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Taking screenshots isn't allowed by the app after upgrading to Android 11

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Re: Taking screenshots isn't allowed by the app after upgrading to Android 11

#231

Post by nexuist »

grishka wrote: post #47
read_if_gay_ wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> at least show a sensible error message so people who haven't spent ridiculous amounts of time reading the source code of your product as part of their job can troubleshoot their systems. Not "something failed, go read logcat, maybe it helps, good luck". While I’m not sure whether it’s true, I think the reasoning behind this is that to the average user, a sensible error message is about as useful as "something faile…

They could at least google it and find out how someone else solved the same problem. No such luck with more generalized error messages.

An infinite loop as you described however is not really an error condition; in fact this is the premise of the Halting Problem [1] which is not solvable as far as we know. There's no way for the media provider to know if the loop will ever resolve and it may just be the case that you have an absolutely massive photo library that takes a lot of time to load. You could argue that they could add some sort of background timer that triggers an error if the provider takes too long to deliver data, but then what should that timeout be? What if the user's device is just naturally slow or the photo library is stored on some sort of external storage device (SD card maybe) with awful bandwidth? If your timeout is too low, it will prevent users from legitimately accessing their photo library; if it's too high, it ruins the point of having a timeout in the first place.

In this sort of scenario the better choice rather than implementing error detection is just fixing the original problem that caused an infinite loop so users don't need to fix anything in the first place. I think the reason why debugging/resolving issues seems so complicated in modern times is in part because we already did fix most/all the "easy" issues from the past generation -- the only remaining issues are extremely hard to catch or, in the case of the Halting Problem you experienced, mathematically impossible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem

Re: Taking screenshots isn't allowed by the app after upgrading to Android 11

#232

Post by skee0083 »

I'm done with android. The final straw for me was when i needed to call 911 for my grandmother and android thought it was a good idea to play notification sounds in the middle of the conversation. Couldn't even hear the operator over all the loud DING DING DING.

Re: Taking screenshots isn't allowed by the app after upgrading to Android 11

#234

Post by yholio »

exikyut wrote: post #141
vagrantJin wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All those highly paid, highly educated people really and truly believe this to be a solution?

Yes. Taking a photo with a separate device is reasonable evidence you're not breaking secure boot et al. If I understand correctly.

It's as if the last 30 years of technical evolution never happened and we are back at faxing signed forms and for extra security and applying triple rot-13 to guarantee no unauthorized access.

Re: Taking screenshots isn't allowed by the app after upgrading to Android 11

#235

Post by cat199 »

supernova87a wrote: post #222
anonymou2 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but it is not really your phone if it runs proprietary software. It is like in medieval times, you didn't own the means of production. Welcome your new digital overlords!!

There is a kind of half-formed philosophy out there which believes we can get back to some false utopian small-collective agri-mercantile worker paradise. It doesn't exist, and never did. Learn how to adapt and make the most of the systems that exist now. I dare to say, if you even actually achieved those fantastical scenarios, the damper on economic and population prosperity would be such that you might not have bee…

> Learn how to adapt and make the most of the systems that exist now.

if this were the attitude, the free software that android is built on wouldn't have existed in the first place...

Re: Taking screenshots isn't allowed by the app after upgrading to Android 11

#236

Post by toast0 »

reaperducer wrote: post #202
zrobotics wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly reminds me of the very early days of online video, where speed runners would video their televisions because screen capture devices were terribly expensive. What's old is new again?

What's old is new again? I'm not so sure. Back in my Windows days (95? 98, maybe?) if I played a DVD on my computer, the window that the video was playing in would be black if I took a screenshot.

A lot of early computer DVD playing was using hardware accelerated decode, with the resulting images bypassing the framebuffer. That means it won't show up on your screenshots, but it wasn't necessarily detecting a a screenshot and blanking the output (although, once software decoding was feasible, that may also have happened).

Re: Taking screenshots isn't allowed by the app after upgrading to Android 11

#237

Post by maple3142 »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #169
indymike wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots. Automatic watermarks. Automatic resizing. Different storage options, putting a phone frame around the screenshot, and lots of other things that are really user workflows. And that is the heart of the issue: when we restrict user workflows, we reduce the utility of the tool.

Then make it a generic image editor. What we have now is: an editor but for screenshots, an editor but for selfies, an editor but for cat photos, each with its own cloud storage which leaks (or spills) data once a year and which data is also being processed by the app owners in ways you’d be disgusted about. There’s a screenshot functionality in the OS and there’s a Share button which should work just as fine and be…

But third party app can be more flexible. For example, I used a app that can let you easily crop a part of screen, then you can edit, image search, share, OCR than translate and many things just in a pop-up.

Re: Taking screenshots isn't allowed by the app after upgrading to Android 11

#238

Post by wojciii »

_odey wrote: post #82
alisonkisk wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can choose not to download their app to your phone.

This does not end up solving the issue though. An android setting toggle to "Disable screenshot blocking policy globally" with a consent box saying "I understand the risks" would. As the owner of the device my desire to take screenshots of anything I want should come first, regardless of what everybody else wants.

Or even better an option to disable the policy for the next 10 or 30 minutes which should be enough to.e to do whatever you need to do.

Re: Taking screenshots isn't allowed by the app after upgrading to Android 11

#239

Post by toast0 »

swebs wrote: post #142
dannyw wrote: post #117

It's blocking you from taking screenshots today. It's blocking you from disabling location services tomorrow.

They already block you from disabling location services if you want to use bluetooth.

My understanding is this is a little bit more nuanced.

For an app to use bluetooth, it needs location permissions as well as bluetooth permissions. Reportedly, this is to prevent an app from using bluetooth beacons to determime your location without permission.

Otoh, it sucks for bluetooth stem toys; you can't use them on an Amazon Fire tablet in a kid's profile, because location permissions are not allowed for kids' profiles.

Re: Taking screenshots isn't allowed by the app after upgrading to Android 11

#240

Post by smolder »

chordalkeyboard wrote: post #229
smolder wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Owning a fragment isn't quite the same as owning the whole thing. Majority stock ownership would be close enough.

Most people don't have the money to afford to own an entire factory, and if they did its still more secure for them to diversify by owning many pieces of many factories in different industries, that's why capitalists figured out how to commodify the means of production as stocks. Its not quite the same, its better.

It's not strictly better, no. As a minority shareholder in Google I have effectively no power to make them stop ruining the internet. Majority control is what gets you something like full ownership, just with some other risks and benefits.
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