Intel's Demos McAfee Social Protection, A Condom For Your Digital Life
During the Day Two keynote address at the Intel Developer 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”. Much of the talk was geared towards software developers and the desire to code once and deploy across a variety of hardware platforms, which of course lead to a long discussion on the benefits and virtues HTML 5, which Intel obviously is firmly behind.
During the security-centric portion of the keynote, however, Renee brought out a rep from Intel’s McAfee division to show off a beta release of the McAfee Social Protection app.
Intel's Renee James, Intel's GM of Software and Services
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 to their 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. Here’s a quick video taken during the keynote that shows the technology in action…
Probably one of the more entertaining moments in today's morning IDF keynote was when the McAfee Social Protection demo rep claimed, "McAfee Social Protection - It's like a condom for your digital life." The audience could relate to that concept pretty easily and it brought on hard guffaw from the crowd. All too often, folks just don't practice "safe Facebook" we guess...
McAfee Social Protection App Beta Demo
In all seriousness though, we actually installed the app in a vein attempt to defeat it with screen grab utilities and various quick and dirty attempts to circumvent the technology and grab a region of the screen where a target picture resided. Impressively enough, apps like Hypersnap, Snagit and a simple print screen operation only resulted in a black region appearing in any of these utilities. We also tried poking around at browser image caches only to find stored images were watermarked with the McAfee Security logo.
And so, it appears Intel's investment in the now 240 engineer-strong McAfee Security business unit is busy innovating, and bringing new, useful solutions to the market place beyond just the traditional virus and malware arena.
