Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

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I love all the comments imagining complex technical workarounds while skipping right over the obvious workaround of using a smartphone camera to take a picture of the screen (which was mentioned near the top of the article that everyone read, of course). Modern camera phones are wide angle enough that it’s not hard to grab a shot of the monitor out of frame.

> These kinds of measures only stop the good guys from doing their jobs. The bad guys put way too much effort into espionage for this to work.

This is for preventing casual screenshots and reminding average office workers that meeting content is sensitive. It’s not an iron-clad tool for defeating dedicated espionage involving hidden pinhole cameras.

There have been similar arguments for ages about how if something isn’t iron-clad perfect protection then it’s pointless, but in the real world making something more difficult actually makes people think twice and stops most of the people who would casually do it.

See for example Snapchat’s screenshot notifications. It’s well known that there’s an elaborate way to circumvent it. However the fact that it takes a lot of work and there’s a risk of getting caught trying really hard to deceive the other party is enough to make most people not want to risk it.

Exactly right. The great firewall of China is another example - of it blocks 60% of people from outside content it is probably "good enough for government work".

Thank you for this. I'm honestly baffled about the quality of other hackers' comments on this topic. Many of them take the feature as a personal attack where it simply is an additional layer of protection against accidentally leaking confidential information. Then making statements that this prevents people from working, where they did not understand that taking screenshots from meetings where this is enabled is not working, but violating work guidelines. When the presenter enables this, they want people to not take screenshots.

This whole comment sections is honestly ridiculous.

I bet it streams the video like a protected HDMI movie... so the video stream isn't part of the WDDM's Team's Window - but placed on top of it.

Interestingly that can be overcome by moving the video just a little between two screens, which reverts it back to a WDDM surface. =D

Or TWO monitors, with "Duplicate" selected, and a camera recording the second monitor under the desk.

> Modern camera phones are wide angle enough that it’s not hard to grab a shot of the monitor out of frame.

Pedantic correction:

'grab a shot of the monitor out of frame of the webcam of the person wanting to take screenshots of the meeting'.

First time I read it I was somehow imagining breaking of laws of physics lmao.

I suppose the biggest irony of this is, most of the shops that might want to enable this are already so sloppy that they half expect folks to screenshot teams presentations for notes later.

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