Hello…. At WWDC 2013, I approached the Apple engineering teams with a need that a client of mine had to disable all screen capture while an app was running. This includes the hotkeys for taking screenshots, capturing displays with AVFoundation, remote desktop apps, Airplay, etc. As to the specific use case in play here, the issue is that there is proprietary content delivered via the app — and the owners of this content need that content secured such that there is no easy facility *on the machine it is running on* to capture this content. Please forgive the length of what follows, but a little explanation is necessary.
I actually posted about this over a year ago in much more limited fashion, but unfortunately the discussion digressed quickly into philosophical issues which were pretty much irrelevant to the problem at hand. I’m hoping that can be avoided now — suffice to say that when I explained the use case to the Apple engineering teams at the WWDC last year, they affirmed that it was a completely legitimate use-case that was desirable to make possible. In fact, Apple has demonstrated the same need in their own DVD player — if you try to screen shot while a protected DVD is playing, your screen results in junk (side note: the Apple engineers I spoke with then said that the approach they were using in the DVD player wouldn’t be a public API option, but that there was perhaps another way it could be exposed via public API). Our use-case isn’t DRM, or video or music; they are online tests. The app is delivering tests remotely — some of which are not your typical classroom college exams, but very privately held, very expensive certification tests which clients have spent many thousands of dollars to create. This test content needs to be secured, and not easily copied while the app is running. Yes, I am aware of various hardware hacks or video options that can be accomplished external to the machine — those are out of scope for this question. We just need to temporarily secure the box the app runs on. The app needs to act similarly to a kiosk while the app is running, and once the app exits, everything returns to normal. We would also like to facilitate this in a way that plays nice within the OS X ecosystem, so that the app can be delivered via the Mac App Store (i.e. we don’t want to have to be looking for other processes like screen recording apps and killing those processes). Having said that, I logged an issue last June in Apple’s reporting system, #14136127. This was subsequently closed by Apple soon thereafter, reported as a duplicate of #5962780, which remains open, and which I do not have access to. Last year at the WWDC, the engineers I spoke with said there was an outside possibility this capability might be able to make it into Mavericks GA. I have seen no movement on this issue since, and have had no luck requesting status in my original logged issue. So my concluding questions are targeted at a general use case of trying to disable the ability to capture content which is delivered to and temporarily displayed within an app within OS X. 1. Does anyone know a possible way this can be accomplished with existing API? 2. If there are any Apple folks reading, can you point me in the right direction, perhaps with a contact of someone on one of the engineering teams we can pursue this further with (feel free to email me offline at br...@bighillsoftware.com)? This use-case has become critical for us, and the answer determines how we continue to support our product on OS X. As a last note — I have no control over the requirement here. I am just tasked with solving the technical problem, and regardless of peripheral issues, the technical challenge here is legitimate, so any answers, advice, or pointers in the right direction are greatly appreciated. Thanks for your time and consideration. Cheers, Brad _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
