Nice one, the good (great?) thing is that you can save this as a plain old html and you've got the whole code :-)
It hasn't got any type of license included or any other info as comments, so perhaps the creator or the OP can let us know.
Show HN: The text disappears when you screenshot it
121–130 of 204 posts
Re: Show HN: The text disappears when you screenshot it
#122If anybody implements that to antiscrenshot some sensitive data, somebody else will use another phone, a tablet or a camera to record a video of it. Nice idea though.
It's just adding friction: Someone determined will figure out a way to get the text.
Sometimes friction is enough.
Re: Show HN: The text disappears when you screenshot it
#123Others have mentioned Branta Games, but I first saw the effect here: https://youtu.be/TdTMeNXCnTs
This one is actually more sophisticated because it doesn't rely on scrolling pixels like the OP. So the object doesn't just disappear in screenshots, but also when the animation stops moving! So you can't actually display text that stands still, like the "hello" in the OP.
I'm not sure I follow. Couldn't you display text that stands still by (re)drawing the outline of the text repeatedly? It would essentially be a two frame animation
Re: Show HN: The text disappears when you screenshot it
#124If anybody implements that to antiscrenshot some sensitive data, somebody else will use another phone, a tablet or a camera to record a video of it. Nice idea though.
[dead]
Re: Show HN: The text disappears when you screenshot it
#125You can take TWO screenshots, moments apart, open in GIMP, paste one over the other and choose any one of these laying modes: Lighten, Screen, Addition, Darken, Multiply, Linear burn, Hard Mix, Difference, Exclusion, Subtract, Grain Extract, Grain Merge, or Luminance. https://ibb.co/DDQBJDKR
Out of sheer curiosity, I put three screenshots of the noise into Claude Opus 4.1, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and GPT 5, all with thinking enabled with the prompt “what does the screen say?”. Opus 4.1 flagged the message due to prompt injection risk, Gemini made a bad guess, and GPT 5 got it by using the code interpreter. I thought it was amusing. Claude’s (non) response got me thinking - first, it was very on brand, second, th…
> pasting images of seemingly random noise into a sensitive environment is a terrible idea.
Only if your rendering libraries are crap.
Re: Show HN: The text disappears when you screenshot it
#126You can pass in different text. eg:
Re: Show HN: The text disappears when you screenshot it
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of sheer curiosity, I put three screenshots of the noise into Claude Opus 4.1, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and GPT 5, all with thinking enabled with the prompt “what does the screen say?”. Opus 4.1 flagged the message due to prompt injection risk, Gemini made a bad guess, and GPT 5 got it by using the code interpreter. I thought it was amusing. Claude’s (non) response got me thinking - first, it was very on brand, second, th…
> pasting images of seemingly random noise into a sensitive environment is a terrible idea. Only if your rendering libraries are crap.
I think they mean prompt injection rather than some malformed image to trigger a security bug in the processing library
Re: Show HN: The text disappears when you screenshot it
#128This would make for a great effect for a technothriller. Like a cyber ransom or something like that.
Re: Show HN: The text disappears when you screenshot it
#129I think there are usecases for this.
Some countries switched to identity apps instead of plastic identity cards. You could make sensitive data non-screenshottable and non-photographable.
A modern variant to the passport anti identity fraud cover: https://merk.anwb.nl/transform/a9b4e52a-9ba1-414b-b199-29085...
The hotel you are checking in doesn't need to know your DOB, length, SSN, birth place, validity and document number. But they will demand a photo of the ID anyway.
Re: Show HN: The text disappears when you screenshot it
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
This one is actually more sophisticated because it doesn't rely on scrolling pixels like the OP. So the object doesn't just disappear in screenshots, but also when the animation stops moving! So you can't actually display text that stands still, like the "hello" in the OP.
I'm not sure I follow. Couldn't you display text that stands still by (re)drawing the outline of the text repeatedly? It would essentially be a two frame animation
I believe the algorithm in the video works by flipping the pixel color when the pixel changes from foreground (some shape) to background, or from background to foreground. If the shape doesn't move, there is no such change, so it disappears.
In the OP the foreground pixels continuously change (scrolling in this case) while the background doesn't change. That's a different method of separating background and foreground.