Comment by mikkupikku | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikkupikku | Hacker News Reader

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I know how to get the audio stream names, the problem is the window titles. With X it's easy, just call xdotool. I'm sure it's probably easy enough on Windows and MacOS too. Wayland is the weird one for making focused window titles privileged information.

Anyway, I do think I've created what should be considered basic desktop functionality here, a simple hotkey that mutes or otherwise changes the volume only of the focused window. Every desktop should have it.

This is just one of the tools I've made for myself with X which I do not want to do without and this makes Wayland a non-option for me. If I can't use X and can't replicate things like this with Wayland, then maybe I should switch to MacOS at that point because the dream of controlling my own computer seems like it's dying anyway.

Wayland is approximately correct in this case and Windows and Mac are behind the security curve for bincompat reasons; window titles certainly leak PII. There should be a way to do it, but it is sensitive information.

Is there any documented attack on macOS or Windows that utilized window title information?

Never in history. If you have software running on your system attacking you then you have so many more issues than the adversary knowing your window titles.

Sure, but again there's no interest in actually making a standard way to do it. I can understand it being something that arbitrary applications probably shouldn't be able to access, but that somehow turns into no way to do it, or complete fragmentation where every DE does it with arbitrary differences (or, more realistically, some DEs support it and others don't).

Okay; is there a way to do it? Can I, the user, decide that I do actually want a program to see titles? Or is it still impossible because 17 years isn't enough to implement utterly trivial APIs that people want?

You are aware that by default programs you run have access to your entire home directory, right? Applying any restrictions to them in the windowing protocol is security theater.

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