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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
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.
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.
McAfee has been spending 100% of their efforts on not making any friends for years.
Start
Magnifier
100% Zoom
Views > Full screen
Print Screen
Start
Paint
Paste
But that still leaves running it in a virtual machine and taking a snapshot that way.
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.
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.
* 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.
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!..."
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.
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
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.
* 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.
Dunno about you, but I stuck a bag of Insta-Pop in the m-wave as soon as I read the summary.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
So do McAfee--this group just doesn't include any of the users.
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...
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.