watermark undetectable. Results were
mixed, ranging from 0% success in removing the watermark up to 58%.
What they don't tell us is what the transformations (which they call
"impairments") were. So all we can conclude is that at least one of
the transformations they chose for their test can remove the VEIL
watermark most of the time. And if you have any experience at all in
the industry, you know that vendor-funded "independent" studies like
this tend to pick easy test cases. You have to wonder what would have
happened if they had chosen more aggressive transformations to try.
And notice that they're refusing to tell us what the transformations
were - another hint that the tests weren't very strenuous.
The VEIL people have more information about all of these tests, but
they are withholding the full testing report from us, even while
urging our representatives to subject us to the VEIL technology
permanently.
Which suggests an obvious question: What is in the secret portion of
the VEIL testing results? What are they hiding?
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