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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.
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.
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 !
The latest example of managers who don't get that computers work by copying data.
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.
...someone uses Noscript or turns off javascript manually.
Then all bets are off. Right click to save. Bam. Where is your god now?
--
BMO
McAfee has been spending 100% of their efforts on not making any friends for years.
This demo is kind of sad because they have a division that really does understand security. It's made up primarily of people and products that were acquired (IntruShield through IntruVert and Sidewinder/Firewall Enterprise through Secure Computing), but they're still McAfee at least in name.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
However, some version of McAfee is usually pre-installed on a lot of crapware computers.
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.
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.
Are AT&T's data rates really that high??
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Here's the write-up: http://blog.securitee.org/?p=241
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.
i'd rather have mcafee make me a sandwich or something and leave security and privacy to the experts.
I'd like to have that engraved on a plaque that I could present to people who tell me their machines must be secure because they run McAfee.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
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! ;-)
Why not upload it to your main PC directly? Or is the software really so smart that it blacklists any similar pictures that happen to be flying by?
My canon is so big that I need a tripod to rest it on.
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:"
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.
MSAV in 1993 was a branded Central Point Software anti-virus (tech that would later go into early Symantec and then Norton AV products). Microsoft AntiSpyware (renamed to Windows Defender) came from buying the GIANT Company Anti-spyware program. So Microsoft has both borrowed other poo and purchased a steaming pile to polish before here.
What they're current using started as Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool, and kept picking up features until it became viable as the standalone Microsoft Security Essentials. I don't know how much of the older piles of poo were added to this new thing. I think it is fair to credit Microsoft for saying "let's start over" with experience learned to build something better at that time, something the other AV vendors seemingly never do. They only got there after polishing at least one pile first though.