Show HN: The text disappears when you screenshot it

https://unscreenshottable.vercel.app/?text=Hello

21•zikero•1h ago

Comments

bix6•1h ago

Ha cool! How’s it work?

Lalabadie•32m ago

The only way to see the text is in the movement. The pattern across any single frame is entirely random noise.

cryptoz•1h ago

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 :)

sans_souse•37m ago

Not sure what you mean - I can screenshot it freely that's not the point the point is if you look then at the screenshot you cant discern the text because its a single frame now

dwg•33m ago

Zooming out before taking screenshot and the text is no longer obfuscated. I tried and confirmed it works. In fact, the text is perhaps even more readable than the original.

anigbrowl•22m ago

It depends how fast or slow your GPU is. I tried it and saw the effect you described, but within a second or two it started moving and was obscured again. Obviously you could automate the problem away.

dylan604•7m ago

Mine freezes the animation on zoom change. Not sure you could automate against that

esafak•22m ago

He's right. https://imgur.com/a/G7CKZ94

dylan604•9m ago

I zoomed out to 90% and could make out something was there but wasn't easy to read. Zooming out further went back to just being noise. I also tried zooming in but with no success. What zoom level did you use and I guess we have to ask the standard what browser/version/OS/etc?? My FFv142 on macOS never took a screen grab like you did

vunderba•6m ago

yeah - I actually was initially confused since I wasn't having any issues screenshotting it but had forgotten that I have the default site zoom set to ~65%.

altcognito•37m ago

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

Izkata•27m ago

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

kemayo•20m ago

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

dylan604•14m ago

My eyes went straight into seeing 3D image mode. It's the easiest one I've seen yet! /s

dylan604•15m ago

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

alliancedamages•12m ago

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

xnx•7m ago

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

markasoftware•6m ago

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

zikero•6m ago

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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