Skip to main content

3M Privacy Filters Update

I have blogged about 3M's privacy filters before and their gold filter still remains, in my opinion, the best privacy filter on the market. If you want to find out more about that one and why you need a privacy filter, see my previous blog post "Why do I need a privacy filter? (3M's new Vikuiti Gold Privacy Filter)". I also blogged about their mobile phone privacy filter.

The problem with their mobile phone privacy filter last year was that it was only available in their standard grey louvered filter, so didn't work well with accelerometer phones that can be used in portrait or landscape modes - you had to pre-select which orientation you wanted to use your smartphone in. Also, the light transmission wasn't as good as the gold filter nor was the touch quite as good after applying it.

Well, they've addressed this and lanuched a new filter for mobile phones and slates at InfoSecurity Europe. The filter is now significantly thinner with excellent touch response and better light transmission - they also have a clarity measure which makes the screen easier to read with the filter (it does kind of work, having seen an iPad with only half the screen covered). They also have (in the lab) a grey louvered filter in two planes. This stops people from being able to read the screen if they aren't directly in front of it and deals with mobile phones and slate devices that can be used in the two orientations. This filter isn't available yet, but 3M told me that they were targeting the end of this year for these new filters. 3M also assured me that the new filter with double-louvers will be no thicker than the current one. This, combined with 3M's great adhesive that allows for a simple application, will make 3M's new privacy filters for mobile phones and slates the one to have, especially as they double as screen protectors.

Unfortunately they only do pre-cut versions for iPhones, iPads and HTC phones at the moment. If you don't have one of these then you will have to either cut it yourself or get a third party to cut one for you.

Comments

Popular Posts

Trusteer or no trust 'ere...

...that is the question. Well, I've had more of a look into Trusteer's Rapport, and it seems that my fears were justified. There are many security professionals out there who are claiming that this is 'snake oil' - marketing hype for something that isn't possible. Trusteer's Rapport gives security 'guaranteed' even if your machine is infected with malware according to their marketing department. Now any security professional worth his salt will tell you that this is rubbish and you should run a mile from claims like this. Anyway, I will try to address a few questions I raised in my last post about this. Firstly, I was correct in my assumption that Rapport requires a list of the servers that you wish to communicate with; it contacts a secure DNS server, which has a list already in it. This is how it switches from a phishing site to the legitimate site silently in the background. I have yet to fully investigate the security of this DNS, however, as most

Security Through Obscurity

I have been reminded recently, while looking at several products, that people still rely on the principle of 'security through obscurity.' This is the belief that your system/software/whatever is secure because potential hackers don't know it's there/how it works/etc. Although popular, this is a false belief. There are two aspects to this, the first is the SME who thinks that they're not a target for attack and nobody knows about their machines, so they're safe. This is forgivable if misguided and false. See my post about logging attack attempts on a home broadband connection with no advertised services or machines. The second set of people is far less forgivable, and those are the security vendors. History has shown that open systems and standards have a far better chance of being secure in the long run. No one person can think of every possible attack on a system and therefore they can't secure a system alone. That is why we have RFCs to arrive at ope

How Reliable is RAID?

We all know that when we want a highly available and reliable server we install a RAID solution, but how reliable actually is that? Well, obviously, you can work it out quite simply as we will see below, but before you do, you have to know what sort of RAID are you talking about, as some can be less reliable than a single disk. The most common types are RAID 0, 1 and 5. We will look at the reliability of each using real disks for the calculations, but before we do, let's recap on what the most common RAID types are. Common Types of RAID RAID 0 is the Stripe set, which consists of 2 or more disks with data written in equal sized blocks to each of the disks. This is a fast way of reading and writing data to disk, but it gives you no redundancy at all. In fact, RAID 0 is actually less reliable than a single disk, as all the disks are in series from a reliability point of view. If you lose one disk in the array, you've lost the whole thing. RAID 0 is used purely to speed up dis