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Intel Demos McAfee Social Protection
MojoKid writes "During the Day Two keynote address at Intel Developer's Forum, Renee James, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Intel's Software & Services Group, talked about software development, security and services in an 'age of transparent computing.' During the security-centric portion of the keynote, James brought out a rep from Intel's McAfee division to show off a beta release of their McAfee Social Protection app. If you're unfamiliar, McAfee Social Protection is a soon to be released app and browser plug-in for Facebook that gives users the ability to securely share their photos. As it stands today, if you upload a photo to Facebook, anyone viewing that photo can simply download it or take a screen capture and alter or share it wherever they want, however they want. With McAfee Social Protection installed though, users viewing your images will not be able to copy or capture them. In quick testing, various attempts with utilities like Hypersnap, Snagit or a simple print screen operation to circumvent the technology only resulted in a black screen appearing in the grab. Poking around at browser image caches resulted in finding stored images that were watermarked with the McAfee Security logo."
* takes out camera phone and copies that supposedly uncopyable image
But you can take a photo of it with your high-res 8mp iPhone camera.
So it prevents the person with McAfee Social Protection installed from saving images from Facebook? I don't get the purpose of this, unless they expect it to become government mandated to be installed on all computers.
What if you run everything in a virtual machine and take a screenshot of the VM window?
Sounds like snake-oil to me.
It must be some type of DRM system. It can't really work without your friends needing to install some piece of software just to view the images.
In any event, it's still easily circumventable by taking a picture of your screen.
In order for this to work, do you have to have the plugin loaded? There is an image transferred to the computer- it can be copied. Hell, it has to be copied in order to be viewed.
If it's displayed on my screen, I can capture it.
End of story.
It costs 20-50% of your resources at any moment to prevent you from making friends?
Hi, we're Intel McAfee. Our NEW built-into-the-hardware tech DISABLES photo downloading!
With this new tech, nobody except yourself can download your pics! If your friends also bought Intel, then you cannot download their pics either!
So, wanted to check out hot pics of your classmates? Yup, can't download them? What's that? We defeated the point of facebook and many purposes of the internet? Noooo, please don't buy AMD instead! Noooo, don't buy ARM please !!!
Intel Inside: can't download pictures !
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-Cz8btbroP6Q/UFEhDZP216I/AAAAAAAKA_Q/aVZGOnND7-Q/s1091/CameraZOOM-20120912185414906.jpg
The latest example of managers who don't get that computers work by copying data.
1996 sent a memo. it claims patent infringement and wants credit for the idea of blocking right click with javascript in the browser. "security through annoyance".
i'd rather have mcafee make me a sandwich or something and leave security and privacy to the experts.
Is it April already?
FRAPS (a game recording tool) can take screenshots of the raw framebuffer contents.
They really haven't thought this through, but I spose it would stop causal copying.
I can just take a photo from the screen with my phone.
Then drive downtown to the nearest internet cafe, upload the pic to my email and download from there to my main PC.
...someone uses Noscript or turns off javascript manually.
Then all bets are off. Right click to save. Bam. Where is your god now?
--
BMO
Me and my free (thank you AT&T) crappy camera cellphone can defeat that in the time it takes me to click 'snap'
The downside is that viewing those images at all requires the plug-in and the FB app. The only way for it to work reliably is to store the image on McAfee's servers and only serve up the unblurred image if the browser is running the plug-in and isn't interfering with it's operation and they have the FB app allowed on their account. If they do otherwise, then someone can get at the image without the protection present and save it. So it's going to be a fight between friends who're having problems with the plug-in or who blocked the app as malware who you want to see your pictures vs. protecting the pictures.
And of course it won't do anything to protect you from images you uploaded before you started using it, let alone images of you uploaded by other people who aren't using the app (like your friend who snapped a pic of you embarrassing yourself at that party last night and posted it from his cel-phone).
Start
Magnifier
100% Zoom
Views > Full screen
Print Screen
Start
Paint
Paste
For slow people like me, I think the parent means you could always take a picture of the monitor. However if so, he really meant "Defeated by a Camera" and said "Android" in a failed attempt to increase his e-penis.
The new Trojan!
It appears to watermark images and use some kind of applet (like Java or Flash?) to block simple screenshots. You need the addon to view the photos I believe. Of course an actual screenshot with a camera would defeat it, but there is obvious quality loss there.
It seems to me that noscript or turning JavaScript off might prevent you from seeing the image all together.
Remove camera-phone from pocket.
Aim at screen.
Shoot.
Upload to inter-tubes.
For the really old-school, there's always film.
How does a project like this even ship without at least one person involved saying "Hey, wait..."?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I cannot understand why people are listening to a company who sends out untested updates that disconnect tens of thousands of home customers and then has to backtrack and cost other companies and people a lot of money to fix McAfee's broken software. These are the same people who crashed millions of their business customers' computers with another untested update. You really want to get in bed with such a poorly managed company?
So pointless...
When I saw the name McAfee Social Protection I thought it was going to be an app that helped prevent me from exposing my social data more widely than I wanted to -- something that monitors Facebook (and other) security settings and warns me if something changes in how public any of my data is. Something like that would be truly useful because I don't want to have to keep up with the changing privacy policies and security settings of every site I put my data on.
I have a simpler and more effective way to keep private pictures private -- I literally keep them private and I don't post them on social networking or photo sharing sites.
Anything that can be viewed on the screen can be copied through the analog hole of just taking a photo of the screen so if it's viewable there's no way to keep it private. (though I'm sure some day all cameras will have built-in copy protection similar to what is used to prevent currency from being copied and all recording devices will use similar schemes to prevent copyrighted audio from being copied, thereby closing the analog hole)
That should eat up 1-2 cores on the cpu good thing that intel cpus have 4+ of them.
This is pointless software, just don't upload pictures you don't want everyone to see. Duh
Also everyone has a cellphone camera, they could simple hold it up and take a picture of your picture.
Sure you loose some quality, but does it really matter if that embarrassing photo of you is in pristine quality, it's still embarrassing.
People still use McAfee? Those poor SOBs.
Will it keep you from getting a social disease?
<rimshot badjoke="true"/>
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Not sure I get your joke exactly. I thought most of the folks around here were android fans. Oh well, yes my point was "Defeated by a Camera". I could have just as easily taken the photo with my Canon and used Canon in the comment also.
It looks like a tremendous pain in the butt to use, although some naiive people who don't understand computers might think it'll protect themselves from themselves.
FWIW, I"ve worked in a bank before, and they had some awful McAfee crud running on the client workstations where if you attempted to do a screen grab, it would overwrite the data on the clipboard with black pixels -- a pain in the arse when you're trying to do consulting or tech support. McAfee had some similarly annoying crudware installed on all the bank's machines, which only granted write access to USB keys unless they'd been encrypted and 'blessed' by the company's IT department.
Obnoxious garbage, designed to inconvenience users. I think there's a bit of Catholic hair-shirt thinking going on here: make the tools and processes as painful as possible, to make clients think they're doing something productive and virtuous, and justify the license fees they're paying the security software racket^H^H^H^H^H^Hindustry.
I'd hazard a guess that some sad, fat middle manager deep in the bowels of McAfee dreamt this up, hoping that turning security software from a product (with loads of free alternatives) into a hard-to-clone for-pay service would generate more revenue.
/me takes picture of screen with iPhone
and this idiocy is what they've got out of it so far? Where's all the "security-built-right-into-the-hardware" goodness they've been using to justify the acquisition?
If you don't want people to have a copy your photo, then don't share it in the first place. It's that simple. Once you publish, it's out, simple as that.
Why don't people understand these simple concepts?
No different than "Hey, Robert told me a secret--it's supposed to be just for me, so don't tell anyone else!..."
The lottery is a tax on people who do not understand math, McAfee is tax on people who do not understand computers.
I really like when people try to take something that fundamentally, logically can't work, and try to make it work. They end up with a half-assed solution that sort-of works on the surface, while giving people a false sense of security.
First of all:
1. If you don't want your photo to be "out there", don't publish it. There is technically no difference between copying it from the server to your laptop, copying it from your memory to the disk buffer, copying it from the disk buffer to your screen, or copying it from a file into an email. (Of course there are differences like RGB transformations and UUEncoding, but the point is, they are ALL copying). Even though to an end-user, "download", "copy", and "display" are different things, to a computer they are not. You can't stop one without stopping the others. It's not possible. This is why DRM is cracked over and over and over again. It's not that encryption can't be done well, it can. It's that you can't both encrypt something and prevent users from decrypting it, while simultaneously letting them "watch" or "listen" to it - because those things require (drum role...) *decrypting* it!!
2. The reality is, if you publish a photo, it's out. Not withstanding legal mechanisms, you don't get to "control" things once you release them out into the big bad world, that's just not how reality works. Anyone why is trying to sell you something that can change that is selling snake oil.
Anyway, I am very sure that the suggested solution of using a VM would work very nicely, just as it works nicely to let you share an iTunes library with your 400 closest friends. Beyond that, video drivers would probably work well. (Including the UltraVNC ones...)
Other Examples:
1. I remember some flaky PDF reader I had to use for a class that tried to do this kind of thing with their protected text-books a while back. If you took a screen-shot using the obvious methods, the part of the window where the text normally displayed had a pattern with their logo. I used a mirror video driver and a test script to flip the pages and take screen-shots, then used Gimp's batch mode to trim them all to the right size and made a nice new PDF.
2. Acrobat reader lets you print some encrypted PDFs, but not to a PDF printer. They didn't plan for Microsoft's PDF competitor, though, and it was easy enough to print to that, and then convert the result back to PDF.
3. Lotus Notes lets you "prevent forwarding", but you can easily take a screen-shot and then paste the previous mail back into Notes.
4. I had a TV tuner card, with wonderful software that tried to prevent you from using remote desktop type tools. They hard-coded the names of the programs it was looking for. Obviously, if you could run this program in some kind of sandbox and limit its access to see what's running, or use different tools, you could get around this limitation. You could also hex-edit the program to change the executable names, except that they checked for that. It was straight-forward, though, to edit the actual name of the EXE for the service that it was checking for, and boom... I could watch my Japanese TV from the USA via Remote Desktop...
None of the work-arounds above took any programming (well, unless you could a script for a testing tool) or genius, so obviously anyone who will invest time into actual programming will have an even easier time defeating this crap.
Someday all computers, tablets, cameras and phones will come with a hardware chip that will detect whatever watermark they embed into the image/video and prevent you from doing anything with the image other than seeing it. Even your camera will detect it and just not record anything. It's already around to some extent in the form of Macrovision, HDCP and other similar technologies that are used to prevent you from snapping screenshots or recording stuff off of your screen. After all, Intel does make lots of those chip things...
I'm a pessimist, so I'll give it 5 years.
Or someone will come up with a way to encode the image so that it can only be viewed through human eyes, but creating some fancy brain-pattern thing, any alteration of the image, and the pattern is destroyed, leaving only gibberish behind... that would be cool. But also scary.
I hope it isn't running for 30 years. A day will do the job.
Even if you were able to secure it against VM's,Printscreens, cache, or any other computer aided means, there's still not going to be able to stop someone taking out their camera of choice (either cell phone or dedicated) and taking a picture of the screen.
Sure, it's not a perfect screengrab, but it will work every time.
Here's the write-up: http://blog.securitee.org/?p=241
It wasn't a joke. When I first saw your post I didn't understand it as it was a picture of /. and the software only works on Facebook. I thought you where saying an Android can take a screen capture of /., so it could take one of Facebook. It took me a moment to get the Android camera reference. Though I could have left off the e-penis personal attack. Sorry about that.
Two problem scenarios: What happens when I get old and the pot stops helping with the glaucoma, and I get prosthetic eyeballs?
What happens when we can keep an eyeball alive as part of a machine indefinitely? That one I can answer; it involves a black market and a melon baller.
You want a photo to NOT be shared around the internet, so obviously the logical thing to do is to upload it to Facebook?
No, the logical thing to do is to not share it, rather than trusting it to a poor cousin of DRM when pretty much all DRM schemes have been cracked within days.
This one? Took someone a few minutes: http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3113117&cid=41320371
Security companies are becoming pathetic cash grabbing monsters. The contracting PC industry is hurting them because they can't peddle more and more antivirus licenses. Microsoft security essentials, windows firewall, and tools like Malwarebytes are hurting them because they are free and work better than their bloated expensive 'security' programs.
So now they're using weird FUD to try and break new markets, releasing 'antivirus' apps for mobile operating systems that do absolutely nothing: http://crave.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/android-security-apps-are-mostly-useless-says-report-50007252/
And now this bullshit...
Tried that. It was called the CPSA, Content Protection System Architecture. An umbrella group which would combine many different forms of DRM together in a manner which provided end-to-end protection for media. Included in it was an watermarking technology - CPSA compliant devices (Which would include all media devices) that detected the watermark on an analog or unencrypted input would refuse to display anything, because there was no legitimate means by which the watermarked content should be leaving the all-encrypted CPSA domain and thus could be reasonably assumed to be pirate.
CPSA itsself largely fell apart, but some of the technologies which once formed part of it are still around. CSS and HDCP were designed to be part of the CPSA, and it did incorporate some preexisting technologies like Macrovision and CGMS for backwards compatibility purposes.
Let me get this... They see a market for people wanting to share pictures to prevent people from saving them?
Doesn't make sense. Why share the pictures in the first place then?
Also, if the pictures can appear on your Facebook page, they can be saved. The browser has the data so can be saved just like it can be displayed. There are already tools to access the browsers rendering engine and its data so it will be trivial to do the same in a streamlined tool that makes it super-easy to save special pictures like this.
Actually, Facebook already tries to protect images by using the age-old method of displaying them as background images, but several extensions to Firefox already exist that adds a right-click option to "show background image", and then you can copy the URL or save the image or whatever - to your hearts content.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
There was a bit of a tiff about photobucket private account images being available for download and people collecting nude images from there and publishing them.
It was nothing new, just this particular site made it very easy. There are TONS of rather sad people who know plenty about computers and have nothing better to do then to try and find images other people don't want the entire world to share.
And stuff like this by McImpotent? Just a small challenge until someone writes a script to not just circumvent it, but make it easier to find the right material. After all, if you want to hide something, it is more interesting right?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You see the image on your computer means that it's already been copied to your computer and you can do whatever you want with it. Use a packet sniffer to get the data being passed, reverse engineer the applet to see what method/key it uses for decryption... or just run in a VM and take a screenshot. McAfee has reached a new low....
Stupid things like this are on par with perpetual motion machines when it comes to stupidity and shortsightedness.
In the case of scenario #1 you'll just be walking around looking at dark squares. The only images or videos you'll be able to see will be commercials! ;-)
My canon is so big that I need a tripod to rest it on.
...I don't use Facebook. :)
Sorry if it seems like a troll, but the easiest way to protect one's data from a social media environment is don't put it on social media, duh. This is the social media equivalent of DRM. But, I want my music and my movies and my email. I don't need FB.
So, go ahead FB, keep allowing to make it harder for people to use your service, throw ads in newsstreams, etc. Your pan is almost flashed anyway.
I've got something that's about as good and doesn't require a stupid plug-in and will work on ALL devices.
Put a transparent PNG over your photo! That will be almost as effective as this stupid plug-in idea.
I can see McAfee's software interfering with one's ability to save or print a photo that has a watermark it recognizes as a "do not copy" code, but I completely fail to see how it could impact my browser on a Linux box if I don't have their software installed.
Lord knows there is no shortage of sites that would have implemented such technology to stop my browser from doing a right-menu-save-as on pictures years ago if such a thing were possible.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
is +5 Funny.
Every trollism an AC posts is prefixed, in my mind, with "A. Coward whined, in a weak and cowardly voice:"
Challenge Accepted.
You FAIL, troll: I won't allow it -> http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3113117&cid=41322363
APK
P.S.=> Get over it troll - you screwed up, & I corrected you...
... apk