Monday, September 19, 2005

Camera and video-camera phones (like my Treo 650) already pose a security risk. Phones which run an OS and are essentially small computers escalate that risk. Recently, while visiting the Giza plateau outside Cairo, a scanner somewhere in the vicinity of the guard booths detected my Treo, identified it as a mini-computer (distinct from the many cellphones in pockets all around me) , and a guard promptly emerged from a dusty hut and asked to examine it.

Camphones have been challenging corporate security for sometime. Sensitive documents are easily passed around by photographing the pages and walking out with the phone in one's pocket. No company yet bans celphones from entering or exiting, but the security staff will look at everything else in your bags. More powerful still is the ability to easily "scan" in documents that can be immediately converted to their original document formats.... and that is what this new innovation in celphone technology may be able to do. That raises the ante on information sharing, competitive intelligence, and several other types of security hazards.
Here it is:


Date: September 19, 2005 12:26:00 AM PDT
To: slashdotnews@hyperreal.org
Subject: Camera Phone As High-precision Scanner
Link: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/19/0230251
Posted by: ScuttleMonkey, on 2005-09-19 05:58:00 from the gadget-goodness dept.[1]

christchurch writes "The software, developed by NEC and the Nara Institute of Science and
Technology (NAIST) in Japan, goes furtherthan existing cellphone camera technology by allowing entire documentsto be scanned simply by [2]sweeping the phone across the page. As reported, an A4 sized page takes only 3 to 5 seconds to scan, and it is causing copyright concerns."

References1. http://christchurch.iclod.com/2. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns? =dn7998&feedId=online-news_rss20

posted by Cheryl @ 7:39 PM