Show HN: X11 tool to share a screen area in any video meeting

I love how simple this is- Barely 100 lines or C++ (ignoring comments). That's one thing that makes me prefer X11 over Wayland.

Yeah. I mean, not to deny the decades of arguments over its warts, but it's kind of amazing to me the extent to which X11 has emerged as, well, the simplest/best and most hackable desktop graphics environment available. You want to play a trick, it's right there. The ICCCM got a ton of hate back in the early 90's, but... no one else has an equivalent and people still innovate in the WM space even today.

Hackable is right. But not always in the positive sense of the word.

FWIW, the threat model you're imagining is an attacker being able to run code to display directly to the desktop using the lowest level native API. A local[1] code exploit at the level of an interactive user is already a huge failure in the modern world.

Is that a reasonable argument against using X11? Sure, for some use cases. Is it a good argument for wayland/windows/OSX/whatever to do your tiling WM experimentation? Not really, those environments kinda suck for playing around with.

[1] Or "local-ish", your system or a trusted remote has to have been compromised already. Untrusted X11 protocol still exists but is deliberately disabled (and often blocked) everywhere. Even ssh won't forward it anymore unless you dig out the option and turn it on manually.

Isn't any app that can access read the x11 socket able to read any input? It's not just running an explicitly malicious app but also the risk of compromising an app which can read the x11 socket (e.g. Firefox)