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Comment by zahlman | Hacker News Reader

> This is the same technology that prevents you from accidentally screenshotting your password manager

Yes, and I would say it's a bad thing that the OS tries to prevent this.

> seeing “follow” on every screenshotted post is just useless noise, but a small unobtrusive platform icon is a useful reminder that the post came from Bluesky and not another very visually similar service like X(cancel) or Mastodon.

I would say it's a bad thing that Bluesky makes the screenshot look different from what was on screen for the user. If I cared about excluding the "useless noise" from a faithful depiction of the pixels on my screen, I could address that myself.

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Why is this feature bad?

As someone who develops apps for confidential conversations, making it harder for people to screenshot the confidential stuff is a feature the sending party wants, that is why they send in your app as opposed to others. It doesn’t make things impossible, just hard enough that 95% of people won’t bother to take a copy.

Same for example with disappearing audio messages on whatsapp

What I don’t like is the app being informed that I took a screenshot. The OS can hide things in screenshots without this.

One user wants it not to be shared, but the other user might have various reasons to want to take that screenshot - maybe it's evidence of something they need to share urgently with others, whatever. It's definitely hostile to that other user. I get why you'd set it up that way, but it's a tension that really goes against the "full control of your own device" ideal a lot of people have.

Don't send me anything you don't want screenshotted. Easy-peasy. I'll accept an opt-out of whatever protections are in place for the general user, but I don't accept that those protections should remain in place for all users. It's hostile.

It's mostly dumb because of obvious analog loop holes. I at minimum carry 4 devices with cameras, often as many as 12. If I want to capture the disappearing message... I will do it; making it annoying just makes me pissed at the developer + the is.

Honestly, even schoolkids know to have another phone/camera(usually a friends) take a picture of their phone screen.

In a world where people have multiple old phones lying around it isn't that hard to come up with this workaround.

If you send it, it is no longer yours to control.

If it is my phone, it should be mine to control. Too often it really isn't my phone...

If you can't trust the intended recipient, a secure communication channel is pointless.

> Yes, and I would say it's a bad thing that the OS tries to prevent this.

Another way to look at it is the OS makes certain guarantees to the developer around security. Giving control of this to the user would erode that guarantee from the OS to the developer. The result of that is that some developers would simply never display some information (e.g. due to their own contracts or reasonable concerns about fraud/abuse/etc.).

Very similar to the video pipelines in modern devices. Prior to video pipelines which the OS could attest could not be hijacked by the user, many content providers simply would not allow e.g. Netflix to release their content on certain platforms. That the OS does provide such an attestation option for developers allows uses that otherwise would not exist.

But… but they allowed. For a long time. Netflix didn’t need that.

Incorrect. There's a log written about this on the Internet. Suffice to say that Netflix did not allow all of their titles to be viewed on all browsers for years after it was technically feasible.

You are right, I remembered wrong. Netflix degraded the quality for me for years, according to them because of lack of DRM. It was because of lack of hardware DRM.

The user should be the ultimate authority of what their computers do, not the app developer. It's my phone, not the app developer's phone. If my phone has a "screenshot" function, I expect to be able to invoke it whenever I want, not whenever some app developer deems it OK.

I hear your perspective. I am not particularly advocating either position. I am just pointing out that the alternative may be fewer apps available on one's favorite platform. Everything is tradeoffs, and fortunately one can always boot into an OS that will screenshot how you want.

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