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Comment by pan69 | Hacker News Reader

About ten years ago I made a converter application that converted a image (jpg/png/gif) to an HTML table. The result at the time was great. Unfortunately the generated HTML was quite verbose so it took a lot of bandwidth to download. I guess a similar conversion program has been used here and it seems that CSS these days can take off quite a bit of fat of that generated code.

PS: Forgot to mention. The reason I wrote the converter at the time was as an experiment to avoid people from right-click and saving images.

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While some websites stop people from right clicking and saving (such as flickr) you can get around that by just screen printing. So why would you invest time in trying to stop one route of copying when there is a second unstoppable?

Clients.

Would it not be easier to explain to them that what they're asking for is impossible to deliver?

Probably not.

Sometimes, yes. Frequently it's very difficult to explain to a client that the way you[1] interpret the words they[2] are using is rather different than what may be in their head.

That is, from the technical perspective it may be 'impossible' to achieve perfect DRM. But from another perspective, if the added cost of circumventing that DRM is large enough that most[3] people won't bother, it /may/ be a success. See: Steam.

In short, the language/terminology barrier between people in different fields results in a lot of client/developer miscommunication, frustration, and, frankly, poor results.

A rather complete discussion on this (w/r/t a client wanting 100% uptime): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3056414

[1] The technical party in the relationship

[2] The party paying someone you to handle the technical side

[3] Again, we run into a problem with precise definitions using 'most' - do we mean 99.9%? Do we mean enough that the cost of implementing the DRM is larger than the $ saved. Though the lost sales due to /having/ DRM is an entirely different discussion.

>So why would you invest time in trying to stop one route of copying when there is a second unstoppable?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management

Good question. I'd like to know also.

On another note, let's be honest. A lot of people today don't know print screen. I'd say the majority. But 10 years ago? That image to table conversion must have been a bank vault.

See the thing is that often at least for me when I want to save a picture it's because I like it and want to use it as a background, the trouble with printscreen is that it only captures the picture at your screen resolution not the photo's resolution so you end up with a grainy unusable image... if someone goes through the trouble of making a picture uncopyable I give up immediately, it's just not worth the hassle.

Uhm, doesn't this spur your ambition?

With something like firebug installed, it takes about 20s to find "div#main-photo-container>noscript" holding the image on flickr in all it's glory.

Or select the picture and copy it to the desktop.

If you want to stop people from right-clicking and saving, why not just cut the image into 16 smaller images? That would also make right-clicking and saving more difficult than screen-printing, so there's no point doing anything more advanced. For even more entertainment value, you could make the pieces irregular shaped, with transparency :-)

Yeah good old times. I did exactly the same thing although not that long ago. It turned amazingly well (although yes no matter what you do the size will be higher than the original image) but the quality was identical. You can use a very small font with the ASCII square character which basically gives you pixel perfect images.

Screenshot?

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