5 ms·

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 fro

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.
    - jevoten 5y ago
      > This is almost always why DRM is used. No, DRM is used to extend control to media players and manufacturers via licensing. The rest are just excuses.
      - qeternity 5y ago
        Given that most DRM these days is implemented in the apps that license the content, I'm not sure this is remotely true. Maybe in the disc era there was truth to this, but even then I'm not sure that it was a greater concern than lost revenues due to piracy.
    - endisneigh 5y ago
      Why do you believe that once you share a message you should continue to have control over it? That’s not what sharing means. Not to mention it won’t work. If they read it nothing is stopping them from simply telling someone else, drm or not. This technology will not prevent anyone from simply handing over their phone - and your messages - to someone else.
      - p49k 5y ago
        This just goes back to what the original person said about "Building walls in physical world is also very stupid hehe" It's entirely reasonable to create a system designed to allow people to share things once, and indicate to others that they don't want it spread any further. It's reasonable to design software which attempts to honor such requests by introducing friction, making it 95% effective despite knowing that 5% of people will be able/willing to work around it. Most people are "path of least resistance" and are too lazy to work around something like this, which is exactly the point. Pretty much every person using such a system is aware that the recipient could just take a picture of the phone with a camera. Perfect is the enemy of the good.
        endisneigh 5y ago
        I don’t think it’s reasonable at all. The wall example isn’t the analogous situation. Is it reasonable that someone give you a gift and you cannot sell it or give it to anyone else?
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    > With messaging inherently you are trying to share with others. If you’re sharing why stop saving? Some others, not all. Otherwise, tell me the point of all the effort that has gone into products like Signal, protocols like TLS etc.
    - endisneigh 5y ago
      There’s really no connection (no pun intended) between this and TLS. With signal the same criticism applies.
      - skinkestek 5y ago
        The connection is simple in my eyes: > With messaging inherently you are trying to share with others. If you’re sharing why stop saving? When sending packages to the Internet you are inherently trying to share with others. If you're sending, why stop receiving?
        endisneigh 5y ago
        > When sending packages to the Internet you are inherently trying to share with others. If you're sending, why stop receiving? Except this isn’t the analogous situation. TLS is more like three people in a room, one of which cannot be removed, and you want to say something to one person without the other person hearing. Ultimately the person who the message is intended for can do whatever they want with the message. If all chat communication was public in a single thread I’d agree with you.
      - zo1 5y ago
        If by TLS you mean the whole encryption and signing of http content etc, then I would argue it's the same. The purpose is to have an immutable and untamperable pipeline of data straight from the "server" to your "eyeballs". The cat definitely came out of the bag with tech enabling so much that was difficult in the real-world, and now they're busy scrambling to put it back, and I would argue, using "privacy" and "safety" as a Trojan horse. Edit. Side note seeing as I don't think I 100% addressed your point. If we allow data to be viewed, and relayed with the potential for altering, then they no longer have 100% control over the content being changed/recorded. So viewing and sharing (with potential edits) is akin to tampering with the pipeline. Sharing is not at issue, it's you being able to intercept and have control over the data on your device. Now I'll go scurry off and take my tin-foil hat off for the day.
  - tut-urut-utut 5y ago
    I think the idea is that messaging follows typical human offline communication patterns. If I tell you something in person, you may remember it for some time, but it's not recorded forever. It exists only in your and my mind. I may misremember or forget it, you may too, and there's no way to know the original message. And there's no way to share that communication. Showing a screenshot of what someone said, is entirely different from saying someone what you heard from someone else. That's why we have contracts because "I said, you said" was never meant to be permanent or enforceable. This is a feature, not a bug. If human conversations were to be permanent, they would be much less said or written. Messengers, especially private messengers, are a loophole, in a sense that they keep forever what people still unconsciously think of as ephemeral communication, and it's good that Telegram is trying to address it; though I'm not confident how effective it may be.
    - endisneigh 5y ago
      > This is a feature, not a bug. If human conversations were to be permanent, they would be much less said or written. Messengers, especially private messengers, are a loophole, in a sense that they keep forever what people still unconsciously think of as ephemeral communication, and it's good that Telegram is trying to address it; though I'm not confident how effective it may be. If this premise were true encrypted unscreenshotable apps would be the norm for communication. They are not. Not even close.
      - dotancohen 5y ago
        Not yet.
    - kuschku 5y ago
      A friend sent an expiring 5-second photo to me in 2018, and to prove a point, I redrew that 1:1 a few weeks ago and showed it to her, because I think expiring messages are bullshit. In the real world, I won’t forget the messages you tell me either, the memories are forever. Why should a digital message expire when memories don’t? I can still remember what my first day of school was, why shouldn’t I be able to see the messages I got sent last week?
  - edpichler 5y ago
    For the same reason that sometimes you are talking and you don't want people recording a video of it.
nicoburns 5y ago
I'm not sure it is. I think it's the same principle that things like GDPR are based on. It's not that you want to prevent the entity from having access to that data at all. It's that you don't want that data sitting around forever which becomes a security liability where the attacker is not the recipient of the message.
globular-toast 5y ago
These kind of features give more power to technically minded people, like the people who implement them. I see similar things with Outlook users being able to "recall" emails or being able to delete messages on Teams etc. There are certain people, usually less technical people, who actually think those features delete data that has already been sent. It is an abuse of power to give less technical people a false sense of security.
polycaster 5y ago
No, it's not stupid because it works pretty well. But preventing you from saving content is not the actual intention behind DRM. It's just the easiest way to hinder you from re-distribution.
- iSnow 5y ago
  >because it works pretty well. How do they enforce it on the web client?
  - johnisgood 5y ago
    They cannot.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  Something working pretty well (which this doesn’t since it’s not respected in all telegram clients anyway) doesn’t mean it’s not stupid. And again, this doesn’t prevent redistribution.
  - polycaster 5y ago
    Well, as I said, it hinders you from redistribution – it doesn't need to shut it down completely to fullfill its goal. Also I assume it's working in a the way intended. It may be a stupid thing to do from your or my perspective because it doesn't work towards our benefit – but the rational behind it is sane. That's what I meant with „not stupid”. I just realize I sound like this sickening utilitarian tone you find in HN discussions so often. Sorry for going that way. Basically I'm with you, it's stupid when you take a step back.
  - Cederfjard 5y ago
    The lock on your front door doesn’t prevent me from entering if I really want to, but it’s a deterrent and a clear signal of your intent, that I’m not to enter without your permission.
    - 5y ago
snvzz 5y ago
New tools for harassment, then erasing the evidence. Or, more power for technical people to hold over those less able.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
cblconfederate 5y ago
The trend is to stop "the masses" who only use their phones. It's an interesting trend, wonder what will be the side effects
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Yeah. When PCs were the dominant platform, we were the ones in control. Now we're the ones being controlled.
  - AndrewUnmuted 5y ago
    I'm not so sure about that. Perhaps during the hobbyist era of PCs, this was the case. But, I distinctly remember a world during the "dominance" of the PC that forced me to work with proprietary software just to be able to type out a document. There was really only one choice of computer to buy and one kind of OS to run on it. It was really hard to use a different OS on your computer, and it was risky too, since PC manufacturers would often not honor warranties if non-proprietary OS/software was used on the computer.
    - cblconfederate 5y ago
      PCs have unique advantages, they enable things like Napster, Torrents, in-premise storage, and all kinds of autonomous servers that could never work with mobile computers and the cloud.
    - matheusmoreira 5y ago
      Even in those days we had more power than we do today. You had to use proprietary software but that software still worked for you and did your bidding. The computer ran the software you told it to run without complaint and it didn't matter that some "rights holders" were losing money or whatever. At some point all of this changed... Software now works for the corporations and only allow us to do what they designed for us. If they don't like something, you just won't be able to do it anymore. You can't even program the computers anymore, that's now a privilege increasingly reserved only for "approved", "licensed" individuals. Typing out a document? I wouldn't be surprised if the office suites of the future started automatically checking your work against some "rights holders" corpus that you're not supposed to copy and then preventing saving or printing until you fix it.
BeFlatXIII 5y ago
The fact that iOS plays nicely with apps that ask to prevent screenshotting is a foundational bug. Does such an ability exist on stock Android? Either way, it’s best practice to root & jailbreak.
- makiftasova 5y ago
  Yes, it also exists on Android too[1][2] [1] https://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/WindowManager.LayoutParams.html#FLAG_SECURE https://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/WindowM... [2] https://stackoverflow.com/a/30618030 https://stackoverflow.com/a/30618030
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  Apps like Tor and private tabs in Firefox ask Android to not allow screenshots when they are open.
  - noisem4ker 5y ago
    Thankfully Firefox can be configured not to do that. Brave, on the other hand, imposes it.
  - afiori 5y ago
    on Android there isn't a screenshot permission, there is an allow screen capture permission. for example private Firefox tabs do not show a preview in the system activity preview, it is a general "do not let the content of the screen escape the control of this app"
- clawoo 5y ago
  > The fact that iOS plays nicely with apps that ask to prevent screenshotting is a foundational bug. In fact, iOS does not provide any tools to prevent screenshotting, on the contrary, this feature requires some nasty hacks to pull off. One of them is actually even patented and it requires rendering whatever you want to protect (text, image, etc) into a one frame DRM protected video and rendering that instead.
miki123211 5y ago
A fun way to easily circumvent this: 1. Hey Siri, turn Voice Over on. 2. Tap the message once, making Voice Over speak its contents. 3. Tap the screen four times with three fingers. When Voice Over is on, this gesture copies the last spoken phrase to the clipboard. 4. Hey Siri, Turn Voice Over off. There's no way to block this without breaking accessibility. You could split a message up into multiple items, which partially solves your problem, but the more items you have, the more annoyed actual Voice Over users become. A similar (although more involved) attack could be used to extract Kindle books. There's no way for Amazon to prevent this, one of the primary screen readers for Windows uses GPL without a CLA, so a proprietary accessibility API is out of the question.
- no_time 5y ago
  >There's no way for Amazon to prevent this Correct, however they can randomize certain words in your copy to watermark it and trace it back to you if it ever finds its way to the public internet.
  - miki123211 5y ago
    Rumor has it that Polish ebook publishers do exactly that. In Poland, there's no single E Ink reader company, so there's no DRM standard that would be compatible with all devices that you might want to read your books on. As a consequence, offering unprotected epub files is standard practice here, but all kinds of watermarks, from divs that are 1px by 1px, to subtle modifications of your book's cover, are pretty common. You can beat this kind of watermark pretty easily by getting three copies of the book and comparing them with diff. You need 3, not 2, so that you know which variant is the original when you notice a difference.
    - no_time 5y ago
      Interesting. I knew you could defeat the protection with multiple copies but the number of copies needed to do it could be increased massively. Let's say they want to catch a serial leaker. They could do massive "watermark cohorts". Like several thousand units sold big. It would surely take several leaks to narrow down the suspect but combined with time information it would pose a significant risk to whoever wants to leak books. Also, >In Poland, there's no single E Ink reader company lol imagining a tech sector without a monopoly or an obviously harmful duopoly is wild.
centrinoblue 5y ago
Web3 will fix it
- trutannus 5y ago
  Just so long as nobody screen shots the NFT.

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.
  - jevoten 5y ago
    > This is almost always why DRM is used. No, DRM is used to extend control to media players and manufacturers via licensing. The rest are just excuses.
    - qeternity 5y ago
      Given that most DRM these days is implemented in the apps that license the content, I'm not sure this is remotely true. Maybe in the disc era there was truth to this, but even then I'm not sure that it was a greater concern than lost revenues due to piracy.
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    Why do you believe that once you share a message you should continue to have control over it? That’s not what sharing means. Not to mention it won’t work. If they read it nothing is stopping them from simply telling someone else, drm or not. This technology will not prevent anyone from simply handing over their phone - and your messages - to someone else.
    - p49k 5y ago
      This just goes back to what the original person said about "Building walls in physical world is also very stupid hehe" It's entirely reasonable to create a system designed to allow people to share things once, and indicate to others that they don't want it spread any further. It's reasonable to design software which attempts to honor such requests by introducing friction, making it 95% effective despite knowing that 5% of people will be able/willing to work around it. Most people are "path of least resistance" and are too lazy to work around something like this, which is exactly the point. Pretty much every person using such a system is aware that the recipient could just take a picture of the phone with a camera. Perfect is the enemy of the good.
      - endisneigh 5y ago
        I don’t think it’s reasonable at all. The wall example isn’t the analogous situation. Is it reasonable that someone give you a gift and you cannot sell it or give it to anyone else?
- skinkestek 5y ago
  > With messaging inherently you are trying to share with others. If you’re sharing why stop saving? Some others, not all. Otherwise, tell me the point of all the effort that has gone into products like Signal, protocols like TLS etc.
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    There’s really no connection (no pun intended) between this and TLS. With signal the same criticism applies.
    - skinkestek 5y ago
      The connection is simple in my eyes: > With messaging inherently you are trying to share with others. If you’re sharing why stop saving? When sending packages to the Internet you are inherently trying to share with others. If you're sending, why stop receiving?
      - endisneigh 5y ago
        > When sending packages to the Internet you are inherently trying to share with others. If you're sending, why stop receiving? Except this isn’t the analogous situation. TLS is more like three people in a room, one of which cannot be removed, and you want to say something to one person without the other person hearing. Ultimately the person who the message is intended for can do whatever they want with the message. If all chat communication was public in a single thread I’d agree with you.
    - zo1 5y ago
      If by TLS you mean the whole encryption and signing of http content etc, then I would argue it's the same. The purpose is to have an immutable and untamperable pipeline of data straight from the "server" to your "eyeballs". The cat definitely came out of the bag with tech enabling so much that was difficult in the real-world, and now they're busy scrambling to put it back, and I would argue, using "privacy" and "safety" as a Trojan horse. Edit. Side note seeing as I don't think I 100% addressed your point. If we allow data to be viewed, and relayed with the potential for altering, then they no longer have 100% control over the content being changed/recorded. So viewing and sharing (with potential edits) is akin to tampering with the pipeline. Sharing is not at issue, it's you being able to intercept and have control over the data on your device. Now I'll go scurry off and take my tin-foil hat off for the day.
- tut-urut-utut 5y ago
  I think the idea is that messaging follows typical human offline communication patterns. If I tell you something in person, you may remember it for some time, but it's not recorded forever. It exists only in your and my mind. I may misremember or forget it, you may too, and there's no way to know the original message. And there's no way to share that communication. Showing a screenshot of what someone said, is entirely different from saying someone what you heard from someone else. That's why we have contracts because "I said, you said" was never meant to be permanent or enforceable. This is a feature, not a bug. If human conversations were to be permanent, they would be much less said or written. Messengers, especially private messengers, are a loophole, in a sense that they keep forever what people still unconsciously think of as ephemeral communication, and it's good that Telegram is trying to address it; though I'm not confident how effective it may be.
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    > This is a feature, not a bug. If human conversations were to be permanent, they would be much less said or written. Messengers, especially private messengers, are a loophole, in a sense that they keep forever what people still unconsciously think of as ephemeral communication, and it's good that Telegram is trying to address it; though I'm not confident how effective it may be. If this premise were true encrypted unscreenshotable apps would be the norm for communication. They are not. Not even close.
    - dotancohen 5y ago
      Not yet.
  - kuschku 5y ago
    A friend sent an expiring 5-second photo to me in 2018, and to prove a point, I redrew that 1:1 a few weeks ago and showed it to her, because I think expiring messages are bullshit. In the real world, I won’t forget the messages you tell me either, the memories are forever. Why should a digital message expire when memories don’t? I can still remember what my first day of school was, why shouldn’t I be able to see the messages I got sent last week?
- edpichler 5y ago
  For the same reason that sometimes you are talking and you don't want people recording a video of it.

nicoburns 5y ago

I'm not sure it is. I think it's the same principle that things like GDPR are based on. It's not that you want to prevent the entity from having access to that data at all. It's that you don't want that data sitting around forever which becomes a security liability where the attacker is not the recipient of the message.

globular-toast 5y ago

These kind of features give more power to technically minded people, like the people who implement them. I see similar things with Outlook users being able to "recall" emails or being able to delete messages on Teams etc. There are certain people, usually less technical people, who actually think those features delete data that has already been sent. It is an abuse of power to give less technical people a false sense of security.

polycaster 5y ago

No, it's not stupid because it works pretty well. But preventing you from saving content is not the actual intention behind DRM. It's just the easiest way to hinder you from re-distribution.

iSnow 5y ago
>because it works pretty well. How do they enforce it on the web client?
- johnisgood 5y ago
  They cannot.
endisneigh 5y ago
Something working pretty well (which this doesn’t since it’s not respected in all telegram clients anyway) doesn’t mean it’s not stupid. And again, this doesn’t prevent redistribution.
- polycaster 5y ago
  Well, as I said, it hinders you from redistribution – it doesn't need to shut it down completely to fullfill its goal. Also I assume it's working in a the way intended. It may be a stupid thing to do from your or my perspective because it doesn't work towards our benefit – but the rational behind it is sane. That's what I meant with „not stupid”. I just realize I sound like this sickening utilitarian tone you find in HN discussions so often. Sorry for going that way. Basically I'm with you, it's stupid when you take a step back.
- Cederfjard 5y ago
  The lock on your front door doesn’t prevent me from entering if I really want to, but it’s a deterrent and a clear signal of your intent, that I’m not to enter without your permission.
  - 5y ago

snvzz 5y ago

New tools for harassment, then erasing the evidence. Or, more power for technical people to hold over those less able.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

cblconfederate 5y ago

The trend is to stop "the masses" who only use their phones. It's an interesting trend, wonder what will be the side effects

matheusmoreira 5y ago
Yeah. When PCs were the dominant platform, we were the ones in control. Now we're the ones being controlled.
- AndrewUnmuted 5y ago
  I'm not so sure about that. Perhaps during the hobbyist era of PCs, this was the case. But, I distinctly remember a world during the "dominance" of the PC that forced me to work with proprietary software just to be able to type out a document. There was really only one choice of computer to buy and one kind of OS to run on it. It was really hard to use a different OS on your computer, and it was risky too, since PC manufacturers would often not honor warranties if non-proprietary OS/software was used on the computer.
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    PCs have unique advantages, they enable things like Napster, Torrents, in-premise storage, and all kinds of autonomous servers that could never work with mobile computers and the cloud.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    Even in those days we had more power than we do today. You had to use proprietary software but that software still worked for you and did your bidding. The computer ran the software you told it to run without complaint and it didn't matter that some "rights holders" were losing money or whatever. At some point all of this changed... Software now works for the corporations and only allow us to do what they designed for us. If they don't like something, you just won't be able to do it anymore. You can't even program the computers anymore, that's now a privilege increasingly reserved only for "approved", "licensed" individuals. Typing out a document? I wouldn't be surprised if the office suites of the future started automatically checking your work against some "rights holders" corpus that you're not supposed to copy and then preventing saving or printing until you fix it.

BeFlatXIII 5y ago

The fact that iOS plays nicely with apps that ask to prevent screenshotting is a foundational bug. Does such an ability exist on stock Android? Either way, it’s best practice to root & jailbreak.

makiftasova 5y ago
Yes, it also exists on Android too[1][2] [1] https://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/WindowManager.LayoutParams.html#FLAG_SECURE https://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/WindowM... [2] https://stackoverflow.com/a/30618030 https://stackoverflow.com/a/30618030
paulryanrogers 5y ago
Apps like Tor and private tabs in Firefox ask Android to not allow screenshots when they are open.
- noisem4ker 5y ago
  Thankfully Firefox can be configured not to do that. Brave, on the other hand, imposes it.
- afiori 5y ago
  on Android there isn't a screenshot permission, there is an allow screen capture permission. for example private Firefox tabs do not show a preview in the system activity preview, it is a general "do not let the content of the screen escape the control of this app"
clawoo 5y ago
> The fact that iOS plays nicely with apps that ask to prevent screenshotting is a foundational bug. In fact, iOS does not provide any tools to prevent screenshotting, on the contrary, this feature requires some nasty hacks to pull off. One of them is actually even patented and it requires rendering whatever you want to protect (text, image, etc) into a one frame DRM protected video and rendering that instead.

miki123211 5y ago

A fun way to easily circumvent this: 1. Hey Siri, turn Voice Over on. 2. Tap the message once, making Voice Over speak its contents. 3. Tap the screen four times with three fingers. When Voice Over is on, this gesture copies the last spoken phrase to the clipboard. 4. Hey Siri, Turn Voice Over off. There's no way to block this without breaking accessibility. You could split a message up into multiple items, which partially solves your problem, but the more items you have, the more annoyed actual Voice Over users become. A similar (although more involved) attack could be used to extract Kindle books. There's no way for Amazon to prevent this, one of the primary screen readers for Windows uses GPL without a CLA, so a proprietary accessibility API is out of the question.

no_time 5y ago
>There's no way for Amazon to prevent this Correct, however they can randomize certain words in your copy to watermark it and trace it back to you if it ever finds its way to the public internet.
- miki123211 5y ago
  Rumor has it that Polish ebook publishers do exactly that. In Poland, there's no single E Ink reader company, so there's no DRM standard that would be compatible with all devices that you might want to read your books on. As a consequence, offering unprotected epub files is standard practice here, but all kinds of watermarks, from divs that are 1px by 1px, to subtle modifications of your book's cover, are pretty common. You can beat this kind of watermark pretty easily by getting three copies of the book and comparing them with diff. You need 3, not 2, so that you know which variant is the original when you notice a difference.
  - no_time 5y ago
    Interesting. I knew you could defeat the protection with multiple copies but the number of copies needed to do it could be increased massively. Let's say they want to catch a serial leaker. They could do massive "watermark cohorts". Like several thousand units sold big. It would surely take several leaks to narrow down the suspect but combined with time information it would pose a significant risk to whoever wants to leak books. Also, >In Poland, there's no single E Ink reader company lol imagining a tech sector without a monopoly or an obviously harmful duopoly is wild.

centrinoblue 5y ago

Web3 will fix it

trutannus 5y ago
Just so long as nobody screen shots the NFT.