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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
What if you run everything in a virtual machine and take a screenshot of the VM window?
Sounds like snake-oil to me.
The article was a bit misleading, but from watching the video its just a facebook app which blocks print screens/copy paste of images you upload through it. Doubt it will take long for tools which bypass this, and chances are the photos will stay within mcaffee social share rather than the general facebook albums, which will prevent a large number of people from using it.
How does a project like this even ship without at least one person involved saying "Hey, wait..."?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Just to be clear...
You're going to take a picture of the picture on your PC monitor with your phone, then you're going to drive to an internet cafe to put the picture in an email (presumably) to yourself, then drive back home again to save it?
If this is what it would take for you to defeat this, then I'd say the joke's on you.
* The photos are hosted on a McAfee server
Oh, won't that be enteraining when the central DB eventually gets hacked and all the photos are released.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Sorry, McAfee AV will still be crap.
It's biggest problem isn't the fact that their virus definitions miss the most virii, worms, and malware of any that I have used. It's the fact that their software tends to kludge up a system and break compatibility all to frequently. Then there are the times when it does find a virus, and instead of removing it, just pegs the CPU at 100% and does nothing to stop the problem. I would find this last situation reasonable with some virus truly hardcore at ripping out AV, but I was able to remove the last one by just deleting the cached .exe from the system and rebooting. Sucked that it took 10 minutes to get that far because the McAfee processes made the system slow as a 386.
Intel made a bad buy. Even Microsoft had the foresight to just start fresh and develop AV on their own instead of buying a pile of steaming poo to polish. I've felt bad for most of the companies McAfee has bought out in the past. Too often the response to support requests is, "Buy the new McAfee edition of the product you already own." even when McAfee hasn't held the company long enough to have gotten farther than the rebranding process.