JayMay 22, 2025
Thoughts on Signal using a DRM-protection tool to safeguard their users on Windows from having all their chats screengrabbed every three seconds
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Show threadJay
Why are Microsoft doing this?
In part, because the resulting petabytes of easily-OCR'd screengrabs will feed Copilot's hungry maw.
May 22, 2025 at 9:07amWeb
Show threadJayMay 22, 2025
In part, because they recognise that a key part of their value proposition to their enterprise grade corporate clients is *accountability shield*.
Employees would be outraged if their employer proposed screengrabbing their desktop every three seconds. But this is just an operating system default behaviour, right.
Show threadJayMay 22, 2025
What has Signal done about it?
Something.
Which is more than you can say about all the other chat client, email client and video calling providers.
They will cause the screen to go black when the screengrabs happen.
Show threadJayMay 22, 2025
How are they doing this? By leveraging a DRM protection mechanism which is also built into windows by default.
This is not the optimal solution, but it appears to be the best practical solution given how windows is currently built. Effectively in the dystopian cyberpunk hellscape of Windows 11, this tool is a tiny bit of shelter from the expanding blast radius of endless advertising and AI-scraping monetisation.
Show threadJayMay 22, 2025
Alongside a handful of other survivors like Mozilla, Internet archive, and Wikipedia, Signal is one of the very few non-disaster-capitalist parts of the internet still standing.
In their case they have achieved this by being rock-solid, nimble and lean.
This move is an example of nimble.
Show threadJayMay 22, 2025
Nimbleness is akin to pragmatism.
You hop from rock to rock as you can, and you take shelter when you must.
A less pragmatic Signal foundation would simply refuse to support Windows and leave the 90-something percent of global desktop users out in the cold by so doing.
Show threadJayMay 22, 2025
What is ominous about this development is that it clearly shows the only remaining shelter to be found is in the accidental lee of structures designed in and of themselves to preserve corporate power.