Also this burns a lot of CPU cycles :(
How to prevent screenshots in a web browser
41–50 of 131 posts
Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser
#42TL;DR You can't, stop trying. It's not worth the effort, it's tilting at windmills, and it pisses your users off. Just stop.
I am glad that this guy tried. I found some of the techniques pretty clever and I enjoyed reading the article. I do not believe you can stop people from taking screenshots and stealing images but I never considered some of the techniques the author explained. He was much closer to solving this than I expected.
Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser
#43How to drive away customers: prioritize your unproven loss of income over making an attractive product. Accuse all your users of copyright infringement.
Do you agree that it's sometimes desirable to communicate in a way that doesn't produce a written record? (e.g. insisting that you talk privately in person rather than over email)
If yes, then I think you agree in principle with the goal here, even if you disagree with the specific use case.
Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser
#44If someone gets really pissed off, they will just take a pic of their screen with an SLR and then photoshop it.
Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser
#45The title is incredibly misleading..
Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser
#46You're still sending the picture across the network to the screen in your most valiant attempt, but by using the inspector's resources, you can get a url link to the cat image[1]. Like you say at the end of the article, it's not really worth it.
The site being slow is a better deterrent than anything written in the post. 9 Seconds to first byte[2].
[1] - http://www.patrick-wied.at/talks/image-protection/demos/cat....
Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser
#47It took 20 years to get image interoperability down to "solved problem" status, so let's get start from scratch by coming up with something that you have no idea will work on cheap tablets, will eat up CPU on battery powered devices, and makes unwarranted assumptions about display technology! Yay!
Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser
#48How to drive away customers: prioritize your unproven loss of income over making an attractive product. Accuse all your users of copyright infringement.
I really dislike this attitude on HN. You can have great products that make no money because cracks get popular (I have done testing with my own software and know for sure this is the case) and get higher results than the original product listing on google, Adblock, and many other methods thought to be "rights". Even look at music piracy. Pirates did the big labels a favor: small, independent artists can't make a liv…
That attitude is realism. It's not unreasonable to take minor steps to make casual copying easier - the clear GIF overlay is a good example of that - but there ain't no such thing as perfect digital restrictions management. Anything beyond those minor steps becomes an inconvenient nuisance for your real customers and the risk/reward paying just isn't worth it.
Imagine you have a stock photo website. Basically honest potential customers might try right-clicking a photo once to download it, and failing that will whip out their credit card. Basically dishonest non-potential customers aren't going to pay you and see your protections as something fun to be worked around.
There just isn't a business case for heroic measures that can ultimately be trivially defeated.
Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser
#49So here's a startup idea that can help with that. 1) Build a library for hiding encrypted information inside images. It should be hard to detect (indistinguishable from random) and robust (e.g. survive printing and scanning). 2) Build a web crawler, coupled with a key store. Crawl the internet for images that contain our encrypted info. 3) The copyright owners will be our paying clients. They will display images only…
Blizzard does this: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/watermark-screenshots-World...
Sneakily, Blizzard did (does?) that to include an account ID, seemingly so that they could catch people exploiting and then proudly posting screenshots (but editing out their character name).
I've got to hand it to them, that is sneaky, but a bit underhanded. And you could sort of see something was a bit off in screenshots of the more gradiented blue skyboxes (in which it was more visible), but I'd thought that was just a poor JPEG encoding routine, until someone looked closer of course.
Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser
#50How to drive away customers: prioritize your unproven loss of income over making an attractive product. Accuse all your users of copyright infringement.
I really dislike this attitude on HN. You can have great products that make no money because cracks get popular (I have done testing with my own software and know for sure this is the case) and get higher results than the original product listing on google, Adblock, and many other methods thought to be "rights". Even look at music piracy. Pirates did the big labels a favor: small, independent artists can't make a liv…
> independent artists can't make a living anymore because everyone just expects it to now be free.
DRM can't help artists make money. It only helps them lose more.
Examples which talk about it:
* http://www.lexi-alexander.com/blog/2014/6/1/will-the-real-pi...
> And this is my favorite part: I am 100% certain that the hacking of entertainment industry's security features provides better entertainment for these kids than the entertainment we're trying to prevent them from stealing. Let that sink in for a second, then try not to bust up laughing.
* http://brutalgamer.com/2012/03/09/cd-project-red-drm-no-long...
> Every subsequent game we will never use any DRM anymore, it’s just over-complicating things…We release the game. It’s cracked in two hours, it was no time for Witcher 2. What really surprised me is that the pirates didn’t use the GOG version, which was not protected. They took the SecuROM retail version, cracked it and said ‘we cracked it’ — meanwhile there’s a non-secure version with a simultaneous release. You’d think the GOG version would be the one floating around.”