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Comment by DerekBickerton | Hacker News Reader

1x1 pixel GIFs are still in use on places like Amazon where the 1x1 GIF image is overlayed on top of another (larger) image. It's to stop people right-clicking and saving the larger image to their device (because copyright). Anyways I can just press F12 and 'steal' the image from devtools, so it's not hard to overcome.

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> places like Amazon

And places like this site right here, where it provides indentation for comments among other things! Search the source for `s.gif` - https://news.ycombinator.com/s.gif

I believe that tracking pixels (1x1) are still very popular for mining browsing activity

Yes. Facebook literally calls it the Facebook Pixel for this reason.

I recently came across an image I wasn't able to download using dev tools and was shocked. I wish I had had the time to figure it out.

If it's visible, it's capturable, it's simply a matter of how obfuscated it is and how much effort you want to spend capturing it. In highly dynamic web apps these days, it could be simple as a right click or as complex as figuring out their rendering system, source data stream, generated key handshake to verify it's the script accessing the data and not a person, and so on. I see this sort of trash a lot more than I care to.

I once broke the "DRM" of a site which displayed images by downloading them obfuscated and using a big blob of JS to unfsck them and display them on a canvas. Grabbing the image should be easy, no? Just use `.toDataURL()`, right? Well, this site deleted all the methods on the canvas object which could be used to grab the image data, and then `.freeze()` (or maybe it was `.seal()`, this was a while ago) to prevent the method being added back in.

In the end I said 'fuck it' and made a patched firefox build in a VM with freeze and/or seal disabled completely, then a small jetpack addon (remember them?) to unfsck the canvas element and grab them images.

You probably could've used `HTMLCanvasElement.prototype.toDataURL.call` on the canvas element

That's easier than my solution. I've got a user script that backs up some methods that runs before the page loads, and a corresponding bookmarklet to restore them.

Hah, I knew a JS wizard would come up with an easier solution after I posted that. Perhaps I'll have to re-sub to that site to see if they've changed their DRM scheme...

Well, you can just PrntScrn it as a last resort, if it's not a background image :-)

Link the page please?:)

Some sites that are more savvy now prevent you from getting into dev tools altogether. That and Google looking to make the whole web canvas is a disturbing trend.

I've seen websites hijack the keyboard shortcut and prevent right clicking from opening the context menu but none that actually prevented dev tools from being opened

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