Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Images To Get Expiration Date
Pickens writes "BBC reports that researchers have created software that gives images an expiration date by tagging them with an encrypted key so that once this date has passed the key stops the images being viewed and copied. Professor Michael Backes, who led development of the X-Pire system, says development work began about 18 months ago as potentially risky patterns of activity on social networks, such as Facebook, showed a pressing need for such a system. 'More and more people are publishing private data to the internet and it's clear that some things can go wrong if it stays there too long,' says Backes. The X-Pire software creates encrypted copies of images and asks those uploading them to give each one an expiration date. Viewing these images requires the free X-Pire browser add-on. When the viewer encounters an encrypted image it sends off a request for a key to unlock it. This key will only be sent, and the image become viewable, if the expiration date has not been passed."
Slashdot users debunk this scheme as stupid in 5... 4... 3...
Cue the plugin which takes a screen capture of the decrypted image and re posts it in its original form. If you can read it you can copy it forever.
And no one will use it cause most people are to stupid to be able to install a plugin.
Now your expiration date doesn't matter.
I can't quite figure out how they'll stop me from taking a screenshot of the encrypted image.
All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.
this thing takes 18 month?
and this crap is so retarded and useless it's not worthy of any discussion. dump it directly into toilet!
your government scientists hard at work.
your feeble encryption is no match for my clipboard.
because you can't lock the print screen out, right?
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
Sounds great, but the more interesting/risky/incriminating/etc the picture, the more likely it is that someone's going to keep an unencrypted copy around, no?
Don't make clients install a plugin. The client is in an unknown state, and most people will just ignore it anyway.
Instead, target the individual companies ( like facebook, google, shutterfly, ect... ) with this technology.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
if you can read it you can copy it, if you can copy it you are creating a new version with your own options.....
assume here you are encypting images and creating a 'new' file and whether or not you can read it is totally in the hands of X-Pire software, assuming the company doesn't muck it all up due to incompetence the problem is it introduces 'hassle' and people are lazy.
I wish Facebook would expire... the sooner, the better.
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
OMG, I just don't know where to start with how lame this is.
It's all about 'unfortunate' stuff that keeps on strolling around the interweb 15 years later. It's about careers and marriages. Of course it will not prevent anyone from saving the images and keeping them for future reference, but how do you decide now who will be the president in 2030? This could prevent a lot of shame because we won't value a shameful picture of someone who has yet to become famous.
Anti-copying mechanisms only work in soft science fiction like Star Trek (Transporters have strong anti-copy technology, as do the holodecks).
If the legions on Slashdot can support or disprove that claim, you would be doing me a favour.
Hint: We already know it doesn't work in the "real world" : http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt
"tagging" something with an "encryption key" is something which doesn't make a lot of sense. I guess maybe someone would want to search for the file based on the key it was encrypted with? *grin*
You know an article is quality when stupid crap like that shows up in the very first paragraph. Who do these big media outlets hire to do their sci/tech articles anyhow? Apparently people who haven't got the faintest clue how things work, or how to explain to others how they work. Somehow, they seem to consistently find the absolutely *least qualified* people to write such articles.
Which will result in something like the "X-Pire-copy-to-imgur browser add-on" which automatically decrypts the image and then posts a decrypted copy to imgur or whatever sharing site you want to use.
Not to mention all the large companies trolling facebook for photos and storing them for later use to provide background check style services/etc.
Once you post it, a copy has been made, once someone views it, a copy has been made. Those copies are outside your control. Even if you encrypt it, once someone views it, an unencrypted copy has been made, and it's once more out of your control.
...researchers have created software that gives images an expiration date by tagging them with an encrypted key so that once this date has passed the key stops the images being viewed and copied.
How long shell we wait before some fella creates a tool that copies those photos, backs them up somewhere after removing the so called encryption?
If they doubt this is possible, they need not look very far. The RIAA knows a thing or two about this.
Apart from the fact that this software only provides a technically ridiculous protection, this will fail in the exact same way that most encryption system fail: the users don't care enough. That's the reason why the mainstream has not adopted email encryption and encryption of instant messages. Encrypting instant messages is trivially easy, yet I couldn't even get many IT people to do it. The users won't install any browser add-on just to view the encrypted pictures of other people. And because everyone knows that, nobody will encrypt their pictures in the first place.
does this mean that 40 y.o. can no longer use their yearbook photos? Will it be like drivers licenses and passports, requiring new photos every few years? That's great for dating sites but who cares about facebook photos?
Flaw #1 that seems to be the focus so far is that you can capture the screen image an make an unencrypted copy. This will only prevent copying by unsophisticated users. (But isn't that exactly who it is for?)
Flaw #2 concerns me more. It is (one of) the same problem(s) as with most DRM - what happens when this key server goes poof? Now all your images are unreadable.
Screenshot. That is all.
One can imagine it enables them to track who is viewing the image anytime, whether or not it's served from Facebook.
It seems everyone wants to call themselves a "researcher" these days, as if there is science behind what they do. The truth is, it's just another hustle.
New Business Model:
Crawl facebook and other sites which use this technology, grab and decrypt all such images, save them and sell a subscription to them.
Second Business Model:
Sell a hacked version of the plugin which allows you to save the image easily.
Hey, a good percentage of the public seems to think that DRM works, it's no wonder they keep coming up with stupid ideas like this....
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
For those complaining about the technical aspects of this proposal, obviously anyone who views the image before the expiration date can save it forever. The point is that after the expiration date, no new people can download the image if they haven't already. Think about your potential employer downloading drunken pictures of your from a frat party 10 years ago. This scheme would prevent that.
Now the fact that this requires a 3rd party plugin to work is problematic. It creates a bottleneck, an extra point of failure, and it suffers from the chicken and egg problem -- nobody will want to post x-pire pictures if their friends can't view them without a plugin, and nobody will install the plugin because they don't need it to see the other 99% of pictures people post.
sure some small percentage will find away around a few photos they want cracked.. this will still block out the majority of pics out there. i think this is a good idea of putting some kind of control back to the person who made the pics.. even if its not 100% fool proof. This is low level protection like a lock on your front door. there will always be ways around it. but it does add "some" level of protection as long as you understand it as such.
Because you know....I install every free plugin that I come across just to view pictures and stuff.
Okay... because i can never hit the print screen key or take a picture of whats on the screen with my camera and repost it.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
So let's see...to implement image expiration on my website, I can ask all my members to install your plugin...or I can add
to my image upload module. Gee, which way should I go?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I can bet the service will be discontinued before any picture will achieve the expiration date.
*facepalm*
This whole concept should be on The Daily WTF.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
This is just another form of DRM. Instead of keying on payments, it is based on a date, but the premise is the same; it is an unnecessary locking of a file which is trivially defeated (worst case scenario: take a screenshot!) and therefore not worth the annoyance. How about just adding the expiration date to the EXIF (or other meta-) data in existing media formats? Any site (specifically Facebook, MySpace, etc) would then be able to revoke the media based on the expiration date. Adding an expiration field to the submission process would do the same thing. Look ma, no end-user annoyances!
As to emails and other similar avenues, live and learn (and use better judgment in picking your friends!). DRM isn't going to stop the issue; it might even exacerbate it ("oh, this image is set to expire. I'd better save an unprotected copy and use it as blackmail later.")
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Just tag an expiration date when you upload the photo, and have a default date.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This is almost as brilliant as those scripts people used to use to block right clicks!
right click and save as .jpg :)
Expose all your facebook data to the App owner along with the picture. Sounds like data mining exploit by Facebook on Facebook users.
Problem, no nitch market exists for picture data which users believe they own even after uploading to Face book.
Facebook by making a 3rd party app viewer to view pictures will give its self an out when the data is used by the 3rd party nefariously.
By encapsulating the view into an App, they can under the guise of supporting the app do data mining and sales on all related data.
Profit!
Most importantly Facebook will use the 3rd party to shift blame to for all the nefarious data mining apps not hosted on face book but that use the data.
So now when you walk into Wal-Mart the advertisements will say "Hi Malcopt, your friend Bagwhore bought product x every week for the last x weeks. You should try it.
Doesn't everyone have a face book friend named bagwhore?
Or on the TV in Wal-Mart, Hi Joe, get your facebook friends to by Laser shark meat and you all will get a 20% discount coupon on all Wal-Mart family friendly Goatsie products.
I'm ready to start a new service called Un-X-Pire. What you will do is run my browser add-on, which will find X-Pire tagged images, request the decryption key from the X-Pire service, and then cache it the first time it is requested for each image. After that, it will just serve out the decryption key over and over (or, if the decryption does something fancy like swap keys based on current time, it will go ahead and decrypt the image for you by spoofing the time the key was initially first cached as the current system time for the decryption process), and then everybody who uses my plug-in will be able to view the image for the rest of eternity so long as at least one person views it with my plugin before it expires.
Also, I bet mine takes a lot less time to code than theirs.
This is not meant to be a foolproof method of preventing people from seeing photos you don't want them to see. This is simply a method of preventing images that you once wanted people to see from hanging around after you've thought the better of your original decision. Sure, someone could capture and re-post the photo in unprotected format if they act before the expiration date, but the point is not to stop others from doing bad deeds.
I don't know about this approach in particular, but the concept seems like a killer app for social networking sites that want to assuage user concerns about their youthful indescretions following them around indefinitely.
the fbi will have the unlock key and will be able to bypass this.
This "technology" has been touted by Ilse Aigner, the Federal Minister of Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection. According to Wikipedia, "Aigner completed a professional training as a telecommunications technician in 1985 and joined the electrical installation business of her parents. In 1990 she graduated from the technical academy with the degree of a State Certified Engineer and worked for several years for Eurocopter in the development of helicopter electric systems." She thinks this nonsense is going to make Germany lead the world in online privacy protection... It is beyond embarrassing. I am sorry and apologize for these idiots.
If Facebook actually wanted pictures to have a shelf-life, they could just allow you to add a default date+x when they would be pulled.
Facebook haven't done this, so I'm guessing they're either a bit short of development cash - or don't want this.
So, how might this work?
Well I'm guessing that either it's:
a brand new file format and the browser requests an external key when the photo display plugin kicks in - so so unlikely to take off, I'll just leave it there.
OR
it's encrypts the image and embeds in tags so the 'plugin' can detect it's a 'special image' and goes off to find a key to decrypt it.
Assuming it's the second, it has my interest. Sounds a little bit interesting - but then I start thinking.
If it's encrypted it's going to have 'look random' - so that's ballsed up the compression ratios of the jpg you uploaded.. and then well most sites tend to compress/thumbnail/crop or a combination of the above... well I don't quite see that working - no it couldn't
I guess maybe we're onto option C, I've just thought of. You don't upload the image, you upload a QR style pointer to the image - and the browser just inserts that in-line?
Well, maybe that would work.. but then these researchers just seem to have come up with a way of replacing an <img src= with a graphical pointer..
Oh and as everybody else has undoubtedly posted whilst I typed this, printsrn.
Maybe there's a market somewhere for pushing the whole public key encryption seamlessly into "stuff we upload" - to restrict or monitor view - but the problem that's never going to go away is that if one person can open it and wants to share it, then there's no security.
development work began about 18 months ago
18 months to build this seems an awful lot, doesn't it? Ubuntu has released 3 versions in such a period!
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Now we can scan for the tasty stuff.
Cool.
Here's a better idea that won't require any additional plugins or new technology to be created: Don't upload pics to Facebook or any other so-called "social networking" site that you don't want available to the public forever. We'll call this idea "common sense".
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
I get that most people here are saying this is totally worthless, and you would be right if there was a reason to break this encryption en-mass. What I think this does help prevent is people you don't know at a time in your past, getting pictures from a time before they knew you.
Basically, it is not cost effective for Facebook to decrypt all these photos, thus on that database your pictures will degrade. Now, during the given time-frame, anyone can decrypt, and some will, but you are implicitly allowing that. What you are implicitly disallowing is Facebook et al. keeping your data forever.
Naturally all this is predicated on the 'fact' that it is not cost effective for the central database to comb itself for these self-deprecating bits of data and decrypt them all periodically/upon upload.
I agree that there are a lot of reasons why this is unlikely to more forward.
From a technical standpoint though, in Windows, you can make a plug-in that will prevent "print screen" from working on/"seeing" certain areas of the screen. Fire up Windows Media player. Start any movie, hit print screen and then see what you got by pasting it into something. You'll notice you'll get the media player window with a nice black box for the content. I also remember Windows being able to do that with IE when they first started their Terraserver project - the imagery was somehow copyrighted and you could look at it, but attempting to copy it or print it resulted in an image with the word copyright repeated over and over and no satellite image.
Of course this won't prevent anyone determined enough to reverse engineer the way the plugin works and then design a workaround. It would however prevent the casual user (probably about 99% of the facebook population) from simply using print-screen or copying the image and mailing it to a friend.
The problem isn't that people need a way to clear embarrassing information off of the internet, the problem is that they put it up there in the first place. From the time the kindergartener learns his first dirty word and proceeds to tell it to as many people as he possibly can, he will (hopefully) get chastised severely in short order, and learn, from that experience and many more, that there are certain things you simply don't do in polite society if you want to be treated kindly by those you care about. Almost everybody knows exactly where that line is drawn or can find it reasonably easily. Most people that choose to cross it do so knowing full well the potential ways in which it can backfire. If people choose to ignore that good advice and label themselves to be impetuous and vulgar, and show no responsibility for their actions or their future, then that's their business, and we should LET THEM. While not everything I've ever written or posted has been of the highest caliber, I'm not worried about anyone holding any of it against me either. But that's just me. Everyone makes their choices. If you want to be a douche, go ahead. That's your business. You'll be judged accordingly.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
That's right up there with 'How do I stop the email I sent 5 minutes ago?'.
People (unwashed masses) don't take the time to think about the consequences of exposing themselves on the Internet.. let alone the privacy implications.
Herd mentality at it's finest... Mooo!
Just how much effort are you willing to expend to circumvent your friend's desire to keep his or her trivial snapshots trivial?
Seriously, what is to stop the keys from being available forever regardless of what date you set? I also agree with those hitting screen-dump right about now. Once decrypted, always decrypted.
Think that the average FB User is not really the most technical or even security conscious person. He will hear "FB now keeps your pictures from circulating". And their reaction will probably be "Ok, then I can upload that pic that I didn't dare to because someone might download it. Now they can't download it and if someone gets it that shouldn't, I'll just retract it".
I foresee a lot of interesting fallout from this. Hopefully enough to get people aware of the privacy threat FB is.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I am kind of used to Slashdot headlines that exaggerate the original article, but how do you go from a company has made some software that might be useful to social networks *like* Facebook to Facebook is going to get images with expiration dates?
where the fuck is facebook mentioned in anything in the TFA ?
Why is everyone saying screenshot?
Once the image is on your screen, it's decrypted... it's yours,
it's in the cache, it's on your harddrive. Not only that, if your
cache is persistent, and you have a super long expiration
on it, it'll be on your drive for X months which may end up
being Their Date+X = new expiration. Oh, that person just
got elected? Hmm, I looked at their profile 4 months ago,
let me rummage in my cache.
Does the wayback hold facebook info?
Can't someone just write some script to copy all available
images off of Facebook while they are still up and just put
them on a drive somewhere? I know pron-heads have been
doing that for a while, lol.
X-pire's website is broken, if you look at the link that is
supposed to explain it, when you scroll the text, you can't
read it, lol. Lemme check another browser... nope just broken
in IE8, Chrome works fine. Hmmm, almost forgot why I quit
using IE, haha.
So, I looked at their site...
1) price has already gone up.
2) only works (viewing) on Firefox cause of the extension
3) only works on jpg
4) specifically states it doesn't prevent copying before expiration
5) W00t! you can add a captcha for "added protection", shame
captcha's been broken.
from website:
If the images are viewed using a browser in which X-pire! is not installed or using another software for viewing images, only a black and white image is shown with a text indicating where X-pire! can be downloaded (free of charge for solely viewing these images). The image remains protected.
Protected? Is the text everywhere? Humans can't see in
black and white? If it's past expiration is the image still
visible in black and white with text on it? Or does it show
expired?
I'm sure Facebook will be happy with all of these images
showing expired. Isn't that 'one' of the things that made
MySpace so ugly, all those 'hosted' images suddenly
expiring or going over their quota then you have some
horribly offensive (white) box in place of the image.
Only real huge benefit I see, I read on their site that you
can hit a panic button and exire ALL of your images at
the same time, instantly. That, I kinda like.
Can't wait to see it implemented! (So I can take bets how
long before it's fully defeated and useless)
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
(1) Have facebook support user defined expiration dates.
(2) Have facebook allow a user to subcategorize friends, subcategories would just be a configuration item not a publicly displayed state. Perhaps family, friends and coworkers. You can then tag photos to be only shown to particular subcategories.
So X-pire's servers can track who has viewed which images when? That info could come in handy. Might even have a market value. Perhaps I should set up my own such system.
Facebook does some image processing before posting. For example, it resizes and it fucks up the colors and there is nothing you can do about it. This means if you post an encrypted image (i.e. random binary data) to it then you will not get it posted as an image at all.
Too lazy to try but if they didn't do that they'd be open to all sorts of tricks with animated gifs and html code and whatnot.
This particular "solution" sounds like the result of somebody thinking in a human-shaped problem space, which is psychologically understandable enough; but is a bias you have to get over if you want to get anywhere in tackling internet problems. And that is my best attempt at a charitable interpretation. Worst case, somebody is a dumbass.
For the sake of charity, we will ignore obvious fuckuperry like "the project runs out of money in three months, and the keyservers go dark, millions of people's pictures(which, being users, they won't have backups of...) get hosed 15 months early" or "the keyserver gets rooted, a relatively small file called 'facebook_camwhores_dont_want_u_to_have_this.zip' appears on every torrent tracker on the wrong side of the tracks and the whole scheme collapses"...
First, the same psychological biases(excessive time discounting, poor inhibition triggering models, bad stability assumptions) and social processes(booze, peer pressure, etc.) that cause people to post pictures and stuff that they will later come to regret will, almost certainly, cause them to assign incorrect 'blackout dates' to the material they do post. 18 months is like, what, 3 failed attempts at "serious" relationships, a number of booze fueled rebounds, and an ill-advised make-up or two? It is also plenty of time for what you did last summer to appear before school officials, what you did a few semesters back to make the HR snoop's radar, etc. Even in a world of purely human, purely manual, threats, this scheme is going to be minimally effective in protecting the people who need it most(while, at the same time, managing to scotch a bunch of happily-married-high-school-sweethearts who have lousy backup practices).
Now, where this scheme really falls flat: This is the internet. It is more full of bots and spiders than is sci-fi written for the arachnid audience. Whatever tag or code is used to clue the plug-in in to the need for a decryption key is going to become a de-facto signal for "High probability of being juicy and/or embarassing". Now the bottom-feeding amateur porn sites won't even need humans or machine vision to find cheap filler content... Hell, facebook, and virtually all even slightly shady crawlers will likely fully support this scheme long before Apple approves iPhone support for it(Hey guys, now you can post your pictures to Facebook in a format your friends can't even see! Hooray!)...
That's the basic problem, right there. If the internet's long memory were confined to some specific location, the simple solution would just be to lean on them legally to provide twilighting tools. Trouble is, the internet's memory is long. And it is distributed across countless entities and jurisdictions. And much of the copying between memory stores is automatic. And records may not exist of a copy operation having occurred. And, with cheaper HDDs, even individual users on cheap laptops are now a formidable chunk of storage. If this scheme ever takes off(doubtful), how long do you think it will be before there exists the following: An OSX application called "iCrawl" that has an excellent UI, costs $20, and crawls and archives the facebook profiles of friends, friends of friends, out up to N levels, 3 competing win32 applications(one trialware, $19.99, with a totally custom widget set, one free, that crashes all the damn time and doesn't work, and one free and more or less functional; but installs a trojan), and a set of python wrappers for unixlike operating systems that make crawling your friends and fetching decryption keys as easy as writing a few scripts?
Barring the full-blown emergence of the dystopian trusted-computing future, with end-to-end DRM and hunter-seeker drones with worldwide lethal force authorization doing 24/7 traitor tracing, you don't get to time-limit stuff you put in widely accessible places on the internet. Sorry about that.
... to turn impossible to capture the screen, to copy/paste the content in some photo edition program, to make every single system to cope with that, and to get a brain.
--- Illogical Spock
Did NOT see that coming. I mean, on slashdot too? SAY IT AINT SO!
Do a "/images/music/" and you will notice that you have seen this scheme before.....
the servers go down so not one can look at the image.
Hope there are backups. Things like this mean potentually more things that will get lost as time goes by.
The only value I can see in this would be if the resulting decrypted picture contains an individual tag for whoever decrypted it. Then when they save it via the gaping analogue hole or a simple print-screen, then the original poster has a chance to find out who released the copy and can suit them.
Here's another way to look at it. Imagine a few small adjustments to the scheme. Put some access controls on who can get the decryption key. Now you're uploading encrypted images to Facebook that Facebook cannot use! Facebook wants to claim excessive rights to the pictures I upload? OK, but good luck doing anything useful with an image full of static.
There have been a few previous schemes like this. Fileopen has one for PDF files. None have been very successful. They all rely on some central server for routine use of the content.
Ignore the encryption and the browser plugin for a moment, and consider: the third-party keyserver logs will contain a wealth of information about who looks at what, and this information is possibly *less* protected than Facebook, depending on the EULAs involved.
Importantly, this looks to be a Facebook-specific implementation of Vanish, a project with the goal of making data "self-destruct" after a set period of time done by Roxana Geambasu and her colleagues at the University of Washington, linked here. They describe in their USENIX Security paper why encryption alone doesn't solve the problem.
Slashdot users debunk this scheme as stupid in 5... 4... 3...
Nah, it's a great plan. Can we have the expiry date based on image quality? Since most Facebook images are a blurry mess, they should all expire before anyone gets to see 'em. No more privacy scandals! Faster Facebook pae loads. And this X-Pire guy can continue to just sell his rubbish and slashvertise all he likes. Everyone wins.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
From TFA:
"The X-Pire program should be available in late January and will cost 2 euros (£1.68) a month. Those who stop paying will not see their images suddenly become viewable, he said, instead they will just not be able to put expiration dates on new images."
I'm sorry, but people who don't even care about their privacy enough to post risque pictures and make them available to the world are not likely to want to pay 2 euros a month to give them an expiry date. In fact, anyone who wants to view the images has to go and download the plugin first. Know what happens in that case? People don't bother and no one sees the pics.
Partyman: Did you see the pics I posted from the party the other night?
Friendface: I saw the gallery, but the pictures are all blank. It said something about requiring a plugin.
Partyman, Yeah, you need to download the X-Pire plugin to see them.
Friendface: Why?
Partyman: I want my pictures to automatically expire after a few months so that they don't stay up too long.
Friendface: Why don't you just remove them later?
Partyman: Too lazy. I'd rather pay someone else to do it.
Friendface: You had to pay?
Partyman: Sure, it's 2 euro a month. So are you gonna download the plugin?
Friendface: Nah, too lazy. I'll pay someone else to look at them.
Your not getting the tech, it isnt saving a jpeg on your box ever. At best it's storing an encrypted jpeg in your cache. With an encrypted expiration key the software sends the expiration key, and gets the picture key via a secure transfer.
Then the key is hanging around your machine in encrypted form, and doesn't need to be fully decrypted to use.
This is a trick, certainly, and hard enough to implement --that the makers of xmpeg didn't bother-- leading to DVD encryption getting hacked.
However a screen capture is a little trickier to defeat, but a good video memory probe can usually defeat that sort of lockout. But with some changes to video cards this could be locked as well.. one of the reasons that I don't plan to buy any displayport hardware if I can avoid it.
My guess is what they're showing is just text, and wont have any of the original picture to it.
All in all I still think that this is a pretty sad excuse for software. And of course thy could actually be selling snake oil, and be hand-waving their way through encryption practices.
Will someone PLEASE think of the latency?
This is definitely going to harm puppies.
"Dear sirs, we are a large corporation with loads of cash and/or a large government and we need you to unlock some expired photos for our (innovation | life-saving charity | anti-terrorism | anti-CP | etc)..."
... is the real key to this problem.
Think of some picture or fact you'd prefer went private and ask yourself this – it there was no reference to it on Google, Bing or FaceBook, how would anyone find it? For you to regain control, all it takes is for these corporations to apply some of their much-vaunted technological prowess and to hold themselves to some standards.
The Knowledge Rights Forum - Help us create and promote a manifesto for the ethical handling of knowledge.
If the Print Screen button can be used to violate the DMCA, does that mean we are all criminals?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Come on guys, this is Slashdot we're on here!
There's another big problem with using a centralized server. As soon as someone wants to wreak havoc on Facebook, all they have to do is DDOS the key server. If this were to catch on and most images become encrypted like that, it'd be a pretty quick and easy way to upset a lot of people.
of course this scheme is completely idiotic
but if it convinces idiots to upload pictures they shouldn't, with the false sense of security that they will eventually go away, that's more embarrassing pictures for us to gawk at
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This is just a rehash of the same technology that was used to make expiring email. Omniva/Disappearing Inc. was doing this at the turn of millennium and just like with this technology, the point wasn't to prevent a moderately determined person from making copies of the emails by doing a screen capture, printing the email (there was actually some cute technology "preventing" even that), or transcribing the damn thing. It was to apply document retention policy of corporations and government industries. And of course to raise money from gullible investors. I mean, after all, there are trillions of images being uploaded to Facebook every few seconds...
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
... on heise.de when it was posted there some week or two ago. The stupid plugin costs money, too! 10 Euros per month, if you can believe that.
Link to Heise article (google translation)
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
why don't they just: send the image if the expiration date has not passed! and my first rule of copying data is: if you can read it, you can copy it, so it will be broken pretty quickly
this is almost as amusing as the 'not printable' wwf pdf format
If this could ever actually work - which it can't - I wouldn't want my digital photos to expire anyway. BUT if anybody actually does want this, why doesn't facebook just delete them after the expiry date?
This opens the door for a new nvidia chipset to decrypt the encrypted images so that they can't be displayed w/o connection through an encrypted HDMI connection. It will be just like video overlays if you try to do a screen capture.
Google Images. FAIL.
Havign read the 2nd link, I'm amazed at
1.) Kneejerk 1: Posting genuinely idiotic or destructive behaviour on the internet on a whim, stuff that will make you look like an idiot,
(for instance posting pics of yourself partying, publicly, on Facebook of all places, when off-work on a different pretext). At least set the viewing permissions correctly..
and
2.) Kneejerk-2: How the narrow-minded and the puritanical now have the perfect tool to enforce conformity over people's private
or at least non-work-related time, by the simple expedient of denying them livelihood or career - I'm thinking of the woman denied her degree over some trivial prank.
This is no different in principal to what dictators have always done, except now the Holy Inquisistion is employers, trainers and administrators of universities.
This is reducing freedom by a thousand cuts.
P.S. I would still vote for the woman posing by the firetruck, if I thought she she could do the job she campaigned for. I wouldn't vote for her because of that photo, but I wouldn't vote against her for it, either. Unlike some, I accept that people have sexuality.
Directly after installation https://keyserver.x-pire.net/ is the default for keyserver. Usually this is fine and you do not have to change this.
How do we setup a keyserver ourselves? Wouldn't it be even more pointless if we entrust the keys to the x-pire guys? Now they can sit back and see the embarrassing images rolling in.
*pulls idiot-face at self in mirror*