Security quotes of the week

In a move that seems Big Brother-ish, Apple has a patent in the works that could use voice and facial recognition technology to activate a "kill switch" on its popular iPhone, shutting it down when hackers "jailbreak" or unlock the phone to install unauthorized programs on it, or try to steal information from an unsuspecting iPhone user.

Apparently the FBI doesn't quite recognize that "Big Brother" is the government.

Although these tools need to be created by competent people, they are intended for mass use (point and click) and so copyright infringement by the masses will always be easy. They will not even know that the hurdles were there, because the tools will jump over them.

Fortuitously, the DCMS have provided an illustration of this in their publishing of the OFCOM report...

[...] What the DCMS [Department for Culture Media and Sport] have done (following in the footsteps of many other incompetents) is to black out the text they consider to be sensitive. Removing this blacking out is simple but tedious ... you can get out a copy of Acrobat and change the text colour to white — or you can just cut and paste the black bits into Notepad and see the text.

ShareMeNot is a Firefox add-on designed to prevent third-party buttons (such as the Facebook "Like" button or the Twitter "tweet" button) embedded by sites across the Internet from tracking you until you actually click on them. Unlike traditional solutions, ShareMeNot does this without completely removing the buttons from the web experience.