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How to prevent screenshots in a web browser

patrick-wied.at

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Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser

#71

Post by the_ancient »

paulhauggis wrote: post #28
dsr_ wrote: post #12

How 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…

You may feel it was a "great product" but apparently people were not willing to pay for your great product. Several companies and people get paid giving away their software.

I suspect that your DRM was so overly burdensome that it turned away any potential customers, you in effect screwed yourself.

If the DRM does not get in may way, or require me to do anything(i.e it is invisible to me) then I might buy that software, for example Steam Games, Spotify, etc have DRM that is invisible to the End User. I will grin and bear this level of DRM, begrudgingly. However if you go much beyond this no thank you.

If your software has Activation Keys, Installation Limits, Locks itself to my Motherboard that I change ever 6mos, or other crap like that then you would never get a single dollar from me.

Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser

#72

Post by jobu »

dsr_ wrote: post #12

How to drive away customers: prioritize your unproven loss of income over making an attractive product. Accuse all your users of copyright infringement.

Obscurity is a far more common problem than plagiarism. The best solution for this is to put a signature in the image. Most people aren't trying to steal an image without attribution, they just want to share something they liked.

Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser

#73

Post by pa7 »

shmerl wrote: post #68
todd3834 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Instead of that, the author could just talk about why interlacing was used in video in the past. No need to bring any DRM context in the discussion. The tone of the article is what's offending, not the technical details.

Could you please elaborate what's offending you? (author here) for me it was just a fun experiment I didn't intend to offend anyone

Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser

#74

Post by the_ancient »

shmerl wrote: post #50
paulhauggis wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

That is the thing the Content owners do not get...

The people releasing the content do not care about the actual content, they are not fans, hell most of them probably never watched/played/listened to the movie/show/game/song they are releasing.

The Act of cracking, releasing, encoding, etc is the entertainment for them... The content is irrelevant

Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser

#75

Post by abbeyj »

nbush wrote: post #18

Cool, I love counterintuitive (and even counterproductive) solutions just for their own sake. I tried to do a similar thing with text a while ago: http://nbush.github.io/headache/

As a challenge I wanted to see how hard it would be to circumvent this. Here's a bookmarklet: javascript:void(function(s,i){for(i=0;iThat should be one line with no spaces if gets line wrapped.

Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser

#76

Post by miketuritzin »

This article (which I enjoyed) reminded me of a paper [1] I co-authored a long time ago about protecting 3D content using a remote rendering system. The big advantage that we had over 2D content (images) is obviously that we never gave clients a full representation of the protected asset.

[1] http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/protected/protected.pdf

Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser

#77

Post by drz »

Aardwolf wrote: post #13
drz wrote: post #9

Take a few screenshots, until you get one image with the odd lines, and one with the even lines, then stitch them back together in Photoshop. 2 minute job, tops.

2 minutes is quite a long time. Long enough to not bother unless you really want that particular image...

Depends on what your hourly rate is, and what they're charging for the image.

For most people (especially the billions in the developing world) it's a good use of their time.

Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser

#78

Post by autokad »

interesting article and method. when viewed from remote desktop, the image always appears interlaced.

otherwise, on a regular screen its barely noticeable. at first glance it looks fine, but then i get the feeling something is off. if i blink or look away quickly, i can see some of the interlacing. but overall, interesting idea of treating the images more as movies rather than images

Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser

#79

Post by jamesgagan »

fuzzywalrus wrote: post #70

Anyone else try it? I was curious and tried his live demo URL. and I used OS X's built in screen capture while using Chrome. The screen capture worked, no special tricks needed. I didn't see any visual degradation between my screen shot and the original. The long and short of it is his DRM did not work.

same here cmd-shift-4 worked fine on both images.

Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser

#80

Post by ZoFreX »

I think maybe you could do this. What about the new, controversial DRM extensions? They're for video, but you could just show a 1 frame video on loop as an image, right?

If those support HDCP then it's encrypted all the way to the display, and it would be challenging to screenshot it.

(Of course, you could take a photo of the screen, but that's a substantial degradation).

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