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Comment by queuebert | Hacker News Reader

What's to stop me embedding a pinhole camera in the lamp behind me, zooming it in on the screen, and recording every meeting?

These kinds of measures only stop the good guys from doing their jobs. The bad guys put way too much effort into espionage for this to work.

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I love all the comments imagining complex technical workarounds while skipping right over the obvious workaround of using a smartphone camera to take a picture of the screen (which was mentioned near the top of the article that everyone read, of course). Modern camera phones are wide angle enough that it’s not hard to grab a shot of the monitor out of frame.

> These kinds of measures only stop the good guys from doing their jobs. The bad guys put way too much effort into espionage for this to work.

This is for preventing casual screenshots and reminding average office workers that meeting content is sensitive. It’s not an iron-clad tool for defeating dedicated espionage involving hidden pinhole cameras.

There have been similar arguments for ages about how if something isn’t iron-clad perfect protection then it’s pointless, but in the real world making something more difficult actually makes people think twice and stops most of the people who would casually do it.

See for example Snapchat’s screenshot notifications. It’s well known that there’s an elaborate way to circumvent it. However the fact that it takes a lot of work and there’s a risk of getting caught trying really hard to deceive the other party is enough to make most people not want to risk it.

Exactly right. The great firewall of China is another example - of it blocks 60% of people from outside content it is probably "good enough for government work".

> Modern camera phones are wide angle enough that it’s not hard to grab a shot of the monitor out of frame.

Pedantic correction:

'grab a shot of the monitor out of frame of the webcam of the person wanting to take screenshots of the meeting'.

First time I read it I was somehow imagining breaking of laws of physics lmao.

I suppose the biggest irony of this is, most of the shops that might want to enable this are already so sloppy that they half expect folks to screenshot teams presentations for notes later.

I bet it streams the video like a protected HDMI movie... so the video stream isn't part of the WDDM's Team's Window - but placed on top of it.

Interestingly that can be overcome by moving the video just a little between two screens, which reverts it back to a WDDM surface. =D

Or TWO monitors, with "Duplicate" selected, and a camera recording the second monitor under the desk.

Thank you for this. I'm honestly baffled about the quality of other hackers' comments on this topic. Many of them take the feature as a personal attack where it simply is an additional layer of protection against accidentally leaking confidential information. Then making statements that this prevents people from working, where they did not understand that taking screenshots from meetings where this is enabled is not working, but violating work guidelines. When the presenter enables this, they want people to not take screenshots.

This whole comment sections is honestly ridiculous.

Or… y’know having a HDMI capture box with a trigger pedal.

Doesn’t hdcp take care of that? 720p over component sure but hdmi has protection for this.

Most cheap HDMI splitters seem to disable HDCP.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/hdcp-master.txt

The vendors of the camera have the same interests of the vendor of the software. It is just a matter of time until the software watermarks the video and your camera automatically stops recording.

Users have to resort to (exclusively, if possible) open source tools.

The real solution is democratization of manufacturing. We need the ability to make our own hardware, our own computers. Then we won't need to suffer the silly policies of corporations.

the Analogue hole Will never Die

They tried to. They tried to make cameras illegal. Remember that?

Yup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Broadband_and_Digital.... Scarily it would be more technically feasible to implement this today than it was then.

It's not technically currently dead, but running a film movie camera pointing at your laptop during a Teams call is a bit out of reach of most. Even movies costing millions of credits are not shot on analogue any more.

Can you manufacture film yourself? Know anyone who does?

It could start with quietly making the essential chemicals in film production and development "controlled". Then you might need a licence to do analogue photography. Eventually even the last few analogue photographers either die or switch to digital due to the increasing impracticality of analogue. Then the film companies stop making it, then you make it illegal for them to start making it again. You've now killed the analogue hole.

Maybe you're hoping it would be futile like the war on drugs, except there's actually demand for drugs. I can't imagine dealers suddenly stocking up on illegal film for all the people wanting to capture stuff from their Teams calls.

Do you use netflix? Maybe similar when taking a screenshot there you end up with black where the video is playing

I can totally imagine that they will do something similar,so I guess it's pretty simple to implement if done like that

I'm pretty sure you can use some HDMI capture device to do that easier.

Totally irrelevant. This is there to protect an organization from itself. Think of it as a watermark on a PDF.

It exist to make the easiest way impossible and to tell participants that the content should not be shared by them.

That's the equivalent of sitting in a movie theater with a camcorder. Not important enough to bother crafting a solution for.

I would say it's completely different. A camcorder movie has bad quality, most people would rather pay for a good quality movie than a free camcorder one.

For sensitive data on the other hand quality doesn't matter as long as it's readable.

Plenty of people would pay to watch a camcorder copy of a new release film rather than pay the cost of taking the whole family to the theatre. That’s why it was commonly done. Now you just go online.

But if it makes Microsoft’s claim untenable then it’s worth noting that security is only limited…a sweeping generalization that “screen capture is blocked” isn’t really valid anymore.

Making something more difficult is okay to claim in my view, but trying to over-state capabilities or security concerns is problematic.

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