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Show HN: Plus – Self-updating screenshots

plusdocs.com

41–50 of 126 posts

Re: Show HN: Plus – Self-updating screenshots

#41
post #8

Hey, I helped build this! Thanks for submitting this. I'm an engineering manager at Plus — would be happy to answer anyone's questions about our product. You can also shoot me an email at zach(at)plusdocs.com if you'd like to hear more about what we're up to.

Minor thing: I can't watch the video because of the tracking system and my adblock. but cool project!

I'll flag this to our designer. Thank you!

Re: Show HN: Plus – Self-updating screenshots

#42
post #14

Very cool. How does Plus handle updating screenshots taken on authenticated pages once that authentication has expired?

(I'm an EM at Plus) It's a bit complex, and not quite perfect, but I'm pretty happy with what we've done so far. The first method is by looking at the HTTP status codes. Since we're running a full browser on our side, we can tell if the status codes that returned are different than the initial capture. We also have been training an image classification model on pictures of log-in screens — this has worked surprisingl…

Why would running a full browser be relevant to knowing HTTP statuses of requests?

Re: Show HN: Plus – Self-updating screenshots

#43
post #40
post #8

Hey, I helped build this! Thanks for submitting this. I'm an engineering manager at Plus — would be happy to answer anyone's questions about our product. You can also shoot me an email at zach(at)plusdocs.com if you'd like to hear more about what we're up to.

Any Googlers in the team ?

No Googlers, but we do have some ex-Meta and ex-Microsoft! https://www.plusdocs.com/company

Re: Show HN: Plus – Self-updating screenshots

#44
This functionality reminds me a networked version of an obscure (but sometimes useful) Excel feature, the "Camera Tool":

https://trumpexcel.com/excel-camera-tool/

Basically, it lets you select a range on a worksheet, and then shows a live updating picture of that range in a new region (possibly in a different sheet). Why is that useful? Well, the range can contain charts in addition to just cells with data. It can be handy to have the charts actually defined in the sheet where the data is stored, so that let you do this while still displaying the chart in the sheet where you want to show it.

Re: Show HN: Plus – Self-updating screenshots

#46
post #45

Awesome work! I think there should be a version that also refreshes screenshots of DOM elements specifically not just pixels - for example you might want to see how a thumbnail of a video changes over time from a rapidly changing page

Thank you! We actually do have the functionality you're mentioning. We call it "Smart capture": https://guide.plusdocs.com/snapshots-and-pages/snapshots/sit... Right now, we've only enabled it on sites where it works well, but we're hoping to bring it to more sites soon.

Re: Show HN: Plus – Self-updating screenshots

#48
post #39
post #7

This seems like a spectacular way to break permissions restrictions and escape data to non-authorized entities. If it's successful, it's the sort of thing that will be brutally blocked by IT all over the place. Very slick, though.

(I'm an EM at Plus) Yeah, we think about the permissions/data escape a lot. I'm glad to see others are commenting with scrutiny too. We've put a lot of effort into our security model, since we know that we're handling very sensitive data. To give a bit of a peek in: All of the session data we store is encrypted with a key unique to each organization, managed through AWS KMS. We've also built a fully event driven arch…

Might be useful when an image url is embedded in another page (like notion for instance), that it become a two-step workflow, so you have to go back to your Plus dashboard and allowlist that specific page that is the requestor.

That way, if someone takes the url of the image and shares it, it doesn't work without the owner allowing it again.

Of course, this isn't meant as a security measure as it would be trivially simple to circumvent, but more of a way of keeping track of the general surface area of how widely shared and image and putting the power in the users hands to reign it in.

Re: Show HN: Plus – Self-updating screenshots

#49

This functionality reminds me a networked version of an obscure (but sometimes useful) Excel feature, the "Camera Tool": https://trumpexcel.com/excel-camera-tool/ Basically, it lets you select a range on a worksheet, and then shows a live updating picture of that range in a new region (possibly in a different sheet). Why is that useful? Well, the range can contain charts in addition to just cells with data. It can be…

I love arcane tools like this. I'm definitely going to share this with our team. Thanks!

Re: Show HN: Plus – Self-updating screenshots

#50
post #39
post #7

This seems like a spectacular way to break permissions restrictions and escape data to non-authorized entities. If it's successful, it's the sort of thing that will be brutally blocked by IT all over the place. Very slick, though.

(I'm an EM at Plus) Yeah, we think about the permissions/data escape a lot. I'm glad to see others are commenting with scrutiny too. We've put a lot of effort into our security model, since we know that we're handling very sensitive data. To give a bit of a peek in: All of the session data we store is encrypted with a key unique to each organization, managed through AWS KMS. We've also built a fully event driven arch…

Guess, adding source string at the bottom on Plus screenshots might be at least a partial solution:

> Source: ,

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