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The fact that it ensures to not take a snapshot of DRM content but also explains that it doesn't hide PASSWORDS in snapshots is INSANE to me! God forbid it tak
by notaustinpowers 2y ago
The fact that it ensures to not take a snapshot of DRM content but also explains that it doesn't hide PASSWORDS in snapshots is INSANE to me!
God forbid it takes a screenshot of Bridgerton but my bank account password, that's fair game!
- hyperman1 2y agoSo you can have some privacy by playing DRMed content in the background?
- notaustinpowers 2y agoI believe it operates on a site-by-site basis since there's settings to tell it to ignore screenshots of certain webpages (at least they're doing that). So one window is blacked out but the other is visible. Just gotta remember to set up all the sites you want blocked which I expect to be made as complicated as possible and a little nag window on the bottom left every time I visit a blocked site, i.e., "Recall isn't able to take a snapshot of this webpage" with a big "FIX NOW" button.
- out-of-ideas 2y agoits the sites that produce some javascript bloatwarae that tells the browser to display a blank page when a screenshot/screencapture software is used. in my opionion that is giving the javascript ecosystem way too much power, though that is life with DRMs ... pretty sad times when folks pay providers and allow the providers to disable a screenshot lol
- heavyset_go 2y agoIt'll just block out the DRMed content and not the rest of the screen.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y agoI'm sure you agreed to give them a non-exclusive, world-wide, royalty-free, un-fuck-with-able license (or some such) to any data saved to your hard drive when you accepted the terms of use for Windows. /s But now I'm curious if there's case law around the question of passwords being copyrighted. That might be a decent avenue of protection but the aforementioned agreement probably supersedes it.
- notaustinpowers 2y agoFrom a quick search it doesn't look like they are, and there's no explicit law on who "owns" a password. Consensus right now is to operate under the assumption that the maker of the software is the owner of the password, not the user.
- refulgentis 2y agoIt's a built-in "feature" of the renderer/DRM they get "for free" I used to work adjacent to screen capture at BigCo and advocated for enabling _some_ way to allow simple $STREAMING_VIDEO_PROVIDER screenshots. Turned out even with full source access and desire to prototype, you couldn't. Air quotes mean "I hate this too", just posting to explain why the feature team would find ex. passwords capital H-hard versus DRM'd content.
- wnevets 2y ago> It's a built-in "feature" of the renderer/DRM they get "for free" This even happens with the iPhone, try taking a screenshot of netflix
- AlexandrB 2y agoSailing the high seas continues to have a better user experience than paying for content. I suspect most media DRM causes lots of annoyance for legitimate customers while barely impeding pirates.
- jasonfarnon 2y agoThis is true, I don't even really know what this fuss is about or even what this "DRM" thing is except it's something the .nfo file says has been removed
- dist-epoch 2y agoA bit like Linux, god forbid you were to read the syslog file, but your browser profile files are fair game for any running script/process.
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- nicolas_t 2y agoThat’s why I actually welcomed the change in mac os that requires prompting to read certain directories like Documents Historical unix permissions are not really aligned with desktop use of a single user
- jwells89 2y agoI wish it were possible to enable a stricter mode that uses something like filesystem overlays to help contain known-unruly software like Adobe Creative Suite. Under this mode, any attempted filesystem reads outside of ~/Library/Application Support/<appname> that aren’t explicitly approved by the user would simply return nothing, and eliminating all traces of the software would be as simple as deleting its respective FS layer/sparseimage/etc.
- wormius 2y agoDRM on password forms, the next big thing
- pojntfx 2y agoAlready a thing on iOS/Android - banking apps have been blocking screenshots for a long time
- Croftengea 2y agoYou can't block a screenshot on iOS, can you?
- Mindwipe 2y agoYou can't block one being taken but you can make it so the content isn't captured by the screenshot, and make the screenshot detectable, both of which are kernel level services provided by the OS or indeed even the hardware.
- wmf 2y agoTechnically, how would Windows know what's a password and what isn't? Now I'm wondering if people have outrage over OBS and Zoom capturing passwords.
- orhmeh09 2y agoLocal AI and/or OCR?
- notaustinpowers 2y agoIf it's using AI I'm sure they can train the model to identify the word "Password" in close proximity to a textbox. OBS and Zoom are screen recorders, not utilizing AI. That's an oranges to apples comparison.
- dylan604 2y agoSince when was Zoom not using AI to create transcripts and all of other crap they've added to "stay relevant"?
- notaustinpowers 2y agoIt may just be an audio model then, not a visual model.
- nerdponx 2y agoUsually people don't type in passwords in a way that's visible Zoom calls. Most password fields obscure their content.
- walterbell 2y ago> Most password field obscure their content iOS device unlock password field _magnifies_ content as visible plaintext.
- prmoustache 2y agoBut they keep the sound on while typing it on their keyboards.
- runjake 2y agoIt makes one wonder who the real Windows customer is.
- amlib 2y agoAll proprietary systems have been protecting the system from the user for a good while now. It's what they mean when they say "the system is more secure". It's not for your security, it's for securing their interests and their partners interests.
- api 2y agoMicrosoft’s primary customers have been businesses and government for decades. This includes PC OEMs. You usually have little to no relationship with them. A company grows toward its customers like a plant grows toward light.
- cyanydeez 2y agoThe Business unit. This stuff will be sold as WorkFromHomeWare.
- PhasmaFelis 2y agoHaha, wow, I hadn't realized they'd finally moved ahead with blocking screenshots on my own computer. Anyone know what level that's happening at and how hard it is to circumvent? The article says that the DRM block is "reassuring on the surface, but it's still far too vague for anyone to actually have any faith in it." I disagree--it's not reassuring on any level whatsoever.
- madeofpalk 2y agoOperating systems have been doing this for... 10-15 years?
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- jasonfarnon 2y ago10-15 years ago was windows 7
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- derefr 2y agoWhen you play a video, you're (usually) sending the encoded video to the GPU for hardware-accelerated decode. The resulting decoded frames then live purely on the GPU. However, rather than each video frame being decoded into a distinct VRAM texture with its own manipulable GPU handle, with hardware-accelerated decode, you just tell the GPU to allocate a single buffer — a mutable canvas, or "draw context" — and then tell it that, as the chunks of your encoded video stream are being played, decoded, and rasterized into frames by the GPU, the GPU should be writing each successive frame it's generating into this buffer. In this setup, the only thing you can get a GPU handle for (besides the encoded video stream) is that buffer. That buffer is special, being the target of the GPU's own asynchronous hardware-accelerated rendering process; so that buffer is referred to as a "hardware-accelerated draw context." (These days GPUs have enough VRAM that you really could get away with dumping each frame out to its own immutable VRAM texture buffer; but back in the early '90s when hardware-accelerated video decode was first invented, reusing a single buffer [or maybe a pair of them] for decoding was a practical necessity. Hardware-accelerated draw contexts have been core to how GPUs work since there were GPUs.) In general, the GPU doesn't allow you to read directly from the VRAM backing a hardware-accelerated draw context (because doing so could block the GPU from writing to it, and also because doing so wouldn't get you a coherent single frame's state out.) The GPU locks that VRAM up and considers it to be "its to use" for as long as the draw context is the target of a hardware-accelerated pipeline. So the GPU will ignore any attempt to use any existing handle you had to the VRAM backing the draw context; only the handle to the wrapping draw-context ADT will work, and that handle doesn't have "read from" as part of its command-set. So how does such a draw context even end up on the screen, then? When a desktop window compositor sets up the GPU to display your windows, it takes various draw-contexts — some of which may be hardware-accelerated — and lays them out in 3D space, with a (usually orthographic) projection. The GPU itself is then told to take care of the rest (the final toplevel "get this scene out and onto a screen" part) internally. There's never a point under normal GPU rendering, where your entire screen-contents are rendered out to a single (externally-addressable) VRAM texture. What happens when you take a screenshot, then? Usually, the compositor is pinged to ask it to render that screenshot; and it does so by allocating a screen-sized VRAM buffer, and then taking each GPU handle in turn and telling the GPU to copy the VRAM underlying that buffer, into the target buffer. But oh no — HW-accel draw-contexts don't have exposed VRAM handles! It used to be (until... Windows Vista, I think?) that hardware-accelerated draw contexts in general (like videos being played using hardware decoding, or like 3D games) just weren't ever captured in screenshots, DRM or no. This was purely a question of GPU performance: a GPU with an architecture that could snapshot a frame of an HW-accel context, wouldn't perform as well as a GPU with an architecture that couldn't. When this ability was later added, it was done so by adding a feature to the GPU: a command was added on HW-accel draw contexts, that would prompt them to stop whatever rendering is happening into the buffer for a moment, at a coherent point; to snapshot that coherent state of the internal VRAM state, copying it over into a non-HW-accelerated buffer; and to then get the accelerated rendering going again. The compositor therefore now had the ability to ask the such draw-contexts for such snapshots, to then be re-copied out into a WIP screenshot. But I emphasize "ask" here — you really are just asking the GPU to do it. The GPU can always just refuse! (OSes had to support GPUs refusing to do it, because many GPUs were old enough that they couldn't manage to do it, even given updated drivers that allowed software to ask the GPU the question; even given newer firmware pushed to the GPU by said drivers.) So DRMed video was implemented simply by telling the GPU that there are some HW-accel draw-contexts that are special, and so the GPU should refuse any requests to snapshot them. (And also, telling the GPU that the encoded video itself is also special — so the GPU should taint any draw-contexts it decodes that video onto with the same specialness.) I believe that DRMed video streams get decrypted on the CPU before being sent to the GPU. So while you can't capture a screenshot of the decoded frame, you could in theory capture the (encoded) video in RAM. Sadly, that RAM is protected by the OS and the decoding happens using Intel SGX or something. So it's impossible to "get in under" the OS to grab the encoded video, either. (Unless you compile a custom kernel... but that's why these extensions have an in-kernel component that doesn't ship with the Windows or macOS DDKs, and why Linux doesn't even get DRMed-video support except in proprietary spins.)
- madeofpalk 2y agoI don't think it's that insane. Print screen already doesn't work with DRMed content, so why would this be any different. On the other hand, how can you guarantee that it won't capture passwords? Even the passwords you enter into Firefox in a web page after clicking the "show password" button?
- tedajax 2y agoYeah but a screenshot is an explicit action by the user where they have the opportunity to curate what is captured. That is not the case when it's just going on in the background.
- madeofpalk 2y agoWhat about Window's built in "Capture last 5 minutes" screen recording, as a part of their gaming features? Or the same feature that's just enabled from the nvidia drivers?
- klabb3 2y agoAlso an explicit action. Look, most people don’t know anything about computers. If it says use recommended settings, they will go for it. Even an explanatory first-install screen with “consent” is just jumbo jumbo to regular folks. It’s not comparable to installing custom software or enabling a feature from the settings. It’s incredibly irresponsible. Even so, such invasive features need to renew consent and/or periodically alert users. The risks with someone else enabling them to spy are too high.
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- diob 2y agoReminds me of those serious warnings at the beginning of movies, like pirating is the worst sin imaginable in the world. They'll find you! Oh but crimes affecting the common folk? That's too hard, sorry.
- orangepanda 2y agoWith the added irony, that the warnings are shown only to people who paid to see the movie
- Antip0dean 2y agoI remember when DVDs started asking your language... so they could threaten you in that language. What a (profit-driven) world...
- tomkarho 2y agoYou wouldn't recall a car
- II2II 2y ago> The fact that it ensures to not take a snapshot of DRM content but also explains that it doesn't hide PASSWORDS in snapshots is INSANE to me! The article gives the impression that passwords will only be captured if they are displayed. So there are only three scenarios where I can envision this happening: the end user opens a document that contains their passwords, the end user opens their password manager and chooses to display their passwords, or the user chooses to reveal the password field. Case 1 is bad practice, plain and simple. (Though I will acknowledge that people do it.) Case 2 and case 3 can probably be fixed, provided the software doesn't define custom controls, since there is already the option to protect DRM content. Microsoft should have provided this functionality and given developers time to adopt it (not doing so is a bad move on their part). On the whole I think this is just trying to rush things to market, rather than the product of any form of malice. That being said, I am glad that I don't use Windows outside of the work environment. Something also tells me that my employer is also likely to disable this feature. (They have more to loose from a data breach of confidential data than they have to gain from tracking employee computer usage.)
- Const-me 2y ago> there is already the option to protect DRM content I never needed to use that option. Still, based on what I read in the documentation about Windows graphics programming, I believe that option is only applicable to video, and is prohibitively complicated to use for a password manager. Read that article https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/medfound/pmp-media-session https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/medfound/pmp... you can’t even play DRM video from your own process, it requires a special OS component called Protected Media Path, and that process can’t run arbitrary code only components signed by Microsoft which means you can't generate DRM-ed video frames from something else with your own code.
- tracker1 2y agoThe problem with the last example (show password in manager) are sites and applications that don't let you copy/paste a password. I've literally fought against those kinds of requirements as weakening security, not strengthening it.
- NotSammyHagar 2y agoTrust me, bro. Windows keeps adding these anti-consumer features, ads, and other things. And people keep using it??? I used to work there and I can't believe they keep doing this stuff.
- cyanydeez 2y agoWindows is a business and school launchpad. If universities started putting Linux on everything, you might see some change, but from what I can tell, these features are for business concerns which are increasingly invasive.
- labrador 2y agoSolution? : make your desktop background a screenshot from a NetFlix movie
- digdugdirk 2y agoMalicious compliance is the best compliance.
- phreack 2y agoSooner or later only people who wear shirts with big brand logos and constantly sing music from the Beatles will be the only ones not permanently recorded by the system. Hell, add a photo of a topless woman somewhere in the mix and bam, instant privacy.
- troad 2y agoI've always been kind of interested in that idea. I'm not sure what to call it - a sort of civil resistance by selective non-palatability. Preventing commercial AI from being trained on your art by making sure there's some throbbing hard cocks in there somewhere, for example, or releasing source code that is explicitly NOT open source licensed, for the benefit of people who don't care about the license, and to the detriment of entities that do.
- mkl 2y agoThat won't do anything. Desktop images are not protected by DRM, and it's (at least mostly) not visible anyway if you're using the computer.
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- labrador 2y agoI have a wide monitor. I could have a Netflix movie playing in a side browser window when I want privacy. It'll be fun to mess with it.
- Hikikomori 2y agoNah your password shows as asterisks.
- boston_clone 2y agoNo, it doesn't - "Note that Recall does not perform content moderation. It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers. That data may be in snapshots that are stored on your device, especially when sites do not follow standard internet protocols like cloaking password entry." https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy-and-control-over-your-recall-experience-d404f672-7647-41e5-886c-a3c59680af15 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy-and-cont...
- Hikikomori 2y agohunter2
- ls612 2y agoYou will own nothing and you will be happy… or else
- raxxorraxor 2y agoAside from the very questionable direction Windows is going, with features nobody ever asked for (nope, businesses did not do so either), I believe this is heavily illegal in my country without a very active and clear consent of the user. I wouldn't want such a feature in a 1000 years and I cannot see the supposed "casual user" that would profit from this.
- N19PEDL2 2y agoAre you from Germany?
- rldjbpin 2y agoto be fair there is a mechanism for preventing drm content to be captured down to hardware level. it is much more trickier to implement a way to recognize sensitive info on the screen visually. but the incentives are of course not aligned in consumer's favour.