Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by thedynamicduo | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

thedynamicduo·

Super invasive IMO. Passwords, personal emails, banking information. Yikes!

View on HN

But not DRM content. The system will recognize and avoid screenshotting that.

Banking details? Fine.

Passwords? A-OK!

Copyrighted content? STOP, YOU FOOLS, BEFORE YOU ANGER THE MOUSE!

This whole thing is dystopian, but making it a priority to avoid DRM controlled content is wild to me. The screenshots are ostensibly a cache, which is part of how video is displayed anyway. Is avoiding caching a 6 frame per minute cache really a higher priority than all of the privacy this undermines?

You haven't been able to take screenshots of DRM controlled content for as long as DRM controlled content has existed. That's what makes it DRM. This technology isn't doing anything special at all. If you wanted to develop it for Windows, you could, and it would work the same way.

This doesn't sound very likely. In order to show pixels on a screen, something has to write those numbers somewhere. Screenshot should be writing those pixels to a file as an image format, not consulting whatever programs are running to ask if there are areas that they don't want to draw.

The pixels are literally encrypted on PCIe on their way over to the GPU, it's quite draconian. Been this way since Vista ("Blu-ray is a bag of hurt" - Steve Jobs)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_Media_Path

That is a crazy thing to do! Looks like it's windows specific at least.

This is rank populism. You're implying sinister intent, when the technical and legal constraints that resulted in that should be obvious. You already can't screenshot DRM content.

That might suggest that we have sinister copyright law. Aside from that I am pretty sure that this feature will threaten to violate a full battalion of privacy laws.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com