The ARDG held a meeting in the Washington, D.C., area on July 30. At the meeting, the "analysis matrix" -- now a kind of questionnaire for proposal submitters -- was completed, along with the "request for information" (RFI) seeking technological schemes. Although the RFI is complete, it hasn't been published on the ARDG web site yet.
ARDG will seek technology proposals until October, and will hold a two-day meeting in Los Angeles late in October at which proponents may make presentations and be subject to questions. That meeting will allocate just 90 minutes per proposal to presentations and questions and answers.
As we noted in an earlier post, EFF's proposal to include language in the RFI to protect independent reviewers was rejected at the meeting. It is still not clear how the ARDG will deal with the fact that many claims made by vendors will simply be wrong. This ARDG meeting reiterated that ARDG does not plan to perform any kind of technology review process. What, then, will set the final report apart from the results of printing out a sample of watermark vendors' web sites, or binding their glossy brochures together?
In his presentation to the ARDG, Scott Craver concluded that "the state of the art [in watermarking] favors analysis" (that is, attacks). Thus, collecting vendor claims about watermarks without either performing or providing for review seems irresponsible.
As Richard Feynman wrote in Appendix F to the Rogers Commission report, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
Posted by Seth Schoen at August 1, 2003 01:24 PM