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

(github.com)
345 points splitbrain | 1 comments | 14 Oct 24 13:11 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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OsrsNeedsf2P ◴[14 Oct 24 14:08 UTC] No.41837682[source]▶
I love how simple this is- Barely 100 lines or C++ (ignoring comments). That's one thing that makes me prefer X11 over Wayland.
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teekert ◴[14 Oct 24 15:35 UTC] No.41838500[source]▶
Is it much more difficult under Wayland?
replies(1): >>41840816 #
favorited ◴[14 Oct 24 19:10 UTC] No.41840816[source]▶
Wayland intentionally makes this more difficult, because one of the security goals of the project is that (by default) Wayland clients shouldn't have visibility into other clients' window contents/events/etc.

Of course, it still needs to be possible under Wayland, because there are plenty of legitimate use-cases (screenshots, screen sharing, video capture, etc.), but it was a non-goal to make it as simple as X.

Wayland merged the image-capture-source and image-copy-capture protocol extensions earlier this year: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wayland-Merges-Screen-Capture

replies(1): >>41842067 #
enriquto ◴[14 Oct 24 21:11 UTC] No.41842067{3}[source]▶
> Wayland intentionally makes this more difficult,

some men just want to watch the world burn

replies(1): >>41843266 #
favorited ◴[14 Oct 24 23:23 UTC] No.41843266{4}[source]▶
And Wayland keeps their apps from spying on the rest of my screen!
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1. lupusreal ◴[15 Oct 24 10:25 UTC] No.41847043{5}[source]▶
Where does this paranoia come from? The kind of attacks cited by Wayland advocates are all theoretically possible but virtually unheard of in practice. In any time in the past thirty years, has there ever been a case of a rogue program in the Debian repos that maliciously spies on the user by exploiting the open and trusting nature of X11? Even if you expand the scope of consideration to applications like browsers getting pwnd by RCE zero days and then doing this, how often does this actually happen? Maybe this degree of paranoia, fear of technically possible but actually extremely rare scenarios, makes sense for targeted individuals like reporters and whistleblowers operating in totalitarian countries, but for anybody else it seems insane. It's like having deadbolts on your bedroom door because you're afraid of somebody trying to kidnap you in the middle of the night, that extra security against such an unlikely threat isn't worth the inconvenience. Except actually, getting kidnapped in the middle of the night is probably a more common occurrence than getting pwned through X11 programs from your distro repos.