20 ms·

Protected Content, Delete by Date, Device Management and more

224 points by yannoninator 5y ago

Croftengea 5y ago
I wonder how do they handle DRM content in the open-source version of Telegram - Telegram Desktop (https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop). Also, Telegram Desktop is licensed under GPLv3, which is an anti-DRM license. Something doesn't add up here...
- mimsee 5y ago
  The editorialized title says DRM but I believe "protected content" in this context means restricting the sharing and screenshotting of content in the app via normal measures, not that they applied tons of cryptography like more a mainstream meaning of DRM would.
  - fsflover 5y ago
    DRM does not mean "tons of cryptography" and never did. It means anything restricting users' freedom to do what they want with the data.
    - yuuta 5y ago
      No. DRM is meant to protect copyrights, but Telegram's intend was to protect private messages from being forwarded to the public, which has nothing to do with copyrights.
      - fsflover 5y ago
        DRM is an instrument, which can protect anything. If you apply it elsewhere, it does not stop being DRM.
  - Croftengea 5y ago
    I see, thanks. So the title is totally misleading then.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  Telegram has a ToS which blocks any client which does not comply with the same restrictions as the app. They have used it in the past to block apps which do not send the "seen" status on messages.
Asmod4n 5y ago
Can apps on iOS disable screen recording or mirroring?
- Gigachad 5y ago
  They can block recordings or mirrors for DRM video. Telegram blocks screenshots of secret chats on android but on iOS it sends a message to the other side saying a screenshot was taken which makes me suspect it isn't possible to block screenshots.
up6w6 5y ago
A nice idea in the opposite direction I saw recently was watermarking images, why create a fake felling of privacy when you can create legal liability ? https://community.signalusers.org/t/watermark-photos-videos/18512/3 https://community.signalusers.org/t/watermark-photos-videos/...
anotherhue 5y ago
My favourite screenshot tool is the camera on another phone.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  Makes for really crap video copying though.
- orangepanda 5y ago
  Thats why I always carry around two phones. To, once every three years, take a photo of something I cant screenshot.
  - indrora 5y ago
    adb on android completely bypasses that. But my personal favorite is that this is entirely, 100% client-side, and there's already a few handy ways to patch out the checks from the foss client.
- paradaux 5y ago
  And besides that, it's very easy to bypass those restrictions anyway. The most common would be to screen _record_ prior to opening, that usually isn't detected — or alternatively, for us rooted users just use a screenshot app which ignores those soft-blocks. In short, this limitation is rather pointless.
  - theon144 5y ago
    >The most common would be to screen _record_ prior to opening, that usually isn't detected — or alternatively, for us rooted users just use a screenshot app which ignores those soft-blocks. According to other comments in this thread, this just freezes when switching apps, and fails. I'm not too surprised, given that the feature (at least on Android) is meant as a security measure (i.e. most of the banking and 2FA apps use it to some extent).
sylvain_kerkour 5y ago
While I'm not a fan of Telegram's security model, I have to say that their dedication to create an awesome product is admirable. EDIT: Just to be clear given the title, I'm not pro DRM, and we can be pro or against auto-removable content, but I just love how they implement features that their users are asking for and the quality of their apps.
- kmarc 5y ago
  I am amazed how high quality telegram's client apps are. Both on desktop (native), android, and even the web versions are feature full, native, blazing FAST. As I said once, telegram is not the best chat app I have to use, but the best... App altogether on my laptop/phone, I have to use :-) The UX is slicker and more comfortable to use than that of whatsapp (and miles ahead signal). With the latest update if I got it correctly, even E2E encrypted chats can be synced to all clients (? Needs to be verified) I guess you mean the security model of non-E2E chats. Although you can read into it that they can do MITM, the details reveal that the actual keys/messages are shared into datacenters in multiple countries so no government alone can retrieve plaintext from at-rest storage. To me (especially compared to anything Facebook products) is already much better than nothing. If it's an issue for you, opt in for E2E chats and enjoy! Sometimes I have to use whatsapp with some contacts and it feels like a huge step back after telegram, especially in UX.
  - baxuz 5y ago
    One thing I can't stand is that it's the only messaging app out there without a presence monitor. As soon as I receive a message all of my clients will start pinging. It's the reason why I avoid it. I talk to someone on the desktop client, yet my phone, work laptop and tablet will ring on every message. I can't be assed to go and mute 3 other devices every time I decide to talk to someone.
    - hansel_der 5y ago
      > I talk to someone on the desktop client, yet my phone, work laptop and tablet will ring on every message. ime the desktop will pickup the message a few seconds before any of the mobile clients does and mark it as read, hence surpressing any notifications on the latter. ofc chat notifications don't make any sounds on my systems to begin with.
mimsee 5y ago
I wonder how they prevent a screenshot from happening on their desktop client or do I just not receive protected content on desktop.
- underscore_ku 5y ago
  or if you use another phone to take a picture
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    Pretty much. A sleezy guy at work would show off the nudes he got on his private phone from girls on Snapchat by taking pictures of the screen with his work phone. Life tip: never send nudes or any private information to anyone you don't completely trust, regardless of the privacy features the communication medium offers, as there's always an easy workaround.
    - xwolfi 5y ago
      Better tip: never send any information or opinion you wouldnt want the public, your parents, your colleagues and the police to associate your name to. I dont get the newish trend online to send BS you're ashamed of.
    - faeyanpiraat 5y ago
      How about you never take nudes in the first place? Data can leak in multitude of ways, earned trust can be broken, etc..
      - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
        >How about you never take nudes in the first place? That's obviously the safest option, but sending and receiving nudes is an activity many sexually active people find arousing. Not having sex is also the safest option to preventing pregnancies and STDs, but people still engage in it with protections that are not 100% guarantee simply because it's an activity that most people need.
Aachen 5y ago
...in regular chats. It's always been there in encrypted chats. Or is that not what the editorialized title refers to?
johnisgood 5y ago
> prevents screenshots and limits the ability to save media I fail to see how this actually prevents what it is supposed to prevent. You can still take a screenshot on desktop, or you can take a photo with another phone of your phone with the "DRM'd" content. They just got rid of the "Save" button and probably revoked the permission for taking screenshots. Is the client open source? If it is, you can just modify it then.
sschueller 5y ago
So since the client is open I can just compile a version that does allow me to Screenshot....
- throwamon 5y ago
  Which means the next logical step for Telegram is to make it closed source. You know, to protect its users' privacy.
can16358p 5y ago
So, "Privacy by obscurity"? Who thought that was a good idea? And how do they plan to restrict screenshots on iOS anyway? This is wrong on so many levels. If someone has access to a material on their own device, Telegeam can only make it inconvenient (but not impossible) to save/forward content, and since it's not real privacy, this only makes people to move away from Telegram to, say, Discord or alternatives, just as me and many others around did. Good move Telegram. This is how you ruin your otherwise-great platform.
- ushakov 5y ago
  > This is how you ruin your otherwise-great platform They already ruined it with ads
  - mimsee 5y ago
    Not a telegram user so I'm interested in how are the ads displayed? Like banner ads?
    - ushakov 5y ago
      Like chat messages https://promote.telegram.org https://promote.telegram.org
      - pizza234 5y ago
        > Sponsored messages on Telegram are displayed in large public one-to-many channels with 1000+ subscribers and are limited to 160 characters. Sponsored Messages are based solely on the topic of the public channels in which they are shown. It's a stretch to define Telegram as "ruined by ads"; this policy seems a reasonable compromise to monetize the product. The "famous competitor"'s way of monetizing is considerably more harmful, IMO.
        JohnWhigham 5y ago
        Lol, have people learned nothing watching software in the past decade? It always starts with the innocuous "oh don't worry, this is very limited and only a select group of people will be exposed to it!" line
endisneigh 5y ago
This trend to prevent others from saving content is stupid. Are people not going to read the content? It’s already “saved” and of course doesn’t stop people from using another phone to screenshot or simply typing up the contents ** Oh and this is yet another kick in the face to people with accessibility issues. ** As an aside, once AR is mainstream I expect that apps will only display encrypted text and some pair of smart glasses will be able to be configured to decrypt and display the play text all on the client (glasses) such that such issues are removed.
- edpichler 5y ago
  > This trend to prevent others from saving content is stupid. Are people not going to read the content? It’s already “saved” and of course doesn’t stop people from using another phone to screenshot or simply typing up the contents Building walls in physical world is also very stupid. It does not prevent people of using ladders hehe. Sorry about the joke. They want to create more friction so users can avoid people from 'easily' taking screenshots.
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    Though I see where you’re going with this the situation is fundamentally different. With messaging inherently you are trying to share with others. If you’re sharing why stop saving?
    - charcircuit 5y ago
      You may want to share an image with a group, but not to the whole world.
    - qeternity 5y ago
      So that they can’t reshare? This is almost always why DRM is used. Just because I want to share some content with you doesn’t mean I want you to be able to share it with someone else.
      - 5y ago
nahqz 5y ago
The problem here is not that Telegram disallows you from taking screenshots but that the OS, which should be on the side of the user, allows apps to disallow you from taking screenshots.
- leadingthenet 5y ago
  The OS probably doesn’t disallow any such thing, but several apps have found workarounds such as briefly setting the screen dark when it detects a screenshot, or various other forms of trickery. The result is that the screenshot still gets taken (they have no way of disabling that), but the photo is unusable.
  - nahqz 5y ago
    Also, the OS shouldn't tell the foreground app when a screenshot is being taken.
    - leadingthenet 5y ago
      Agreed, but there’d probably be an uproar from the content providers, and neither Apple nor Google has an incentive to be on the users side on this one :/
lapinot 5y ago
I wonder how this fares with android rooting, ios jailbreaking and generic desktop reverse engineering. Surely i can capture the screen video buffer in some way or another. And most probably someone dedicated enough would find the encryption scheme and key from the binaries to extract source media. Back in the days there were apps in cydia to get a hold of all the snaps you received since they were just lying unencrypted inside a private sandbox.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  I had a rooted android and still found it hard to get around it. The only way was with the xposed framework thing and you have to install a module that disables the secure flag thing. It wasn't compatible with my device so I couldn't see any way to do it.
- amelius 5y ago
  It might not stop everyone, but it could stop most people. Hell, I even stopped trying to use developer tools to extract facebook videos because they made it more difficult, and stopped using youtube-DL because Google is now throttling it. Main reason is that it's not worth the trouble anymore.
  - faeyanpiraat 5y ago
    Last I did FB video downloading like a year ago I had to write a script that converts and stitches video fragments together. It was still doable, but quite inconvenient. Simpler to just record screen with OBS. I lost a favourite video of mine from youtube, fortunately someone reupled it, so I quickly ripped it with OBS, as the youtube downloaders had trouble downloading the audio part.
  - zimpenfish 5y ago
    > stopped using youtube-DL because Google is now throttling it Had the same problem. Switched to yt-dlp. Now I do not have the problem.
mimsee 5y ago
This reminds me of old websites blocking right clicking on a webpage since that's how you viewed the source code, yet there's always a way to get the source. Same in this case, there's always a way to capture the "protected" content. Edit: granted, not only old websites do this. Instagram lays a full width/height transparent div atop the picture to prevent right-click copying of the image.
- eloeffler 5y ago
  Haha yes. I think I first saw this on social media websites, so it's a very close comparison. This introduced me to developer tools and the funny 3d view of html layers that Firefox had.
- DocTomoe 5y ago
  Some legislations have pretty rubbery rules about "circumventing effective DRM" to tack extra charges onto you if you find a way to save content the content creator does not want saved. I would argue that a DRM that can be circumvented is no longer "effective", but lawyers and judges might think differently about that.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  Except the platforms are getting better at it. Android has an API which allows apps to completely block the screenshot functionality. For the average android user, there is no way to get around this. Computers are getting locked down more and more to the point where these kinds of restrictions actually start working.
  - ddalex 5y ago
    > these kinds of restrictions actually start working. This - it didn't use to be true because most computer users were literate enough to bypass simple restrictions, and if a platform was restricted, others were available. With the latest changes in Windows, Android, and demographics, now a vast majority of users cannot easily bypass restrictions; the war on general computing has been won. Yes, a small number of highly skilled people can easily dump binary data through hacked devices, but in the grand scheme of economics, that doesn't matter.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
staff009 5y ago
And today I had to update before I was able to use Telegram. Stupid policy.
deleted 5y ago
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gopkarthik 5y ago
"Telegram Introduces DRM" Just want to point out that it's not actually DRM. Just Telegram giving users the option to prevent message recipients from downloading content.
- fsflover 5y ago
  How is it different from DRM?
  - Scharkenberg 5y ago
    It doesn't prevent the user from accessing it "the wrong way", it just makes it inconvenient to save an external copy.
    - fsflover 5y ago
      Exactly as with DRM.
      - Scharkenberg 5y ago
        Only in the most liberal sense of the phrase "DRM" (which IMO would be a useless definition as many platforms/apps have analogous intentional and unintentional barriers, but they're not called "DRM"), but not DRM as we know it. While the decision is on the sender's side, a crucial distinction is that the sender enjoys the same power as the recipient in the conversation - very similar to information sharing between friends IRL. Calling it "DRM" is just pedantic.
        fsflover 5y ago
        > as many platforms/apps have analogous intentional and unintentional barriers Now, that I'm thinking about it, it seems that the new trend of hiding the files on the disk looks indeed like a light version of DRM preventing users from doing whatever they want with their data.
  - AlfeG 5y ago
ur-whale 5y ago
So you'll just need a second phone to take a picture of the first? Why is this even a feature?
- blitzar 5y ago
  The lock on your door just means someone has to break a window to get in. By your rationale you dont bother closing let alone locking your front door.
petercooper 5y ago
It's more a bathroom door lock than DRM. It's not meant to be unbeatable - it's to prevent accidental embarrassment, and most likely to be used by small groups of willing participants (as in 'group chats' or the 'secret santa' example, perhaps)?
- bhelkey 5y ago
  >it's to prevent accidental embarrassment I am not sure I understand where you are coming from. Are you suggesting that people accidentally take screenshots and share them?
  - petercooper 5y ago
    It's not uncommon for unwritten, but implicitly accepted, social conventions to be broken in the moment. You might take a screenshot of a private group chat "just to show my wife and I'll definitely delete it later" but then forget and it leaks.. etc. etc. Having some guard rails on that sort of situation might help/remind some people.
londons_explore 5y ago
There is more of a social issue here... If Person A sends a message to Person B, who should get to decide when that message is deleted? Telegram seems to have decided that either Person A or Person B can delete the message, without the permission or notification of the other. I personally would prefer it to be the message is only deleted with the permission of Person A and Person B. Ie. "Bob has deleted his copy of this chat, and requests you do the same. Delete Chat?"
- liminalsunset 5y ago
  Of course, the other consequence of being able to delete unilaterally is that message history is no longer a "redundant backup" - one person's mistake can delete everything. Furthermore, chat transcripts can change silently, which may have various consequences. Telegram deleted messages are not shown as placeholders, but just disappear. On the other hand however, unilateral delete does help the use case where people want to minimize the chance that the information is accidentally leaked or exposed - the "store less info" strategy
- Gigachad 5y ago
  In my ideal world. You would get one hour to delete the message. I think it is genuinely useful to be able to "undo" a send and redact stuff accidentally sent to the wrong person as this is so trivial to mess up. But after you leave it for an hour, it becomes archived history for the other person. This is actually how telegram used to work from memory before they let you delete both sides whenever you want.
omglolwtezz 5y ago
Not rooting = not owning. Fuck policies, fuck dmca, fuck google
mcraiha 5y ago
I like the idea of "Log In via Call" since there have been some issues with SMS delays.
yur3i__ 5y ago
I personally am happy about this feature, the main application for me will be to prevent the leaking of private information from smaller groups, obviously if someone was so determined they could easily get around it but for small groups of average users, removing the immediate option is good enough
liminalsunset 5y ago
Just tested this. In a group with this enabled, indeed, the iOS app results in either a black, transparent, or otherwise missing screenshot of the area of the screen displaying the media. In the few minutes I played with it, I wasn't able to bypass it. However, the chat is viewable in Telegram Web (K). Web K even offers to download the picture, which actually downloads the file. Additionally, Telegram Desktop for Mac similarly allows screenshots as usual and isn't affected. In the past I have seen some other apps implement screenshot prevention on iOS usinf something that "cloaks" the screen when the button combination is detected, and when the OS is about to background the app. This is the method Fido My Account (mobile carrier in Canada) uses (current version allows screenshots, but blocks the info from the app switcher). The method Telegram is using appears to be rather seamless, as it does not show the screen going black or anything when the screenshot is taken. Stack Overflow seems to discuss two solutions, one using DRM video, and another using some password field hackery. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18680028/prevent-screen-capture-in-an-ios-app https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18680028/prevent-screen-... This is the most likely case, as the behaviour is similar to what happens when you take a screenshot of DRM netflix; it appears it is drawn by the hardware and not in the OS framebuffer, and thus shows up as a black box. Of course this is not really security, but Telegram, despite being open source on the client, does have in the ToS that apps have to implement the "secure" features of secret chats properly, or risk being blocked. Recently they have been sending info out to bot developers that says apps that don't implement the ads in channels will be blocked as well, but I'm not sure if they will really enforce this. "We ask that you make sure that these sponsored messages are supported and properly displayed in your app by January 1, 2022. Unfortunately, Telegram cannot financially sustain apps that support Telegram Channels but do not display official sponsored messages – such apps will have to be disconnected."
- bottled_poe 5y ago
  > Just tested this. In a group with this enabled, indeed, the iOS app results in either a black, transparent, or otherwise missing screenshot of the area of the screen displaying the media. In the few minutes I played with it, I wasn't able to bypass it. What about screen recording?
Scharkenberg 5y ago
The title is editorialized/sensationalized. Original title: "Protected Content, Delete by Date, Device Management and More"
- wffurr 5y ago
  Yeah OP or mods please update the flamebait title.
somebodythere 5y ago
Imagine future, with Neuralink DRM. You go to tell your friend the summary of the movie you just saw, but thankfully the implant was able to disable your vocal cords just in time to protect the intellectual property of the copy right holder.
- diegoperini 5y ago
  > was able to disable your vocal cords just in time Or make you forget instantly!
  - josefx 5y ago
    Your limited time license to Disneys "The Lion King" has just expired please assume a stable position while the licensing system purges your long term memory of any audio, visual or emotional response associated with it or pay $10 for the limited time chance of upgrading your memories to the latest Lion King remake with a monthly subscription fee of only $5.99^1 . ^1 Actual viewing of the movie not included, use of IP during social events requires a premium license, disparaging comments are subject to filtering and may result in license termination, Disney is not responsible for any long term damage to your brain, ... .
    - 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
      wow. i can totally see this happening. It's not even funny anymore
    - ducaale 5y ago
      This reminds me of Tom Scott's "Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers" video [1] [1] https://youtu.be/IFe9wiDfb0E https://youtu.be/IFe9wiDfb0E
      - kuschku 5y ago
        Also see the other video Tom Scott made on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JlxuQ7tPgQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JlxuQ7tPgQ
cblconfederate 5y ago
Why is this called DRM?
- discardedrefuse 5y ago
  It's not called DRM. OP used disingenuous title.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
guerrilla 5y ago
The Internet and computers just keep getting more and more annoying. Is this really what people want?
sparkling 5y ago
They are not preventing anything, they are just making it harder.
chrismorgan 5y ago
The tooltips on the images and videos are excellent. Now I want a comparison between iOS’s text recognition and a pharmacist. And it made me think of how 93% of paint splatters are valid Perl programs (https://www.mcmillen.dev/sigbovik/2019.pdf https://www.mcmillen.dev/sigbovik/2019.pdf, PDF, 7MB).
- JorgeGT 5y ago
  There are witty alt texts in all figures in Telegram's blog posts. I would really like to know the ratio of (time spent writing the text) / (time spent coming up with the alt texts)...
dathinab 5y ago
I think this trend of preventing people from copying is worry some as: - people might have a legal right to make copies - it's opens up a lot of potential for abuse, as it's harder to safe proof of abuse. - it gives people a false sense of security (e.g. when sexting) Couldn't they instead e.g. display low resulution images for screenshots or similar? That should be good enough for artists in my experience. (I mean there are artists which live draw the art on e.g. twitch they then sell, it works as the image quality you can easily extract is just not "good enough" for most potential buyers, and if we idk. throw AI sharpening tools at it then we could also throw tools at it which circumvent telegrams protections).
- dathinab 5y ago
  Oh, they also added support for deleting messages you send. If we compare it to classical post that is like sneaking into someones else house and stealing the message you send. I can understand why they do it. But it, especially compared with the DRM change, makes abuse SOOO much easier.
  - elcomet 5y ago
    Deleting messages was alreday supported in telegram for years. They just added the option to partially delete a whole conversation (whereas you could delete only the full conversation, or messages one by one).
    - dathinab 5y ago
      yes, but that makes a very big difference for the usability for cyber mobbing, extortion and similar.
      - handoflixue 5y ago
        How so? You could already delete the whole conversation to avoid leaving traces, or individual messages if you want to create a misleading log. What specific tactics does the new method open up?
bennyp101 5y ago
I don't use telegram, but I know it can be added as a bridge in Matrix - so if someone has that setup, surely this is pointless? Would the image not just be saved on the Matrix server? In fact with any sort of bot?
marcodiego 5y ago
Ok. Since this is open source using an open protocol, what is the healthy client or fork?
tinus_hn 5y ago
Are the client and the protocol no longer open?
dejj 5y ago
Let me just fork the client and remove the anti-feature… oh wait.
GranPC 5y ago
So much for not editorializing titles.
1cvmask 5y ago
This reminded me of the video on DRM called C.R.A.P.(Content Restriction Annulment Protection) by David Berlind of ZDNET: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ww65z8HuIJ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ww65z8HuIJ8
discardedrefuse 5y ago
I expected more from HN. If anyone bothered to read the article (which, btw, was posted with a disingenuous title...shame on you OP), you would see that Protected Content is only available in Groups and Channels, and is not on by default. It seems a lot of people don't realize that Telegram is used for more than chatting with your contacts. Telegram Groups and Channels serve as a content delivery system, with access often restricted behind some kind of pay system like Patreon or Telegram's own Payments API (think OnlyFans and private Discords). This is a boon to content creators as it protects their payed Telegram content from being easily shared into other Telegram Channels. Telegram quietly transcended beyond chat app and into the social media arena a while ago. It's about time HN caught up.
- nine_k 5y ago
  While this should work against unsophisticated users, the "analog hole" cannot be really plugged: the user has to see or hear the protected content. At that moment, the content may be grabbed (in a bit-perfect way, with some luck). So, this can curb sharing but not really prevent it. Will it be a net positive? Let's see.
  - afiori 5y ago
    in general even if decent copies are easy drm can be effective: not in preventing copies but in making paying users feel they got their worth. I am generally of the opinion that piracy is a net positive, but I am ok with pirated content being slightly degraded, analog copies often meet this criteria
- Zambyte 5y ago
  > which, btw, was posted with a disingenuous title...shame on you OP How is it disingenuous? They introduced DRM. Call it "protected content" if you want,but that honestly seems more disingenuous than simply calling it "DRM". > This is a boon to content creators as it protects their payed Telegram content from being easily shared into other Telegram Channels. No it doesn't. DRM doesn't work. End of story. Telegram has a public API and a Free Software client. All someone has to do is fork the client and disable screenshot / screen recorder blocking. At best they can block "forwarding" so you can't actually see what user originally sent the message. Once you send someone content on Telegram, you have no technical capability to stop them from doing what they want with it.
emptysongglass 5y ago
dang, please change the title of this post! This is far and away editorializing (with a deeply negative connotation) the original announcement.
- detaro 5y ago
  if instead of adding yet another comment complaining about the title you instead emailed dang, it would actually improve the chance of it happening.
ocdtrekkie 5y ago
A lot of negativity here for this, but I see the benefits in some scenarios for privacy: We may want to share family pictures with more of our family, but not have those pictures piped out to social media/the public. Especially for less technical users, this provides a reasonably decent protection from that occurring.
tpoacher 5y ago
I hate "DRM" as much as the next person, but ... am I the only person that sees this as a great feature in the particular content it is implemented for? This isn't like classical DRM where the intent is to stop you from owning content you already purchased. This is effectively a way for group/page holders to ensure control over content that is not meant to be shared beyond that context. Yes I know that technically if you post a picture of your kids in the group someone could still take a physical screenshot from another phone, but the point is reasonable friction, not an insurmountable tech barrier.
stiltzkin 5y ago
This has a bad title.
yuuta 5y ago
This is misleading. The new privacy protection features in Telegram are not DRM at all. They are just to prevent users from forwarding information outside of private chats or saving them, not related to copyrights at all (which is what DRM is meant to protect). Also, DRM is not mentioned in the changelog.
diebeforei485 5y ago
You know, I think this is the right call. A lot of people have this instinct to screenshot and share things from private groups. Making people jump through hoops means only the most egregious stuff would still be shared.
politician 5y ago
> Restricted saving No one has two phones, or one phone and a camera. Of course, that’s not remotely true, so what have they accomplished? If someone receives messages that they want or need to save, e.g. for legal reasons, this feature isn’t going to stop them.
yuuta 5y ago
THIS IS COMPLETELY MISLEADING. Telegram just provides group administrators with an option of preventing bad members from secretly forwarding messages to other chats, or to save them locally. It has nothing to do with digital rights, nor DRM. It is a privacy feature, not a copyright feature.
stefandesu 5y ago
Am I the only one that's still waiting for them to implement synchronized end-to-end encrypted chats? Ideally using a well-known algorithm and enabled by default. (In my opinion, Telegram has by far the best apps of all messengers out there, but I will never be able to get certain friends to use it until that issue is resolved...)

224 points by yannoninator 5y ago

I wonder how do they handle DRM content in the open-source version of Telegram - Telegram Desktop (https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop). Also, Telegram Desktop is licensed under GPLv3, which is an anti-DRM license. Something doesn't add up here...

mimsee 5y ago
The editorialized title says DRM but I believe "protected content" in this context means restricting the sharing and screenshotting of content in the app via normal measures, not that they applied tons of cryptography like more a mainstream meaning of DRM would.
- fsflover 5y ago
  DRM does not mean "tons of cryptography" and never did. It means anything restricting users' freedom to do what they want with the data.
  - yuuta 5y ago
    No. DRM is meant to protect copyrights, but Telegram's intend was to protect private messages from being forwarded to the public, which has nothing to do with copyrights.
    - fsflover 5y ago
      DRM is an instrument, which can protect anything. If you apply it elsewhere, it does not stop being DRM.
- Croftengea 5y ago
  I see, thanks. So the title is totally misleading then.
Gigachad 5y ago
Telegram has a ToS which blocks any client which does not comply with the same restrictions as the app. They have used it in the past to block apps which do not send the "seen" status on messages.

Asmod4n 5y ago

Can apps on iOS disable screen recording or mirroring?

Gigachad 5y ago
They can block recordings or mirrors for DRM video. Telegram blocks screenshots of secret chats on android but on iOS it sends a message to the other side saying a screenshot was taken which makes me suspect it isn't possible to block screenshots.

up6w6 5y ago

A nice idea in the opposite direction I saw recently was watermarking images, why create a fake felling of privacy when you can create legal liability ? https://community.signalusers.org/t/watermark-photos-videos/18512/3 https://community.signalusers.org/t/watermark-photos-videos/...

anotherhue 5y ago

My favourite screenshot tool is the camera on another phone.

Gigachad 5y ago
Makes for really crap video copying though.
orangepanda 5y ago
Thats why I always carry around two phones. To, once every three years, take a photo of something I cant screenshot.
- indrora 5y ago
  adb on android completely bypasses that. But my personal favorite is that this is entirely, 100% client-side, and there's already a few handy ways to patch out the checks from the foss client.
paradaux 5y ago
And besides that, it's very easy to bypass those restrictions anyway. The most common would be to screen _record_ prior to opening, that usually isn't detected — or alternatively, for us rooted users just use a screenshot app which ignores those soft-blocks. In short, this limitation is rather pointless.
- theon144 5y ago
  >The most common would be to screen _record_ prior to opening, that usually isn't detected — or alternatively, for us rooted users just use a screenshot app which ignores those soft-blocks. According to other comments in this thread, this just freezes when switching apps, and fails. I'm not too surprised, given that the feature (at least on Android) is meant as a security measure (i.e. most of the banking and 2FA apps use it to some extent).

sylvain_kerkour 5y ago

While I'm not a fan of Telegram's security model, I have to say that their dedication to create an awesome product is admirable. EDIT: Just to be clear given the title, I'm not pro DRM, and we can be pro or against auto-removable content, but I just love how they implement features that their users are asking for and the quality of their apps.

kmarc 5y ago
I am amazed how high quality telegram's client apps are. Both on desktop (native), android, and even the web versions are feature full, native, blazing FAST. As I said once, telegram is not the best chat app I have to use, but the best... App altogether on my laptop/phone, I have to use :-) The UX is slicker and more comfortable to use than that of whatsapp (and miles ahead signal). With the latest update if I got it correctly, even E2E encrypted chats can be synced to all clients (? Needs to be verified) I guess you mean the security model of non-E2E chats. Although you can read into it that they can do MITM, the details reveal that the actual keys/messages are shared into datacenters in multiple countries so no government alone can retrieve plaintext from at-rest storage. To me (especially compared to anything Facebook products) is already much better than nothing. If it's an issue for you, opt in for E2E chats and enjoy! Sometimes I have to use whatsapp with some contacts and it feels like a huge step back after telegram, especially in UX.
- baxuz 5y ago
  One thing I can't stand is that it's the only messaging app out there without a presence monitor. As soon as I receive a message all of my clients will start pinging. It's the reason why I avoid it. I talk to someone on the desktop client, yet my phone, work laptop and tablet will ring on every message. I can't be assed to go and mute 3 other devices every time I decide to talk to someone.
  - hansel_der 5y ago
    > I talk to someone on the desktop client, yet my phone, work laptop and tablet will ring on every message. ime the desktop will pickup the message a few seconds before any of the mobile clients does and mark it as read, hence surpressing any notifications on the latter. ofc chat notifications don't make any sounds on my systems to begin with.

mimsee 5y ago

I wonder how they prevent a screenshot from happening on their desktop client or do I just not receive protected content on desktop.

underscore_ku 5y ago
or if you use another phone to take a picture
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  Pretty much. A sleezy guy at work would show off the nudes he got on his private phone from girls on Snapchat by taking pictures of the screen with his work phone. Life tip: never send nudes or any private information to anyone you don't completely trust, regardless of the privacy features the communication medium offers, as there's always an easy workaround.
  - xwolfi 5y ago
    Better tip: never send any information or opinion you wouldnt want the public, your parents, your colleagues and the police to associate your name to. I dont get the newish trend online to send BS you're ashamed of.
  - faeyanpiraat 5y ago
    How about you never take nudes in the first place? Data can leak in multitude of ways, earned trust can be broken, etc..
    - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
      >How about you never take nudes in the first place? That's obviously the safest option, but sending and receiving nudes is an activity many sexually active people find arousing. Not having sex is also the safest option to preventing pregnancies and STDs, but people still engage in it with protections that are not 100% guarantee simply because it's an activity that most people need.

Aachen 5y ago

...in regular chats. It's always been there in encrypted chats. Or is that not what the editorialized title refers to?

johnisgood 5y ago

> prevents screenshots and limits the ability to save media I fail to see how this actually prevents what it is supposed to prevent. You can still take a screenshot on desktop, or you can take a photo with another phone of your phone with the "DRM'd" content. They just got rid of the "Save" button and probably revoked the permission for taking screenshots. Is the client open source? If it is, you can just modify it then.

sschueller 5y ago

So since the client is open I can just compile a version that does allow me to Screenshot....

throwamon 5y ago
Which means the next logical step for Telegram is to make it closed source. You know, to protect its users' privacy.

can16358p 5y ago

So, "Privacy by obscurity"? Who thought that was a good idea? And how do they plan to restrict screenshots on iOS anyway? This is wrong on so many levels. If someone has access to a material on their own device, Telegeam can only make it inconvenient (but not impossible) to save/forward content, and since it's not real privacy, this only makes people to move away from Telegram to, say, Discord or alternatives, just as me and many others around did. Good move Telegram. This is how you ruin your otherwise-great platform.

ushakov 5y ago
> This is how you ruin your otherwise-great platform They already ruined it with ads
- mimsee 5y ago
  Not a telegram user so I'm interested in how are the ads displayed? Like banner ads?
  - ushakov 5y ago
    Like chat messages https://promote.telegram.org https://promote.telegram.org
    - pizza234 5y ago
      > Sponsored messages on Telegram are displayed in large public one-to-many channels with 1000+ subscribers and are limited to 160 characters. Sponsored Messages are based solely on the topic of the public channels in which they are shown. It's a stretch to define Telegram as "ruined by ads"; this policy seems a reasonable compromise to monetize the product. The "famous competitor"'s way of monetizing is considerably more harmful, IMO.
      - JohnWhigham 5y ago
        Lol, have people learned nothing watching software in the past decade? It always starts with the innocuous "oh don't worry, this is very limited and only a select group of people will be exposed to it!" line

endisneigh 5y ago

This trend to prevent others from saving content is stupid. Are people not going to read the content? It’s already “saved” and of course doesn’t stop people from using another phone to screenshot or simply typing up the contents ** Oh and this is yet another kick in the face to people with accessibility issues. ** As an aside, once AR is mainstream I expect that apps will only display encrypted text and some pair of smart glasses will be able to be configured to decrypt and display the play text all on the client (glasses) such that such issues are removed.

edpichler 5y ago
> This trend to prevent others from saving content is stupid. Are people not going to read the content? It’s already “saved” and of course doesn’t stop people from using another phone to screenshot or simply typing up the contents Building walls in physical world is also very stupid. It does not prevent people of using ladders hehe. Sorry about the joke. They want to create more friction so users can avoid people from 'easily' taking screenshots.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  Though I see where you’re going with this the situation is fundamentally different. With messaging inherently you are trying to share with others. If you’re sharing why stop saving?
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    You may want to share an image with a group, but not to the whole world.
  - qeternity 5y ago
    So that they can’t reshare? This is almost always why DRM is used. Just because I want to share some content with you doesn’t mean I want you to be able to share it with someone else.
    - 5y ago

nahqz 5y ago

The problem here is not that Telegram disallows you from taking screenshots but that the OS, which should be on the side of the user, allows apps to disallow you from taking screenshots.

leadingthenet 5y ago
The OS probably doesn’t disallow any such thing, but several apps have found workarounds such as briefly setting the screen dark when it detects a screenshot, or various other forms of trickery. The result is that the screenshot still gets taken (they have no way of disabling that), but the photo is unusable.
- nahqz 5y ago
  Also, the OS shouldn't tell the foreground app when a screenshot is being taken.
  - leadingthenet 5y ago
    Agreed, but there’d probably be an uproar from the content providers, and neither Apple nor Google has an incentive to be on the users side on this one :/

lapinot 5y ago

I wonder how this fares with android rooting, ios jailbreaking and generic desktop reverse engineering. Surely i can capture the screen video buffer in some way or another. And most probably someone dedicated enough would find the encryption scheme and key from the binaries to extract source media. Back in the days there were apps in cydia to get a hold of all the snaps you received since they were just lying unencrypted inside a private sandbox.

Gigachad 5y ago
I had a rooted android and still found it hard to get around it. The only way was with the xposed framework thing and you have to install a module that disables the secure flag thing. It wasn't compatible with my device so I couldn't see any way to do it.
amelius 5y ago
It might not stop everyone, but it could stop most people. Hell, I even stopped trying to use developer tools to extract facebook videos because they made it more difficult, and stopped using youtube-DL because Google is now throttling it. Main reason is that it's not worth the trouble anymore.
- faeyanpiraat 5y ago
  Last I did FB video downloading like a year ago I had to write a script that converts and stitches video fragments together. It was still doable, but quite inconvenient. Simpler to just record screen with OBS. I lost a favourite video of mine from youtube, fortunately someone reupled it, so I quickly ripped it with OBS, as the youtube downloaders had trouble downloading the audio part.
- zimpenfish 5y ago
  > stopped using youtube-DL because Google is now throttling it Had the same problem. Switched to yt-dlp. Now I do not have the problem.

mimsee 5y ago

This reminds me of old websites blocking right clicking on a webpage since that's how you viewed the source code, yet there's always a way to get the source. Same in this case, there's always a way to capture the "protected" content. Edit: granted, not only old websites do this. Instagram lays a full width/height transparent div atop the picture to prevent right-click copying of the image.

eloeffler 5y ago
Haha yes. I think I first saw this on social media websites, so it's a very close comparison. This introduced me to developer tools and the funny 3d view of html layers that Firefox had.
DocTomoe 5y ago
Some legislations have pretty rubbery rules about "circumventing effective DRM" to tack extra charges onto you if you find a way to save content the content creator does not want saved. I would argue that a DRM that can be circumvented is no longer "effective", but lawyers and judges might think differently about that.
Gigachad 5y ago
Except the platforms are getting better at it. Android has an API which allows apps to completely block the screenshot functionality. For the average android user, there is no way to get around this. Computers are getting locked down more and more to the point where these kinds of restrictions actually start working.
- ddalex 5y ago
  > these kinds of restrictions actually start working. This - it didn't use to be true because most computer users were literate enough to bypass simple restrictions, and if a platform was restricted, others were available. With the latest changes in Windows, Android, and demographics, now a vast majority of users cannot easily bypass restrictions; the war on general computing has been won. Yes, a small number of highly skilled people can easily dump binary data through hacked devices, but in the grand scheme of economics, that doesn't matter.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

staff009 5y ago

And today I had to update before I was able to use Telegram. Stupid policy.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

gopkarthik 5y ago

"Telegram Introduces DRM" Just want to point out that it's not actually DRM. Just Telegram giving users the option to prevent message recipients from downloading content.

fsflover 5y ago
How is it different from DRM?
- Scharkenberg 5y ago
  It doesn't prevent the user from accessing it "the wrong way", it just makes it inconvenient to save an external copy.
  - fsflover 5y ago
    Exactly as with DRM.
    - Scharkenberg 5y ago
      Only in the most liberal sense of the phrase "DRM" (which IMO would be a useless definition as many platforms/apps have analogous intentional and unintentional barriers, but they're not called "DRM"), but not DRM as we know it. While the decision is on the sender's side, a crucial distinction is that the sender enjoys the same power as the recipient in the conversation - very similar to information sharing between friends IRL. Calling it "DRM" is just pedantic.
      - fsflover 5y ago
        > as many platforms/apps have analogous intentional and unintentional barriers Now, that I'm thinking about it, it seems that the new trend of hiding the files on the disk looks indeed like a light version of DRM preventing users from doing whatever they want with their data.
- AlfeG 5y ago

ur-whale 5y ago

So you'll just need a second phone to take a picture of the first? Why is this even a feature?

blitzar 5y ago
The lock on your door just means someone has to break a window to get in. By your rationale you dont bother closing let alone locking your front door.

petercooper 5y ago

It's more a bathroom door lock than DRM. It's not meant to be unbeatable - it's to prevent accidental embarrassment, and most likely to be used by small groups of willing participants (as in 'group chats' or the 'secret santa' example, perhaps)?

bhelkey 5y ago
>it's to prevent accidental embarrassment I am not sure I understand where you are coming from. Are you suggesting that people accidentally take screenshots and share them?
- petercooper 5y ago
  It's not uncommon for unwritten, but implicitly accepted, social conventions to be broken in the moment. You might take a screenshot of a private group chat "just to show my wife and I'll definitely delete it later" but then forget and it leaks.. etc. etc. Having some guard rails on that sort of situation might help/remind some people.

londons_explore 5y ago

There is more of a social issue here... If Person A sends a message to Person B, who should get to decide when that message is deleted? Telegram seems to have decided that either Person A or Person B can delete the message, without the permission or notification of the other. I personally would prefer it to be the message is only deleted with the permission of Person A and Person B. Ie. "Bob has deleted his copy of this chat, and requests you do the same. Delete Chat?"

liminalsunset 5y ago
Of course, the other consequence of being able to delete unilaterally is that message history is no longer a "redundant backup" - one person's mistake can delete everything. Furthermore, chat transcripts can change silently, which may have various consequences. Telegram deleted messages are not shown as placeholders, but just disappear. On the other hand however, unilateral delete does help the use case where people want to minimize the chance that the information is accidentally leaked or exposed - the "store less info" strategy
Gigachad 5y ago
In my ideal world. You would get one hour to delete the message. I think it is genuinely useful to be able to "undo" a send and redact stuff accidentally sent to the wrong person as this is so trivial to mess up. But after you leave it for an hour, it becomes archived history for the other person. This is actually how telegram used to work from memory before they let you delete both sides whenever you want.

omglolwtezz 5y ago

Not rooting = not owning. Fuck policies, fuck dmca, fuck google

mcraiha 5y ago

I like the idea of "Log In via Call" since there have been some issues with SMS delays.

yur3i__ 5y ago

I personally am happy about this feature, the main application for me will be to prevent the leaking of private information from smaller groups, obviously if someone was so determined they could easily get around it but for small groups of average users, removing the immediate option is good enough

liminalsunset 5y ago

Just tested this. In a group with this enabled, indeed, the iOS app results in either a black, transparent, or otherwise missing screenshot of the area of the screen displaying the media. In the few minutes I played with it, I wasn't able to bypass it. However, the chat is viewable in Telegram Web (K). Web K even offers to download the picture, which actually downloads the file. Additionally, Telegram Desktop for Mac similarly allows screenshots as usual and isn't affected. In the past I have seen some other apps implement screenshot prevention on iOS usinf something that "cloaks" the screen when the button combination is detected, and when the OS is about to background the app. This is the method Fido My Account (mobile carrier in Canada) uses (current version allows screenshots, but blocks the info from the app switcher). The method Telegram is using appears to be rather seamless, as it does not show the screen going black or anything when the screenshot is taken. Stack Overflow seems to discuss two solutions, one using DRM video, and another using some password field hackery. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18680028/prevent-screen-capture-in-an-ios-app https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18680028/prevent-screen-... This is the most likely case, as the behaviour is similar to what happens when you take a screenshot of DRM netflix; it appears it is drawn by the hardware and not in the OS framebuffer, and thus shows up as a black box. Of course this is not really security, but Telegram, despite being open source on the client, does have in the ToS that apps have to implement the "secure" features of secret chats properly, or risk being blocked. Recently they have been sending info out to bot developers that says apps that don't implement the ads in channels will be blocked as well, but I'm not sure if they will really enforce this. "We ask that you make sure that these sponsored messages are supported and properly displayed in your app by January 1, 2022. Unfortunately, Telegram cannot financially sustain apps that support Telegram Channels but do not display official sponsored messages – such apps will have to be disconnected."

bottled_poe 5y ago
> Just tested this. In a group with this enabled, indeed, the iOS app results in either a black, transparent, or otherwise missing screenshot of the area of the screen displaying the media. In the few minutes I played with it, I wasn't able to bypass it. What about screen recording?

Scharkenberg 5y ago

The title is editorialized/sensationalized. Original title: "Protected Content, Delete by Date, Device Management and More"

wffurr 5y ago
Yeah OP or mods please update the flamebait title.

somebodythere 5y ago

Imagine future, with Neuralink DRM. You go to tell your friend the summary of the movie you just saw, but thankfully the implant was able to disable your vocal cords just in time to protect the intellectual property of the copy right holder.

diegoperini 5y ago
> was able to disable your vocal cords just in time Or make you forget instantly!
- josefx 5y ago
  Your limited time license to Disneys "The Lion King" has just expired please assume a stable position while the licensing system purges your long term memory of any audio, visual or emotional response associated with it or pay $10 for the limited time chance of upgrading your memories to the latest Lion King remake with a monthly subscription fee of only $5.99^1 . ^1 Actual viewing of the movie not included, use of IP during social events requires a premium license, disparaging comments are subject to filtering and may result in license termination, Disney is not responsible for any long term damage to your brain, ... .
  - 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
    wow. i can totally see this happening. It's not even funny anymore
  - ducaale 5y ago
    This reminds me of Tom Scott's "Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers" video [1] [1] https://youtu.be/IFe9wiDfb0E https://youtu.be/IFe9wiDfb0E
    - kuschku 5y ago
      Also see the other video Tom Scott made on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JlxuQ7tPgQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JlxuQ7tPgQ

cblconfederate 5y ago

Why is this called DRM?

discardedrefuse 5y ago
It's not called DRM. OP used disingenuous title.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

guerrilla 5y ago

The Internet and computers just keep getting more and more annoying. Is this really what people want?

sparkling 5y ago

They are not preventing anything, they are just making it harder.

chrismorgan 5y ago

The tooltips on the images and videos are excellent. Now I want a comparison between iOS’s text recognition and a pharmacist. And it made me think of how 93% of paint splatters are valid Perl programs (https://www.mcmillen.dev/sigbovik/2019.pdf https://www.mcmillen.dev/sigbovik/2019.pdf, PDF, 7MB).

JorgeGT 5y ago
There are witty alt texts in all figures in Telegram's blog posts. I would really like to know the ratio of (time spent writing the text) / (time spent coming up with the alt texts)...

dathinab 5y ago

I think this trend of preventing people from copying is worry some as: - people might have a legal right to make copies - it's opens up a lot of potential for abuse, as it's harder to safe proof of abuse. - it gives people a false sense of security (e.g. when sexting) Couldn't they instead e.g. display low resulution images for screenshots or similar? That should be good enough for artists in my experience. (I mean there are artists which live draw the art on e.g. twitch they then sell, it works as the image quality you can easily extract is just not "good enough" for most potential buyers, and if we idk. throw AI sharpening tools at it then we could also throw tools at it which circumvent telegrams protections).

dathinab 5y ago
Oh, they also added support for deleting messages you send. If we compare it to classical post that is like sneaking into someones else house and stealing the message you send. I can understand why they do it. But it, especially compared with the DRM change, makes abuse SOOO much easier.
- elcomet 5y ago
  Deleting messages was alreday supported in telegram for years. They just added the option to partially delete a whole conversation (whereas you could delete only the full conversation, or messages one by one).
  - dathinab 5y ago
    yes, but that makes a very big difference for the usability for cyber mobbing, extortion and similar.
    - handoflixue 5y ago
      How so? You could already delete the whole conversation to avoid leaving traces, or individual messages if you want to create a misleading log. What specific tactics does the new method open up?

bennyp101 5y ago

I don't use telegram, but I know it can be added as a bridge in Matrix - so if someone has that setup, surely this is pointless? Would the image not just be saved on the Matrix server? In fact with any sort of bot?

marcodiego 5y ago

Ok. Since this is open source using an open protocol, what is the healthy client or fork?

tinus_hn 5y ago

Are the client and the protocol no longer open?

dejj 5y ago

Let me just fork the client and remove the anti-feature… oh wait.

GranPC 5y ago

So much for not editorializing titles.

1cvmask 5y ago

This reminded me of the video on DRM called C.R.A.P.(Content Restriction Annulment Protection) by David Berlind of ZDNET: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ww65z8HuIJ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ww65z8HuIJ8

discardedrefuse 5y ago

I expected more from HN. If anyone bothered to read the article (which, btw, was posted with a disingenuous title...shame on you OP), you would see that Protected Content is only available in Groups and Channels, and is not on by default. It seems a lot of people don't realize that Telegram is used for more than chatting with your contacts. Telegram Groups and Channels serve as a content delivery system, with access often restricted behind some kind of pay system like Patreon or Telegram's own Payments API (think OnlyFans and private Discords). This is a boon to content creators as it protects their payed Telegram content from being easily shared into other Telegram Channels. Telegram quietly transcended beyond chat app and into the social media arena a while ago. It's about time HN caught up.

nine_k 5y ago
While this should work against unsophisticated users, the "analog hole" cannot be really plugged: the user has to see or hear the protected content. At that moment, the content may be grabbed (in a bit-perfect way, with some luck). So, this can curb sharing but not really prevent it. Will it be a net positive? Let's see.
- afiori 5y ago
  in general even if decent copies are easy drm can be effective: not in preventing copies but in making paying users feel they got their worth. I am generally of the opinion that piracy is a net positive, but I am ok with pirated content being slightly degraded, analog copies often meet this criteria
Zambyte 5y ago
> which, btw, was posted with a disingenuous title...shame on you OP How is it disingenuous? They introduced DRM. Call it "protected content" if you want,but that honestly seems more disingenuous than simply calling it "DRM". > This is a boon to content creators as it protects their payed Telegram content from being easily shared into other Telegram Channels. No it doesn't. DRM doesn't work. End of story. Telegram has a public API and a Free Software client. All someone has to do is fork the client and disable screenshot / screen recorder blocking. At best they can block "forwarding" so you can't actually see what user originally sent the message. Once you send someone content on Telegram, you have no technical capability to stop them from doing what they want with it.

emptysongglass 5y ago

dang, please change the title of this post! This is far and away editorializing (with a deeply negative connotation) the original announcement.

detaro 5y ago
if instead of adding yet another comment complaining about the title you instead emailed dang, it would actually improve the chance of it happening.

ocdtrekkie 5y ago

A lot of negativity here for this, but I see the benefits in some scenarios for privacy: We may want to share family pictures with more of our family, but not have those pictures piped out to social media/the public. Especially for less technical users, this provides a reasonably decent protection from that occurring.

tpoacher 5y ago

I hate "DRM" as much as the next person, but ... am I the only person that sees this as a great feature in the particular content it is implemented for? This isn't like classical DRM where the intent is to stop you from owning content you already purchased. This is effectively a way for group/page holders to ensure control over content that is not meant to be shared beyond that context. Yes I know that technically if you post a picture of your kids in the group someone could still take a physical screenshot from another phone, but the point is reasonable friction, not an insurmountable tech barrier.

stiltzkin 5y ago

This has a bad title.

yuuta 5y ago

This is misleading. The new privacy protection features in Telegram are not DRM at all. They are just to prevent users from forwarding information outside of private chats or saving them, not related to copyrights at all (which is what DRM is meant to protect). Also, DRM is not mentioned in the changelog.

diebeforei485 5y ago

You know, I think this is the right call. A lot of people have this instinct to screenshot and share things from private groups. Making people jump through hoops means only the most egregious stuff would still be shared.

politician 5y ago

> Restricted saving No one has two phones, or one phone and a camera. Of course, that’s not remotely true, so what have they accomplished? If someone receives messages that they want or need to save, e.g. for legal reasons, this feature isn’t going to stop them.

yuuta 5y ago

THIS IS COMPLETELY MISLEADING. Telegram just provides group administrators with an option of preventing bad members from secretly forwarding messages to other chats, or to save them locally. It has nothing to do with digital rights, nor DRM. It is a privacy feature, not a copyright feature.

stefandesu 5y ago

Am I the only one that's still waiting for them to implement synchronized end-to-end encrypted chats? Ideally using a well-known algorithm and enabled by default. (In my opinion, Telegram has by far the best apps of all messengers out there, but I will never be able to get certain friends to use it until that issue is resolved...)