Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to prevent screenshots in a web browser

patrick-wied.at

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 131 posts

Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser

#81

Post by drz »

AlyssaRowan wrote: post #31
NathanKP wrote: post #4

That demo messed with my eyes. Even though it is interlacing faster than the eye can see for some reason it still felt weird to look at it. Overall, not worth the trouble or the decline in user experience.

Lesson learned: LCD monitors are absolutely horrible at interlacing. And you can, of course, put them back together with one line of JavaScript. As he says, it's futile. People should stop doing this. Yawn. I am associated with a... certain industry ... (ahem) which frequently finds its content reposted (and it wouldn't be right or proper of me to identify any further, but I'm sure it's a moderately generalised probl…

Image search gets you the sauce on any reasonably popular image, so a watermark isn't as critical as you seem to think it is.

If a customer willing to pay for content is really intrigued by your image, he'll find the sauce.

Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser

#82

Post by shmerl »

pa7 wrote: post #73
shmerl wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Just the notion that DRM is something that should be used in general. I find the concept of DRM to be insulting towards the users.

Also this part:

> seems like there is a problem —  let’s solve it for fun and profit

It's like saying: "Police state struggles with policing measures. Let's help it for fun and profit". I hope you get the idea why this can sound offending.

Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser

#83

Post by smtddr »

kstrauser wrote: post #48
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…

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…

>>Basically dishonest non-potential customers aren't going to pay you and see your protections as something fun to be worked around.

You have no idea how much time I've spent on sites doing weird things to try and stop the user from downloading their content. Like online schools that don't want anyone to save the class-lesson videos. I don't even want the media, I just find it irresistible to understand and ultimately defeat their protection.

Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser

#84

Post by stcredzero »

wavefunction wrote: post #65
stcredzero wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The evidence shows that DRM in the service of corporations and businesses tends to be nasty. But there are reasons to believe that DRM, if used to protect the data and privacy of individuals would be very valuable, with the caveat that it would have to be implemented in a trustworthy way. What if there was a way to provide access to your medical records to people who need them, only for as long as they need them? Wha…

That's the same pie-in-the-sky "what if" that loser corps have been pursuing forever. Whatever scheme they come up with, someone else breaks it shortly thereafter, whether it's DiVX, or DVD encryption, or BluRay encryption, or any of that silly bs.

That's the same pie-in-the-sky "what if" that loser corps have been pursuing forever.

1) That's the same kind of half-baked wishful thinking that's been going around the Internet since before the web. 2) I'm not advocating doing what loser corps have been pursuing. I'm advocating flipping the economics around 180 degrees.

someone else breaks it shortly thereafter, whether it's DiVX, or DVD encryption, or BluRay encryption

It's wishful thinking to ascribe magical powers to anything, even hacking over the vast labor pool of the Internet. Modern content encryption based on VMs gets broken but takes labor to break, and only works as well as it does for mass-distributed media because enough people care about it. (I'm not talking about DVD encryption and earlier. Keeping a single symmetric key secret is fundamentally broken.) Flip around the economics, so equally powerful protections are applied to data only a few people care about, and the addition of a little legal support would be enough to form an effective deterrent.

It is fundamentally broken -- for corporate mass distribution. But that's not the only thing it can be used for.

Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser

#85

Post by enraged_camel »

todd3834 wrote: post #42
kstrauser wrote: post #22

TL;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.

Yeah, sometimes it is worth taking a shot at problems that are thought to be unsolvable. It helps you gain deep insight into the problem domain and become a better thinker.

Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser

#86

Post by FedRegister »

When will website authors learn that you control the content but the client, by virtue of owning their computer, controls the presentation. At best you can make suggestions. At worse you're at the total mercy of the user.

If you want to give out indelible images then go back to print.

Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser

#87

Post by hobbes78 »

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.

That also happened to me. But then I realized I set the browser to display everything in 110% by default. If you go back to 100% indeed you can't do a proper screenshot...

Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser

#88

Post by nbush »

abbeyj wrote: post #75
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;i That should be one line with no spaces if gets line wrapped.

Nice work! Here's another solution posted in an earlier thread: javascript:d=document.createElement("div");d.innerHTML="span:nth-child(odd) {display:none;}";document.body.appendChild(d);

I don't think there's any easy way for the obfuscation to stay ahead of JS reversal. Thanks for taking a look!

Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser

#89

Post by stevekemp »

jobu wrote: post #72
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.

> Most people aren't trying to steal an image without attribution, they just want to share something they liked.

As an amateur photographer you'd be amazed how many people think nothing of taking an image and slapping it on their website, or in their print media.

People routinely use services like imgur.com to rehost images they have no permission to use, and can and will strip watermarks and be silent when asked for attribution.

I'm used to it now, but damn it's frustrating when you take that _one_ great shot and find it everywhere on the internet the next day with no credit.

Re: How to prevent screenshots in a web browser

#90

Post by shmerl »

stcredzero wrote: post #84
wavefunction wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the same pie-in-the-sky "what if" that loser corps have been pursuing forever. Whatever scheme they come up with, someone else breaks it shortly thereafter, whether it's DiVX, or DVD encryption, or BluRay encryption, or any of that silly bs.

That's the same pie-in-the-sky "what if" that loser corps have been pursuing forever. 1) That's the same kind of half-baked wishful thinking that's been going around the Internet since before the web. 2) I'm not advocating doing what loser corps have been pursuing. I'm advocating flipping the economics around 180 degrees. someone else breaks it shortly thereafter, whether it's DiVX, or DVD encryption, or BluRay encry…

> It is fundamentally broken

What is fundamentally broken is the idea of overreaching preemptive policing (DRM). I.e. the one expressed by Sony execs in the past:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_rootkit#Background

> "The industry will take whatever steps it needs to protect itself and protect its revenue streams... It will not lose that revenue stream, no matter what... Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop this. We will develop technology that transcends the individual user. We will firewall Napster at source - we will block it at your cable company. We will block it at your phone company. We will block it at your ISP. We will firewall it at your PC... These strategies are being aggressively pursued because there is simply too much at stake."

It's as broken and crooked as it gets.

Post reply on HN