Reddit doesn't want you stealing their new warning

[jinpa]

Reddit has a new admonition to report "useless comments" . They've even disabled the ability to select it in order to copy and paste it. You can neither select it, nor right-click and copy the image. I tried in both Chromium and Firefox. Never seen that before.
They haven't yet figured out how to prevent someone from taking a screen capture, though.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/w77ihy/mercedes_becomes_first_sports_outfit_to_invest_in/

[hungrier]

@jinpa I'm logged in and I don't see that anywhere

[jinpa]

@hungrier Maybe it only shows up in Classic view? That's even stranger.

[hungrier]

@jinpa That's what it is. Apparently the whole thing is defined as a CSS rule:

.commentarea > .usertext::before {
	display: inline-block;
	content: "please report spam, hostility, and useless comments/submissions";
	background-color: #FFB5B5;
	color: black;
	height: 20px;
	padding: 2px 10px;
	line-height: 20px;
	border-radius: 3px;
	border: 1px solid #C70000;
	margin: 5px 0;
}

[CodeJunkie]

please report spam, hostility, and useless comments/submissions

[Gribnit]

@CodeJunkie

[hungrier]

@CodeJunkie Did you just funge their warning? Careful, they might sue

[loopback0]

@Gribnit

[Unperverted Vixen]

@hungrier said in Reddit doesn't want you stealing their new warning:

Apparently the whole thing is defined as a CSS rule:

So it's not Reddit that did that, but rather the moderators of that specific subreddit.

EDIT: And I bet the can't-copy is an accident due to the hacky CSS nature? That's normally meant for stuff like icons that you wouldn't want copied, I thought, so the browser is being "helpful".

[BernieTheBernie]

Go to

The Far Side Comic Strip by Gary Larson - Official Website | TheFarSide.com

Visit the official online home of The Far Side comic strip by Gary Larson for your daily dose of Gary’s classic cartoons.

and try copying one of the current cartoons there...

[jinpa]

@BernieTheBernie said in Reddit doesn't want you stealing their new warning:

Go to

The Far Side Comic Strip by Gary Larson - Official Website | TheFarSide.com

Visit the official online home of The Far Side comic strip by Gary Larson for your daily dose of Gary’s classic cartoons.

and try copying one of the current cartoons there...

Same with any of the comics at https://www.gocomics.com/. This I can understand; these are their assets, so it's not a WTF to encourage people to post links to the page rather than copying their cartoon itself. This is one of my principle uses for Pale Moon - they still have the option to view the media URL's in the page that all browsers had at one point, which is useful for copying comics to other forums.
(I do include the URL as attribution.)

But in any case, @hungrier and @Unperverted-Vixen already showed that it probably wasn't intentional.

[topspin]

@BernieTheBernie said in Reddit doesn't want you stealing their new warning:

Go to

The Far Side Comic Strip by Gary Larson - Official Website | TheFarSide.com

Visit the official online home of The Far Side comic strip by Gary Larson for your daily dose of Gary’s classic cartoons.

and try copying one of the current cartoons there...

Huh, interesting.
I get a 403 for the URL and Firefox's media info page also doesn't work.
Still leaves the old analog hole, but I thought it'd be easier.

[HardwareGeek]

@topspin said in Reddit doesn't want you stealing their new warning:

I get a 403 for the URL

I'd guess the server requires the right Referer string. If it wasn't requested from the containing page, no image for you!

[topspin]

@HardwareGeek said in Reddit doesn't want you stealing their new warning:

@topspin said in Reddit doesn't want you stealing their new warning:

I get a 403 for the URL

I'd guess the server requires the right Referer string. If it wasn't requested from the containing page, no image for you!

Was my guess too.
Is there an easy way to circumvent that, just using Firefox without reverting to curl? (Only asking out of curiosity)

[HardwareGeek]

@topspin I don't know; I've never tried doing that sort of thing. My guess would be no, not an easy one. And if I were paranoid enough about my valuable assets to implement a scheme like that, I'd make it even more difficult by requiring that the Referer be that of an iframe, or whatever the Web 3.0 equivalent is, embedded in the page, and the iframe contents can only be fetched if its request has the correct Referer. Nest Referer-restricted iframes to the desired level of paranoia.Edit: Never mind.

[kazitor]

@topspin
Easiest way I just found with a quick bit of mucking about was to right click on the element in the DOM tree and hit “Use in Console”, then run temp0.oncontextmenu=()=>true, i.e. override the contextmenu event listener.

Someone who’s spent more time gazing into the abyss of JS might know a “better practice” to query for event listeners to be used as a parameter to removeEventListener.

FIled under: this is not an endorsement of copyright infringement

[topspin]

@kazitor said in Reddit doesn't want you stealing their new warning:

Easiest way I just found with a quick bit of mucking about was to right click on the element in the DOM tree and hit “Use in Console”, then run temp0.oncontextmenu=()=>true, i.e. override the contextmenu event listener.

That sent me down the right path.

Easier way: uncheck the box.

[kazitor]

@topspin said in Reddit doesn't want you stealing their new warning:

Easier way: uncheck the box.

I poked around that bit with the debugger etc. but completely missed the checkbox. Yeah, that’s almost trivial (though getting at the event handler to modify or give to removeEventListener would be the programmatic way to hit every image at once).

[Tsaukpaetra]

@jinpa said in Reddit doesn't want you stealing their new warning:

they still have the option to view the media URL's in the page

Seems to work fine in Chrome-likes?

[remi]

@kazitor said in Reddit doesn't want you stealing their new warning:

FIled under: this is not an endorsement of copyright infringement

Though interestingly in this case, the picture by itself doesn't make much sense, as the legend isn't part of it.

Which actually might be a better way for the site to protect their assets. Make it so that the picture by itself is useless, rather than preventing copying of the picture. I don't know if that's intentional, but that's clever.

(of course it still doesn't prevent any form of screenshoting but I don't think anything truly can, so as with many security measures it's more about putting reasonable barriers than making it absolutely unbreakable)

[bugmenot]

@topspin said in Reddit doesn't want you stealing their new warning:

Easier way: uncheck the box.

Even easier way: Use shift-rightclick. That gives me the default browser context menu.

[izzion]

All of you degenerates need to be for funging.

[jinpa]

@izzion Many charities aim to influence how others (other donors, governments, or the private sector) allocate their funds. We call this influence on others “leverage.” Expenditure on a program can also crowd out funding that would otherwise have come from other sources. We call this “funging” (from “fungibility”).

I'm not sure I see how this applies.

[topspin]

@bugmenot said in Reddit doesn't want you stealing their new warning:

@topspin said in Reddit doesn't want you stealing their new warning:

Easier way: uncheck the box.

Even easier way: Use shift-rightclick. That gives me the default browser context menu.

TIL

[topspin]

@jinpa said in Reddit doesn't want you stealing their new warning:

@izzion Many charities aim to influence how others (other donors, governments, or the private sector) allocate their funds. We call this influence on others “leverage.” Expenditure on a program can also crowd out funding that would otherwise have come from other sources. We call this “funging” (from “fungibility”).

I'm not sure I see how this applies.

It's a joke on NFTs.

[BernieTheBernie]

@remi said in Reddit doesn't want you stealing their new warning:

of course it still doesn't prevent any form of screenshoting but I don't think anything truly can

comes with Android (at least version 10): there are some äpps which can prevent a screenshot. E.g. the German Covid vaccination app CovPass. When you try to do so, a message pop-up is shown that you must not take a screenshot of "private contents".
And I guess that current versions of  OSs and  can do so, too. Because copy rights matter.

[Applied Mediocrity]

@BernieTheBernie Chrome does prevent you from taking screenshots in incognito mode solely to make it more inconvenient. However, I imagine there could be a malware app launching your 2FA authenticator and OCR-ing the screenshot.

[acrow]

@BernieTheBernie How sharp are phone cameras these days? If the camera pixel density is sufficient to tell apart the color components of the screen pixels, you could programmatically reconstruct the original image from a photo of the screen.
Virtually no loss of fidelity.

[dkf]

@acrow said in Reddit doesn't want you stealing their new warning:

How sharp are phone cameras these days?

Depends on the phone, but typically much better than the screen.

[remi]

@acrow said in Reddit doesn't want you stealing their new warning:

a photo of the screen.

That's the ultimate screen shot technique and it seems unlikely to me that this will soon be significantly broken.

I mean, it's easy to imagine that e.g. phone cameras could have a check for known patterns and refuse to take pictures, in the same way that printers/scanners can apparently refuse to print/scan bank notes. But screens are so ubiquitous in our lives that many pictures may contain one without it being a situation where someone would want to prevent a screen shot. So the technique would have to be more than just "detect a screen." It's possible to imagine detecting e.g. a special feature of the screen (like our Lounge background detection -- or the EURion thing!) but I wonder how feasible that would be with real world lighting conditions, bad framing and the like (EURion works because scanning guarantees reasonably good imaging conditions!).

But I don't think it will really ever truly need to come to that, because taking a picture of the screen requires two devices (or maybe tricks with a mirror?) that makes it impractical in many cases. Not impossible, for sure, but at least one more step than any other method.

So yeah, there'll always be a way to do that, but it may be a pain in the ass to do so.

[BernieTheBernie]

@remi Exactly, see
https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/28541/what-s-an-image-file

[acrow]

@remi My wife regularly needs to borrow my phone, to take a photo of a bill she received as a PDF (that is, take a photo of the screen of her phone), in order to use her banking app's barcode scanner to read the bill's barcode (from the photo on the screen of my phone).

[remi]

@acrow Did she try with a mirror? I just thought of that when writing the previous post, and it may allow to capture the device with the device...

Unless the app that reads the barcode only allows using the back camera, not the front one, which sadly seems very likely.

[acrow]

@remi said in Reddit doesn't want you stealing their new warning:

@acrow Did she try with a mirror? I just thought of that when writing the previous post, and it may allow to capture the device with the device...

Unless the app that reads the barcode only allows using the back camera, not the front one, which sadly seems very likely.

The scanner app wants to also use the screen as a viewfinder. I doubt it'd keep scanning while it doesn't have the screen. So you can't display the PDF at the same time.

[remi]

@acrow yeah, obviously I didn't really think about it.

Though my phone allows splitting between two applications at the same time (I almost never use that because the screen isn't really large enough for it to make sense), so maybe you could use that? But ISTR that not all applications are compatible with this mode, so while it's probably easy to find a PDF viewer that does (and scroll/zoom so that just the barcode is visible), the other app may not.

[dcon]

@BernieTheBernie said in Reddit doesn't want you stealing their new warning:

Because copy rights matter.

Just change from dark mode to light mode. (Evil idea: actually implement something like that)

[Gurth]

@BernieTheBernie said in Reddit doesn't want you stealing their new warning:

And I guess that current versions of  OSs and  can do so, too. Because copy rights matter.

I know for sure that Safari and Chrome (on macOS) both prevent you from taking a screenshot of (some?) movies playing in the browser, which I found out during the recent discussion here about the green Amiga GUI in Stranger Things. All you get is a black rectangle where the video is supposed to be.

But, trying that just now in Firefox, it works fine. So I guess the moral of the story is, as usual, pick the right tool for the job.

[topspin]

@Gurth isn’t there a plug-in handling the DRM instead of the browser implementing it itself?
Also, ISTR having had that problem with Firefox before.

[loopback0]

@topspin said in Reddit doesn't want you stealing their new warning:

@Gurth isn’t there a plug-in handling the DRM instead of the browser implementing it itself?
Also, ISTR having had that problem with Firefox before.

Yeah.
There is, or used to be, differences in support for the DRM used by Netflix, Amazon etc between Chrome and Firefox. Sometimes they behave differently, sometimes not.

[dkf]

@Gurth said in Reddit doesn't want you stealing their new warning:

@BernieTheBernie said in Reddit doesn't want you stealing their new warning:

And I guess that current versions of  OSs and  can do so, too. Because copy rights matter.

I know for sure that Safari and Chrome (on macOS) both prevent you from taking a screenshot of (some?) movies playing in the browser, which I found out during the recent discussion here about the green Amiga GUI in Stranger Things. All you get is a black rectangle where the video is supposed to be.

But, trying that just now in Firefox, it works fine. So I guess the moral of the story is, as usual, pick the right tool for the job.

It might depend on what codec they're using and where in the graphics stack the video decoding is being done. It might be not ultimately a policy reason (though policy might be why they don't try to fix it).

[Gurth]

@dkf I’m not sure it isn‘t policy to prevent it, given how both Apple and Google have fairly major stakes in making money from online videos.

[remi]

@dkf said in Reddit doesn't want you stealing their new warning:

It might depend on what codec they're using and where in the graphics stack the video decoding is being done.

: I remember when almost any OpenGL window would be captured as a black rectangle. Or a green one. Or a copy of whatever random crap happened to be in that memory buffer when the snap shot was done.

That was hugely annoying when I was trying to write reports based on the results of a software that was 99% about 3D visualisation.

At that time phones cameras (and digital cameras generally speaking) weren't commonplace, if they had been I think I would have done all my snap shots with an external camera.

[Gern_Blaanston]

@jinpa said in Reddit doesn't want you stealing their new warning:

Reddit has a new admonition to report "useless comments" .

Without useless comments Reddit would not exist.

A few months ago someone asked a question about something and I said "No, I would never do that because that's retarded."

My post was removed by the moderator because apparently that is considered to be some sort of slur against .... retarded people?

At that point I decided that I could live just fine without Reddit.

[Arantor]

@Gern_Blaanston there are better words to use than 'retarded' because it turns out that not everyone that seems 'slow' is 'stupid'.

[MrL]

@Arantor said in Reddit doesn't want you stealing their new warning:

@Gern_Blaanston there are better words to use than 'retarded' because it turns out that not everyone that seems 'slow' is 'stupid'.

Thankfully we have thought police to tell us what words to use. We would be so lost without it.

[Arantor]

This post is deleted!

[jinpa]

@Gern_Blaanston said in Reddit doesn't want you stealing their new warning:

A few months ago someone asked a question about something and I said "No, I would never do that because that's retarded."

My post was removed by the moderator because apparently that is considered to be some sort of slur against .... retarded people?

At that point I decided that I could live just fine without Reddit.

Meh. I'm mostly opposed to forums censoring well-thought posts that are prohibited by one side. I don't have a real problem with a mod deciding to forbid harsh words because they lower the quality of a discussion.

By way of comparison, I wouldn't have a problem with a bratty kid being thrown out of a lecture hall.

Disclaimer: I use the word myself times, and I don't have a problem with the word being used for genuinely retarded people, but it's often tossed around as a slur.

[Tsaukpaetra]

@jinpa said in Reddit doesn't want you stealing their new warning:

used for genuinely retarded

😘 I love retarded people!

[Watson]

@jinpa said in Reddit doesn't want you stealing their new warning:

Meh. I'm mostly opposed to forums censoring well-thought posts that are prohibited by one side.

If it's their forum, it's their rules. They have the right to make that choice.

[jinpa]

@Watson said in Reddit doesn't want you stealing their new warning:

@jinpa said in Reddit doesn't want you stealing their new warning:

Meh. I'm mostly opposed to forums censoring well-thought posts that are prohibited by one side.

If it's their forum, it's their rules. They have the right to make that choice.

And others have the right to point out their hypocrisy and fear of the truth, and make sure that corrupt government players are not influencing them.

No careful thinker respects the owners of Reddit, but that's a discussion beyond the scope of this thread.