Is this "our screens have poor viewing angles, so we're going to make them worse and call it a feature?"
You can hack a PC just by looking at it, say 3M and HP
Top security minds at HP have discovered that if you look at a PC, you can read what's on its screen. And if you're not the intended reader of that screen, it constitutes “visual hacking”, a terrifying menace that Must Be Stopped. The good news is it Can Be Stopped With This One Amazing Sheet Of Plastic, aka a 3M “Privacy …
COMMENTS
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Thursday 15th October 2015 16:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: This is far cheaper...
"True, but that's harder to take with you when you're travelling and I expect it's only going to take someone wearing polarised sunglasses to undo your security.."
I plan to start a Kickstarter for a mobile phone secure screen that consists of two sheets of polarising material glued together with the polarisations 90 degrees apart. I've just tested it and it seems to work admirably.
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Thursday 15th October 2015 07:55 GMT saif
Firewall
And unencrypted verbal communications can be easily intercepted by any one in the same room. Ultimately what is required is a firewall at the universal ports not just at the the digital to analogue transformation layer...the interface between man and machine. We need the firewall between man and man. Speaking gibberish or Welsh might do it.
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Thursday 15th October 2015 08:24 GMT Alien8n
Re: Firewall
My father in law used to work at NatWest and they had an issue with their Swansea branch many years ago, so they sent one of their head honchos over to sort the branch out. Every time he walked into a room the staff would switch from English to Welsh so he couldn't understand what they were talking about. Imagine their horror when on the final day he says goodbye to them in fluent Welsh. Turned out that despite no longer having the accent he was Welsh as well...
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Thursday 15th October 2015 12:54 GMT TitterYeNot
Re: Firewall
"And unencrypted verbal communications can be easily intercepted by any one in the same room"
This is known in the black-hat trade as aural hacking.
Definitely not to be confused with oral hacking, which is something else entirely (and may or may not involve someone wearing a poorly fitted dental brace.)
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Thursday 15th October 2015 08:28 GMT Warm Braw
As an alternative
You could get out your knitting needles,
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Thursday 15th October 2015 08:32 GMT Alister
the unintended consequence of making it harder to gather around a PC to check out that really funny new thing on YouTube.
...and the further unintended consequence that the number of internal emails suddenly rises, as people send each other the link to the new You Tube Funny, instead of gathering round one notebook...
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Thursday 15th October 2015 08:50 GMT Alien8n
One company I worked at one of the senior managers came in complaining that his laptop was really slow. A quick search for all emails with attachments confirmed the issue was the thousands of emails containing videos and pictures. Including a rather inordinate amount of porn that was being emailed to him by one of the machine operators. We hit delete and told him not to be so stupid again or he'd be losing his redundancy pay (the only reason they weren't reported to HR was the fact that both he and the operator were leaving 2 months later on redundancy and the redundancy pay was in the 4 to 5 figure range). Same company had another user who we didn't report for downloading music and movies from file sharing sites. Turned out the IT manager had his download folder set up as a network share to save him from downloading the same files...
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Thursday 15th October 2015 13:01 GMT Michael Strorm
Please... won't someone think of Corbis?
Don't they realise that this would decimate stock image libraries' investment in office types crowding round a corporate laptop?
(Fact: Such images constitute approximately 47% of all stock photos in existence. Another 35% consists of groups of socialising woman apparently laughing at something highly amusing one of them has just said, while showing off their perfect white teeth and- in a very odd coincidence- none of them happen to have their eyes shut nor have been caught in an awkward-looking mid-expression change, like always happens when anyone normal tries taking such a photo).
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Thursday 15th October 2015 08:32 GMT xeroks
virtual monitors
A more effective solution might be the use of an occulus/hololens type device to present the data to a single user.
I don't believe anything out there is capable enough as a monitor replacement, but I wonder if HP have any devices like this in the pipeline. This might be the first step in a bigger marketing campaign.
Or a cheap trick to make a quick buck.
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Saturday 17th October 2015 04:07 GMT Cryo
Re: virtual monitors
"Not yet, but they are improving. There are Oculus prototypes that are full 1080p, plus for business purposes you don't need stereoscopy; a single screen, even a Cardboard solution with a sufficiently-high-res smartphone will suffice."
The VR headsets like the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and other upcoming models that have been getting attention lately probably wouldn't be great as monitor replacements for at least the near future, simply because they're designed more for spreading their resolution out over a wide field of view. You don't need a 100+ degree viewing angle for a virtual monitor, so under that usage scenario, much of their resolution would be wasted. For a privacy-minded head-mounted display that isn't concerned with putting people in immersive 3D environments, a much narrower field of view with pixels more tightly packed together would probably be ideal.
And even if you're not sending different images to each eye, you'll still need a separate display for each eye (or half of a larger display dedicated to each eye) since optics aren't going to let you view the entirety of a screen right in front of your face with both eyes at once. And again, the design of these headsets that use a single smartphone screen divided in two are more suited to providing a wide field of view than they are a sharp central resolution. And of course, you probably won't want to be using a bulky solution with a screen much larger than you need for any considerable length of time.
For "business purposes" you would be better off with a headset that makes use of two much-smaller screens that could be optimally positioned in front of each eye. And if you plan to use the thing in a public place, you'll probably prefer an augmented reality solution to something designed for virtual reality. What good is the security gained from using the headset if you're getting pickpocketted in the process?
I agree that the tech is improving though, and within a few years or so, there may be AR headsets that are not much bulkier than a pair of glasses, that can provide dual-screen output suitable as a proper monitor replacement.
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Saturday 17th October 2015 08:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: virtual monitors
"And even if you're not sending different images to each eye, you'll still need a separate display for each eye (or half of a larger display dedicated to each eye) since optics aren't going to let you view the entirety of a screen right in front of your face with both eyes at once."
True. That's why Cardboard positions the phone several inches in front of you, thus putting it within the view of both eyes (either directly or by half-silver optics). It's also IIRC less disorienting than a dual-screen solution since you can have screen mismatch as well as the extremely close-up focus that can strain eyes.
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Thursday 15th October 2015 15:56 GMT BlindProgrammer
Re: virtual monitors
I have the solution. As a totally blind programmer I don't even have a monitor. Nobody can hear my screen-reader through my headphones. If everybody else did the same for security's sake maybe somebody would give me a job on the back of my 25 years experience and not care about my blindness
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Thursday 15th October 2015 12:33 GMT Kubla Cant
Would be useful if they integrated this into screens, allowed sections of it to be turned on and off by software and then turned it on over password fields only.
Useful, but only when you're logging in to a system that displays the password characters. If you're still using something like that then people spying on your screen is probably the least of your problems. I'd guess that the last such system became obsolete in 1980.
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Thursday 15th October 2015 16:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "Or "mal-looking" as it may one day come to be known"
Hacking is entirely the wrong description of the problem - hence the ridicule.But nevertheless a real problem and if we can come up with a better solution than a grotty piece of scratched plastic that we slide over our svelte laptop screens, so much the better.
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