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Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

This trend to prevent others from saving content is stupid. Are people not going to read the content? It’s already “saved” and of course doesn’t stop people from using another phone to screenshot or simply typing up the contents

Oh and this is yet another kick in the face to people with accessibility issues.

As an aside, once AR is mainstream I expect that apps will only display encrypted text and some pair of smart glasses will be able to be configured to decrypt and display the play text all on the client (glasses) such that such issues are removed.

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A fun way to easily circumvent this:

1. Hey Siri, turn Voice Over on.

2. Tap the message once, making Voice Over speak its contents.

3. Tap the screen four times with three fingers. When Voice Over is on, this gesture copies the last spoken phrase to the clipboard.

4. Hey Siri, Turn Voice Over off.

There's no way to block this without breaking accessibility. You could split a message up into multiple items, which partially solves your problem, but the more items you have, the more annoyed actual Voice Over users become.

A similar (although more involved) attack could be used to extract Kindle books. There's no way for Amazon to prevent this, one of the primary screen readers for Windows uses GPL without a CLA, so a proprietary accessibility API is out of the question.

>There's no way for Amazon to prevent this

Correct, however they can randomize certain words in your copy to watermark it and trace it back to you if it ever finds its way to the public internet.

Rumor has it that Polish ebook publishers do exactly that.

In Poland, there's no single E Ink reader company, so there's no DRM standard that would be compatible with all devices that you might want to read your books on. As a consequence, offering unprotected epub files is standard practice here, but all kinds of watermarks, from divs that are 1px by 1px, to subtle modifications of your book's cover, are pretty common.

You can beat this kind of watermark pretty easily by getting three copies of the book and comparing them with diff. You need 3, not 2, so that you know which variant is the original when you notice a difference.

Interesting. I knew you could defeat the protection with multiple copies but the number of copies needed to do it could be increased massively. Let's say they want to catch a serial leaker. They could do massive "watermark cohorts". Like several thousand units sold big. It would surely take several leaks to narrow down the suspect but combined with time information it would pose a significant risk to whoever wants to leak books.

Also,

>In Poland, there's no single E Ink reader company

lol imagining a tech sector without a monopoly or an obviously harmful duopoly is wild.

> There's no way to block this without breaking accessibility.

Then sooner or later someone will break accessibility just to prevent this. And everyone will follow.

It's not that easy any more.

In modern iOS versions, Voice Over has an AI-powered screen recognition module that does not rely on the accessibility information that the developer provides.

As far as I know, it's not possible to prevent the use of this module, not without making the text on the screen unreadable to any OCR engine.

This module isn't perfect, in fact, it's far from perfect, but for something as simple as extracting a bunch of text that already appears on the screen, it would probably work.

Wouldn't that be illegal under the ADA?

It depends.

There's nothing in the ADA (or any similar legislation) that says that all services ever created need to be accessible. Whether such legislation applies to you depends on a lot of factors, whether your software is used in workplaces, government and education being the most important (but not the only) ones.

Sometimes it's the organization that's only allowed to pick accessible software, not the developer that needs to make the software accessible. Sometimes it's okay to use inaccessible software as long as an accessible alternative exists and can be used by those who need it.

If someone cared enough to break accessibility this way, they could implement a switch that conditionally disables accessibility where legally permitted. I believe Kindle already lets publishers do this, come to think of it.

> This trend to prevent others from saving content is stupid. Are people not going to read the content? It’s already “saved” and of course doesn’t stop people from using another phone to screenshot or simply typing up the contents

Building walls in physical world is also very stupid. It does not prevent people of using ladders hehe.

Sorry about the joke. They want to create more friction so users can avoid people from 'easily' taking screenshots.

Though I see where you’re going with this the situation is fundamentally different.

With messaging inherently you are trying to share with others. If you’re sharing why stop saving?

I think the idea is that messaging follows typical human offline communication patterns.

If I tell you something in person, you may remember it for some time, but it's not recorded forever. It exists only in your and my mind. I may misremember or forget it, you may too, and there's no way to know the original message. And there's no way to share that communication. Showing a screenshot of what someone said, is entirely different from saying someone what you heard from someone else. That's why we have contracts because "I said, you said" was never meant to be permanent or enforceable.

This is a feature, not a bug. If human conversations were to be permanent, they would be much less said or written. Messengers, especially private messengers, are a loophole, in a sense that they keep forever what people still unconsciously think of as ephemeral communication, and it's good that Telegram is trying to address it; though I'm not confident how effective it may be.

A friend sent an expiring 5-second photo to me in 2018, and to prove a point, I redrew that 1:1 a few weeks ago and showed it to her, because I think expiring messages are bullshit.

In the real world, I won’t forget the messages you tell me either, the memories are forever. Why should a digital message expire when memories don’t? I can still remember what my first day of school was, why shouldn’t I be able to see the messages I got sent last week?

>Why should a digital message expire when memories don’t?

I'm curious if you understand that your memories don't expire, but that almost all other people's do? I'd be interested to know if you think the platforms should conform to how your brain works, or if you think most brains work like yours. Just so you know, most people can't remember 99% of conversations verbatim that are years old.

> hy should a digital message expire when memories don’t?

In that case, why do you need a digital message if you remember everything? You also don't have any extra recording on personal communication except your (and the counterpart) memory, why it should be any different for digital messages?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29483659

That's YOU. Not everybody (I would say the majority) can do it, there will always be some doubt as the OP said.

> This is a feature, not a bug. If human conversations were to be permanent, they would be much less said or written. Messengers, especially private messengers, are a loophole, in a sense that they keep forever what people still unconsciously think of as ephemeral communication, and it's good that Telegram is trying to address it; though I'm not confident how effective it may be.

If this premise were true encrypted unscreenshotable apps would be the norm for communication.

They are not. Not even close.

Not yet.

So that they can’t reshare? This is almost always why DRM is used. Just because I want to share some content with you doesn’t mean I want you to be able to share it with someone else.

Why do you believe that once you share a message you should continue to have control over it? That’s not what sharing means.

Not to mention it won’t work. If they read it nothing is stopping them from simply telling someone else, drm or not. This technology will not prevent anyone from simply handing over their phone - and your messages - to someone else.

This just goes back to what the original person said about "Building walls in physical world is also very stupid hehe"

It's entirely reasonable to create a system designed to allow people to share things once, and indicate to others that they don't want it spread any further. It's reasonable to design software which attempts to honor such requests by introducing friction, making it 95% effective despite knowing that 5% of people will be able/willing to work around it.

Most people are "path of least resistance" and are too lazy to work around something like this, which is exactly the point. Pretty much every person using such a system is aware that the recipient could just take a picture of the phone with a camera.

Perfect is the enemy of the good.

I don’t think it’s reasonable at all. The wall example isn’t the analogous situation.

Is it reasonable that someone give you a gift and you cannot sell it or give it to anyone else?

Your analogy is not relevant at all to the situation.

It's completely reasonable for someone to give you a letter or photo of a personal nature and ask you not to share it (or simply expect you to understand that it's not to be shared). In the physical realm, the honor system comes into effect. In the digital realm, there's nothing wrong with adding an imperfect layer of accountability/protection to greatly reduce the chance that it becomes shared.

It’s perfectly relevant. It’s literally the analogous situation. There’s nothing special about the so-called digital realm.

The same expectations and honor system you described can be upheld in the “digital realm”. The only difference is that people have the arrogance to try to force things upon “digital” users because they can.

And also, I never said the gift was physical in nature.

It's not just about messaging. Although, I'm not sure I agree or disagree about your idea of message ownership, or lack of it; I've got mixed feelings about it.

I think it also comes down to wanting to own the "distribution" chain.

Example scenario (made up, so might have flawed reasoning): If I have an official following on Telegram where I post my art, and there's a fan/knock-off Twitter account reposting my art without my permission. I don't have many ways of stopping them. I could send a DMCA notice, but that's slow and doesn't prevent someone from reopening their knock-off distribution channels. DRM creates friction for most people that they won't even bother thinking about setting up a sidestepping distribution channel that fragments my audience.

Also to add (edit): being perfect isn't the point. I mean, most habits or ways we do things _every day_ aren't even close to optimal; much less perfect. If we threw out everything that's not perfect, we'd be left with nothing.

You don’t really need an example scenario - just take YouTube, the largest source of creator content - it does nothing to prevent you from sharing the videos.

Ultimately if you feel like you’re being wronged DMCA should be used and not a programmatic approach simply because a program has no notion of who was right to begin with.

So in your example you say “my art”, but what if it were not? Should you not be able to post “your art?”

I believe people should handle people issues and computers handle, well, the other stuff.

There is an enormous difference between a tie rack (or any commodity, including digital ones) and a letter or photo of a personal nature. There is nuance in this situation that has to be understood and recognized in order to evaluate why the feature exists and if it provides value.

There's an enormous difference between a physical object, which has inherent scarcity; and information, which does not. We strongly enforce property rights on physical objects because since they are scarce, theft is possible (if a person acquires a physical object then someone else acquires it, it is necessary that the original acquirer no longer possesses it - therefore either it was a gift, or it was paid for in some manner, or the second acquisition was theft). The notion of theft of information was invented by politicians due to an utter lack of creativity with respect to how to incentivise the creation of a non-scarce resource. While physical property rights are rights in the positive sense (they grant owners of physical objects the right not to have those objects removed from them without due consideration), intellectual property rights are rights only in the negative sense (they grant the owners no inherent abilities they did not already have, instead they only restrict the freedom of others by limiting their rights to acquire something that would otherwise be limitlessly abundant).

You’re still not getting it. The “gift” I describe can be a letter or photo of personal nature. My point stands.

Grandma gifts you a photo of her and her partner. Do you believe that you shouldn’t be able to show your own family their ancestors picture?

It’s obviously not reasonable. She could explicitly ask, but ultimately the choice is yours.

> Grandma gifts you a photo of her and her partner.

Which is a contrived example that conveniently sidesteps the two most relevant factors: the personal/intimate nature of the communication and the consequences of sharing it against the person’s will during a timeframe in which it would have an effect on the person's life.

> It's completely reasonable for someone to give you a letter or photo of a personal nature and ask you not to share it (or simply expect you to understand that it's not to be shared).

Yeah, and because I am a good friend, I will not share those photos with anyone, especially if they ask me not to. :)

Yes and some people are somewhat bad friends, and will share them, but not if there's a small barrier to overcome, as it's not worth the effort.

And people are terrible friends and will take the time/effort to bypass any measures necessary to share the photo.

The feature is designed to address the "somewhat bad" case, not to be perfect.

> And people are terrible friends and will take the time/effort to bypass any measures necessary to share the photo.

Exactly. They will pretty much bypass this one as well.

Yes, that's exactly what I said. The feature is designed to address the "somewhat bad friend" case, not the "terrible friend" case. Both of those kinds of people exist in the world.

Reducing the chance of something that you didn't want shared from being shared by a factor of X% is better than nothing. Try to step out of black-and-white thinking for a minute. Just because something is not perfect doesn't mean it's useless.

I'm personally disgusted by tools which actively attempt to prevent someone from doing something which I myself can bypass just because I have the knowledge to do it.

Yes, your example of trying to prevent someone moderately bad from sharing something personal to you which you don't want shared is reasonable. The trouble is, you can use the same mechanism for much less reasonable and more nefarious, corporate things.

So the end result is that we're not to have moderately nice things, lest they be used as a weapon against user freedom by a mega-corporation.

I wonder how many people it actually stops from saving or sharing. If they want to save, they will. If they want to share, they will. I know you are talking about some people who want to save or share but is too lazy to take a screenshot or take a photo with whatever they can.

It's not about sharing, it's about proof of provenance.

If I say "Alice told me this", there is no proof that it actually happened; Alice can deny it. If I forward the message or show you a screenshot, then the case that the communication happened is significantly stronger. (Of course screenshots can be doctored, but that's another problem)

That's mostly what this is about - reducing the chances for accidental or willful disclosure to third parties.

> If I forward the message or show you a screenshot, then the case that the communication happened is significantly stronger. (Of course screenshots can be doctored, but that's another problem)

How is it another problem? If the method purports to be able to strengthen claims of veracity, but immediately after you demonstrate it to be vulnerable to spoofing, then it offered nothing in the first place. It's exactly the same problem.

And if someone uses the telegram web client or simply hands over the phone?

And it is about sharing - that’s how communication works, no?

Exactly. When you share something, that information is out and you have no control over of it. Plus, why would my friend want to share and then un-share something, or why would I want to do that to someone? The answer is that it is not for the regular people, it is to protect creators and such, not some regular Joe. Telegram is targeting a particular audience with this change. That said, I am pretty sure it will not be successful because I have access to a lot of creators' stuff through the Internet, be it music or books. If people want to save or share stuff, they will find a way.

s/creators/rights-holders/g

Many things are shared in confidence.

While I an certain the current state of affairs of having DRM and personal privacy is unstable in the face of even the tech we had 10 years ago, we still have a strong personal need for control over our information and our works.

Not true! We have no personal need for control over our information, as the utter lack of legal protections for personal privacy and personal information collection make abundantly clear. And works? Are you kidding me? Have you seen a typical corporate IP assignment agreement? This has nothing to do with persons (which the laws are making increasingly clear are irrelevant), and everything to do with corporations and their shareholders.

I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic or attempting a joke here?

The EU, where I live, absolutely does have legal protections for personal privacy and personal information collection, hence GDPR and all the cookie popups[0].

And even if the law was silent, that wouldn’t itself be evidence of a lack of need, as people died from lack of workplace health and safety regulations well before there were laws about that.

And while IP assignments are an interesting suggestion to raise, I counter that I have also seen a forum of users who didn’t read the T&C and suddenly realised $corporation had the eternal right to reproduce whatever they wrote on that forum (kinda necessary but clearly non-obvious to most normal people), which demonstrates that people definitely feel strongly attached to even really dumb and low-value works if they are those works are their own.

[0] that they adhere to the relevant law about as well as all the YouTube videos saying “no copyright intended” adhere to IP laws is an enforcement problem, not a lack of rights

> This is almost always why DRM is used.

No, DRM is used to extend control to media players and manufacturers via licensing. The rest are just excuses.

Given that most DRM these days is implemented in the apps that license the content, I'm not sure this is remotely true. Maybe in the disc era there was truth to this, but even then I'm not sure that it was a greater concern than lost revenues due to piracy.

Just because you want to share something doesn't mean you should. You cannot control what people will do, nor should you be able to control their actions by limiting their freedoms. Either you trust them or you don't.

> With messaging inherently you are trying to share with others. If you’re sharing why stop saving?

Some others, not all.

Otherwise, tell me the point of all the effort that has gone into products like Signal, protocols like TLS etc.

There’s really no connection (no pun intended) between this and TLS. With signal the same criticism applies.

If by TLS you mean the whole encryption and signing of http content etc, then I would argue it's the same. The purpose is to have an immutable and untamperable pipeline of data straight from the "server" to your "eyeballs". The cat definitely came out of the bag with tech enabling so much that was difficult in the real-world, and now they're busy scrambling to put it back, and I would argue, using "privacy" and "safety" as a Trojan horse.

Edit. Side note seeing as I don't think I 100% addressed your point. If we allow data to be viewed, and relayed with the potential for altering, then they no longer have 100% control over the content being changed/recorded. So viewing and sharing (with potential edits) is akin to tampering with the pipeline. Sharing is not at issue, it's you being able to intercept and have control over the data on your device.

Now I'll go scurry off and take my tin-foil hat off for the day.

The connection is simple in my eyes:

> With messaging inherently you are trying to share with others. If you’re sharing why stop saving?

When sending packages to the Internet you are inherently trying to share with others. If you're sending, why stop receiving?

> When sending packages to the Internet you are inherently trying to share with others. If you're sending, why stop receiving?

Except this isn’t the analogous situation.

TLS is more like three people in a room, one of which cannot be removed, and you want to say something to one person without the other person hearing.

Ultimately the person who the message is intended for can do whatever they want with the message.

If all chat communication was public in a single thread I’d agree with you.

For the same reason that sometimes you are talking and you don't want people recording a video of it.

You may want to share an image with a group, but not to the whole world.

The fact that iOS plays nicely with apps that ask to prevent screenshotting is a foundational bug. Does such an ability exist on stock Android? Either way, it’s best practice to root & jailbreak.

Yes, it also exists on Android too[1][2]

[1] https://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/WindowM... [2] https://stackoverflow.com/a/30618030

> The fact that iOS plays nicely with apps that ask to prevent screenshotting is a foundational bug.

In fact, iOS does not provide any tools to prevent screenshotting, on the contrary, this feature requires some nasty hacks to pull off.

One of them is actually even patented and it requires rendering whatever you want to protect (text, image, etc) into a one frame DRM protected video and rendering that instead.

I'm imagining another method whereby you have a high frame rate video that only displays part of the image on any individual frame. Because of the high frame rate, the individual frames appear to merge together as a single image to the human eye.

Any screenshot would only get one frame. You may have to stitch together multiple frames to get any useful data.

I wonder if this would work.

I actually tried something like this at one point but I always ended up with something seizure-inducing.

Apparently, these app vendors go to a lot of trouble to protect the screenshot blocking ability. They test for rooted iOS devices and make decisions on how to even allow the app to launch if rooting has been detected as they know that part of the use of the rooted OS is to get arround screenshot detection.

That’s why the first tweak you should install on a jailbroken iPhone is a jailbreak cloak.

> The fact that iOS plays nicely with apps that ask to prevent screenshotting is a foundational bug. Does such an ability exist on stock Android? Either way, it’s best practice to root & jailbreak.

When I used feature "screen cast" and tried to cast Firefoxs private tab, I just got black screen.

Apps like Tor and private tabs in Firefox ask Android to not allow screenshots when they are open.

Thankfully Firefox can be configured not to do that. Brave, on the other hand, imposes it.

on Android there isn't a screenshot permission, there is an allow screen capture permission.

for example private Firefox tabs do not show a preview in the system activity preview, it is a general "do not let the content of the screen escape the control of this app"

New tools for harassment, then erasing the evidence.

Or, more power for technical people to hold over those less able.

These kind of features give more power to technically minded people, like the people who implement them. I see similar things with Outlook users being able to "recall" emails or being able to delete messages on Teams etc. There are certain people, usually less technical people, who actually think those features delete data that has already been sent. It is an abuse of power to give less technical people a false sense of security.

The trend is to stop "the masses" who only use their phones. It's an interesting trend, wonder what will be the side effects

Yeah. When PCs were the dominant platform, we were the ones in control. Now we're the ones being controlled.

I'm not so sure about that. Perhaps during the hobbyist era of PCs, this was the case. But, I distinctly remember a world during the "dominance" of the PC that forced me to work with proprietary software just to be able to type out a document. There was really only one choice of computer to buy and one kind of OS to run on it. It was really hard to use a different OS on your computer, and it was risky too, since PC manufacturers would often not honor warranties if non-proprietary OS/software was used on the computer.

Even in those days we had more power than we do today. You had to use proprietary software but that software still worked for you and did your bidding. The computer ran the software you told it to run without complaint and it didn't matter that some "rights holders" were losing money or whatever.

At some point all of this changed... Software now works for the corporations and only allow us to do what they designed for us. If they don't like something, you just won't be able to do it anymore. You can't even program the computers anymore, that's now a privilege increasingly reserved only for "approved", "licensed" individuals.

Typing out a document? I wouldn't be surprised if the office suites of the future started automatically checking your work against some "rights holders" corpus that you're not supposed to copy and then preventing saving or printing until you fix it.

PCs have unique advantages, they enable things like Napster, Torrents, in-premise storage, and all kinds of autonomous servers that could never work with mobile computers and the cloud.

No, it's not stupid because it works pretty well. But preventing you from saving content is not the actual intention behind DRM. It's just the easiest way to hinder you from re-distribution.

Something working pretty well (which this doesn’t since it’s not respected in all telegram clients anyway) doesn’t mean it’s not stupid.

And again, this doesn’t prevent redistribution.

Well, as I said, it hinders you from redistribution – it doesn't need to shut it down completely to fullfill its goal.

Also I assume it's working in a the way intended. It may be a stupid thing to do from your or my perspective because it doesn't work towards our benefit – but the rational behind it is sane. That's what I meant with „not stupid”.

I just realize I sound like this sickening utilitarian tone you find in HN discussions so often. Sorry for going that way. Basically I'm with you, it's stupid when you take a step back.

The lock on your front door doesn’t prevent me from entering if I really want to, but it’s a deterrent and a clear signal of your intent, that I’m not to enter without your permission.

Not the analogous situation.

You keep saying that, but I think that maybe you could make a better effort to understand other people’s analogies, even when they don’t map neatly to the mental model you have in mind.

My point is that a prevention mechanism can have utility for those employing it, even if it’s trivially circumvented by those who really want to. It does not have to be a binary thing, where either it works perfectly 100% of the time or it’s useless. It’s obvious to me that this feature could have a stifling effect on spread of content, and that might be well enough to have fulfilled its purpose.

Mind you, ideologically I do not necessarily agree with it, but that’s another matter.

Actually it fits quite well.

>because it works pretty well.

How do they enforce it on the web client?

They cannot.

I'm not sure it is. I think it's the same principle that things like GDPR are based on. It's not that you want to prevent the entity from having access to that data at all. It's that you don't want that data sitting around forever which becomes a security liability where the attacker is not the recipient of the message.

Web3 will fix it

Just so long as nobody screen shots the NFT.

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