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Show HN: The text disappears when you screenshot it

177 pointsby zikerotoday at 2:18 AM62 commentsview on HN

Comments

axiolitetoday at 6:30 AM

You can take TWO screenshots, moments apart, open in GIMP, paste one over the other and choose any one of these laying modes:

Lighten, Screen, Addition, Darken, Multiply, Linear burn, Hard Mix, Difference, Exclusion, Subtract, Grain Extract, Grain Merge, or Luminance.

https://ibb.co/DDQBJDKR

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xnxtoday at 3:50 AM

This game disappears if you pause it: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Bg3RAI8uyVw

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catlifeonmarstoday at 5:49 AM

https://gist.github.com/jncornett/d7cb397ce3ceff268a0ee1b86f...

On iPhone: screenrecord. Take screenshots every couple seconds. Overlay images with 50% transparency (I use Procreate Pocket for this part)

kemayotoday at 3:37 AM

This makes me feel motion-sick, which is kind of impressive because I'm normally not easily susceptible to that.

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QuiCasseRientoday at 7:25 AM

Even is some have found a workaround, this is a cool feature

shannifintoday at 4:29 AM

Others have mentioned Branta Games, but I first saw the effect here: https://youtu.be/TdTMeNXCnTs

Syntoniclestoday at 4:05 AM

I first saw this effect in a video from Branta Games.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg3RAI8uyVw

The effect is disrupted by introducing rendering artifacts, by watching the video in 144p or in this case by zooming out.

I'd love to know the name of this effect, so I can read more about the fMRI studies that make use of it.

What I've found so far:

Random Dot Kinematogram

Perceptual Organization from Motion (video of Flounder camouflage)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VO10eDIyiE

dylan604today at 3:42 AM

Has anyone tried a long exposure to see if the motion smears into something discernible? Obviously harder to expose a bright screen without some ND since the shutter speed is the phone's main exposure control

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elAhmotoday at 7:43 AM

If you blink really fast, the text almost disappears.

vivegitoday at 5:30 AM

Cool. I used the Windows snipping tool and just screen-recorded it.

dgantoday at 6:42 AM

What i am supposed to see here? Its just static noisy background

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alanfalcontoday at 5:14 AM

Not technically a screenshot, I guess, but trivially easy to do with software I had lying around all the same. https://media4.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExYXloZ3Z0NT...

Izkatatoday at 3:29 AM

Firefox on Android seems to just be a static image, I can't see any text.

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zikerotoday at 3:51 AM

Another idea I had with this concept is to make an LLM-proof captcha. Maybe humans can detect the characters in the 'motion' itself, which could be unique to us?

- The captcha would be generated like this on a headless browser, and recorded as a video, which is then served to the user.

- We can make the background also move in random directions, to prevent just detecting which pixels are changing and drawing an outline.

- I tried also having the text itself move (bounce like the DVD logo). Somehow makes it even more readable.

I definitely know nothing about how LLMs interpret video, or optics, so please let me know if this is dumb.

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viccistoday at 6:36 AM

For what it's worth, there are some websites that embed some crazy shit when you screenshot. On reddit, r/CenturyClub will fill your background with a slightly off-white version of your username so that they can identify leakers, and I'm not certain how exactly they do it.

bix6today at 2:44 AM

Ha cool! How’s it work?

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markasoftwaretoday at 3:50 AM

same thing, but a game: https://brantagames.itch.io/motus

alliancedamagestoday at 3:45 AM

You can also break it by recording the screen, of course.

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altcognitotoday at 3:20 AM

Fun side effect: staring at the letters for a bit makes the rest of the image move.

cryptoztoday at 2:52 AM

Had a lot of fun trying to break this. Turns out you can screenshot real easily by zooming out. Maybe there are other ways but I stopped trying :)

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kpstoday at 3:59 AM

The text reappears when I screenshot it twice.

davidgerardtoday at 6:44 AM

Screnshotted fine in Xfce.

UltraSanetoday at 3:58 AM

Seems trivial to diff multiple screenshots to identify what parts move. Or just use a compression algorithm to do the same.

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hbbiotoday at 5:58 AM

Coinbase was hacked for $400M when literally someone from outsourced support services was taking screenshots on their phone!

The culprit had more than 10k photos of all security details for thousands of wealthy customers.

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