Encrypted data in Youtube videos

I just had this idea because I have a friend that works with stegonagraphy. In my past post, I told you how youtube has this video/audio fingerprint technology that recognizes copyright content. Obviously one way people have been getting around that is by introducing enough noise in the audio/video to pass the threshold of detection but still good enough to be enjoyed as audio/video. This is a classic stegonagraphy question, how much other data can you embed in media and still have it be undetected. So what if the embedded noise introduced in Youtube videos is actually encrypted data, because afterall, encrypted data will look like random bits (that's the point of encryption). Basically, all you will need is a shared symmetric key and AES or some other symmetric encryption. I wonder if anyone is currently doing that. I'm sure other people have thought of this (and probably have not blogged it though, well you can probably guess why they have not blogged it). Back to reading.

Why MPAA or RIAA have not yet sued Google?

I thought of this on my walk, I was not sure if I should post it, but why not? So will MPAA or RIAA ever sue Google? My guess would be probably not. For one, Viacom is already suing Google and it's going to be a long and expensive court battle. Plus currently Google has pretty good technology (because they have the resources) to automatically recognize content upload by users and use that to create revenue for record or movie companies by inserting ads into the video. So Google makes money, labels and studios make money and everyone is happy. Finally, Google has deep pockets and that usually provides some safety from being sued. MPAA and RIAA knows that many of these technology court battles boils down to whoever has the best legal team. It's really a battle between the lawyers and money buys the best lawyers and Google has plenty of money (or access to plenty of money). But MPAA and RIAA have no qualms going after Megaupload because they do not have deep pockets. Fundamentally technology is the same, you upload content, people download content. But megaupload/megavideo does not have technology to automatically identify media the same way that Google does and it does not have a system to quickly make revenue by inserting ads like Google does. It's not like megaupload wants to be sued, it's not like they want to be just like Youtube if they could be lack resources to make it happen. As a result, they will get sued and probably get shut down and that will scare everyone else to try a similar business model, and Youtube will reign supreme as the only option. Once again, since Google already solved their bootstrap problem by having a lot of money, they know that Youtube is kinda safe since they have smart lawyers. Megaupload will get sued and lose money and may file bankruptcy because of costly lawsuits. So sometimes it may not be good enough to just have an idea, sometimes you need a powerful company to be behind you to make sure that your idea takes off. The barrier to entry these days are extremely high because big companies have really monopolized just about everything. But life is hard and that's the world we live in, and it's survival of the fittest (i couldn't leave without an anecdote, one day I'm going to look back at these posts and say, why did you do it? and my response will be to myself, I don't know, I guess instead of keeping all of these thoughts to myself, I wanted to try an experiment and put them on the Internet). Also, I'm getting much better at this blogging thing. Now back to reading and programming.