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Snapchat Isn’t Just for Sexting

8 points| scottrblock | 13 years ago |scottblock.com | reply

8 comments

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[+] martythemaniak|13 years ago|reply
A bit off-topic, but since I heard about Snapchat I've been wondering: Couldn't they almost guarantee* a self-destruct? Right now, they notify the sender if the receiver takes a screenshot right, but don't to anything to actually prevent that screenshot.

Can't they slice the image into many small parts, group them into N groups, then flash each group for 1/Nth of a second, essentially creating a looping video out of an image? A screenshot would then only take the current frame buffer, which would be only a part of the image and hopefully not useful. The image would have ghostly appearance, but it'd offer much better protection. OTOH, this sounds like an overly-complicated technical solution - after all notification only is much simpler and seem to offer a "good enough" solution.

*of course, it'd be very hard to protect anything when sending bits to someone else - someone can patch the app to get rid of the timer, dump the image to disk etc etc.

[+] ynniv|13 years ago|reply
Any animation fast enough to look like a coherent image is easily captured by an external camera as a single image.
[+] ynniv|13 years ago|reply
So it's not just about sexting, but communicating by sending pictures to another smartphone? What's next, short messages and duplex voice chat?

</sarcasm>

[+] tremblanc|13 years ago|reply
Asking this question in earnest. What other applications does one use this apart from sexting? I thought of it, even read articles that talk about how it changes how we communicate, etc. I just can't think of a use for this.