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Comment by OCTAGRAM | Hacker News Reader

This was a nice trick to protect text from copying. For instance, student assignments. Students could still use digital camera on CRT display, but 20 years ago cameras were costly and students did not have them. And typing text from scratch was a tedious job. So online served assignments were not shared too fast.

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Around 2005 digital cameras were commonplace. Mobile phones also had cameras by then, even if not very good ones by today's standards. Maybe you're talking about an earlier time?

2005 is pre iPhone.

While cameras were definitely common, they also weren't quiet as ubiquitous as they're today.

Lots of families only had them for trips etc, not readily available for kids to make photos of screens.

Many flip phones had cameras by then. For instance, the Razr V3 was the best selling phone of 2005, and had a 640×480px camera.

It's not that Cameras didn't exist, more that the technological features were not sophisticated enough to enlist cheating compared to now. A personal OCR Python library wasn't a thing back then.

Not saying that cheating was impossible but uneasy unlike to now where there's a library for everything.

AABBY FineReader was very pirate-able since the early 2000s. The workflow would have been a bit clunky, but it was still very doable.

Nobody argued that it was impossible before. Nor did I claim that there were no cameras before 2005.

Cameras just weren't as ubiquitous as today. Unironically arguing that point is silly. They just weren't (I know you didn't, but we're in a comment chain that made that argument).

Yes, in most groups of people, there were a few of them that had cameras readily available, but it wasn't the norm for everyone.

What was available (not just cameras, but ocr etc pp) was a lot less accessable then it is today - where you just point your phone at it and it transparently extracts you the full text of whatever is on screen/lens, consequently the issue got a lot more problematic and widespread, which was the only thing what was put forward here.

if you are dedicated and smart enough to invest in a small camera pirate OCR software you can probably just do the assignment in the first place...

If you think every student had a razr (btw good luck reading text on tiny screen photo from 640x480 camera) you're pretty privileged;)

> 2005 is pre iPhone

I hate how incompetent tech writing and marketing rewrote and simplified mobile phone history into pre/post-iphone. Yes, we did have touchscreens, smartphones and camera-enabled devices many years before the iPhone. Arguably, on several metrics, many Symbian/Linux/blackberry phones of that era are better smartphones than today's iPhone/Androids as defined by hardware capabilities which got removed over time while arbitrary constraints got added on the software front.

Don't know about other markets but the first iPhone didn't sell well especially because it was behind the high end feature phones of the time for a more expensive price.

The iPhone which made it was the 3G.

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone

I had an Ericsson R320s at the time and that was the web page that convinced me to replace it with a Nokia E70. The joystick stopped working after many years and there was no fix for it. I switched to E90 and I hated the keyboard. It took a lot of force to press the keys and there was no clear key separation to touch-type. But that was the phone which I dropped on the pavement while riding the bike at 80 Km/h and it survived with just scratches! The best 3 phones I ever had.

Now I have a N86 which I'm going to keep until the last 2G goes offline.

haven't had a chance to try this myself, but i've been told e70's joystick simply needs disassembly and cleaning (perhaps with a judicious application of wd-40).

I'm fully aware. I merely used that as a timeframe anchor to make my point.

This might have been the case where you were, but it wasn't everywhere.

I was about 15 at the time, I'd had multiple digital cameras and had a phone with a crappy camera on it. All of my friends had digital cameras. Myspace had already peaked, Facebook was taking off, and that was largely driven by kids taking pictures.

The idea that the ability to take a photo wasn't ubiquitous for big parts of the western world in 2005 doesn't seem accurate.

Now everybody has a phone with a good camera, back then cameras were not so affordable and cameras in phones were very bad quality

I had my first digital camera in 2003 and my first videocall-capable phone in 2004 (Nec e313). I was a kid

> And typing text from scratch was a tedious job

At least by typing them the typer might learning something. :)

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