If Your Hard Drive Could Testify ...
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The government contends that it is perfectly free to inspect the hard drive of every laptop that enters the country in the same way it looks through suitcases.
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Amazing, but ... Comment This week I attended an event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View that celebrated the golden anniversary of the IBM RAMAC 305, the first hard disk drive storage system.â¦
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Got backup? How about a new 1-terabyte drive for $70 off the usual price?
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You'd be surprised what search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live Search record and retain in their vast data banks.
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The last time I browsed the selection of desktops in a computer store, I came down with a case of instant deja vu. Each time I'd spot a thoughtful feature on one company's PC -- say, both USB and FireWire ports on the front or a full set of memory-card slots -- I would look at the machine to its right or left and spot the exact same item.
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Buy a Toshiba PC, and get some XDR memory.
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A new kind of gadget can save your data -- and your hide -- when your laptop is damaged or lost.
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First, thanks for the great comments on yesterday's post about Apple and the hard disk of my MacBook. People were universally positive and helpful, and I can say I really learned some really important things as a result of the discussion. First, the cost of the data on the hard disk swamps the value of the value of the disk and even the value of the computer. There was source code on the computer, and other information, which if it fell into the wrong hands, could cause some serious problems for me. I have no agreement with Apple that covers the security or privacy of the data. As far as I know they think they own the contents of the disk as well as the disk itself. The experience I had with them actually makes me think they probably do feel its theirs. This from a company that takes the security of its own private information very seriously, they seem to have almost no regard for the security of its customers' information. You have no control over when a hard disk will crash, or any foreknowledge of when it's even likely to crash. So there's no way to protect against this kind of security issue. And that's what it is. What kind of sense does it make to invest in firewalls, and of what value is Apple's claim that Macs are inherently more secure, when all the data on one of my computers is now completely out of my control forever? I'm not so concerned about the privacy issues, but I could imagine that other people might be. And if identity thieves are not aware of this backdoor way to get access to private information, how long before they are? Security experts always warn us that obscurity is not a good strategy for security. So what to do?  Basically I've given up on trying to get Apple to do the right thing and give me my disk back. Some people at the Emeryville store are well-itentioned, and are just naive about the problems that can come when you trust people with all your data. Others just don't care. Either way it seems unlikely that I'm going to get it back, and even if I do, it's been out of my control for too long.  I'm going to go through the tedious job of changing the passwords on all my sensitive online accounts. That was overdue anyway. And next time a laptop blows its hard disk, I'm either going to replace it myself and shred the old disk, the same way I'd shred any sensitive documents before throwing them out, or just throw away the whole computer. I know this isn't green, but there seems to be no other course that's anything close to secure. And always be aware that you could lose a laptop, or it could be stolen. So far it seems that this is not yet an identity theft concern, but you can't be sure, and it won't be long before it is.  Thanks again for all the good info, advice and vibe.
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Backing up--your PC or your car--can be hard to do. This month's gadgets can help.
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Your work computer just suffered a major meltdown. Maybe the operating system failed, or a virus crashed the hard drive.
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Is your hard drive the land of the lost files? An experimental software program labels files with images that can be easily remembered.
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File-recovery software can resurrect every piece of porn and propaganda you've emptied out of your computer's Recycle Bin. It looks as if they're removed from the hard drive, but the 1s and 0s of the "deleted" files still exist. Wired's How To Wiki shows you a couple of ways to leave no trace behind.
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Blog: According to Microsoft officials, this new solution could solve all of your backup problems and help you immediately restore your entire system to an earlier day if your hard drive dies.
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Digital photocopiers use hard drives to store data. If not properly secured, they can be vulnerable to data thieves. By the Associated Press.
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Hoping to get some work done on a recent train trip to New York, I kicked back, opened my laptop, and clicked on Microsoft Excel. Up popped a prompt asking for the original program disk. Same thing with Word and PowerPoint. Nothing would run.
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Western Digtial's latest external drive tops out at one terabyte. In Gear Factor.
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(InfoWorld) - Hard drives full of confidential data are still turning up on the second-hand market, researchers have reported. Investigations carried out on behalf of BT by the University of Glamorgan in the U.K., Edith Cowan University in Australia, and Longwood University in the U.S., found that 37 percent of drives surveyed had traces of personal data on them. Damningly, this figure is much the same as it was for the same surveys undertaken by the universities in each of the last two years, suggesting that either companies are ignoring the issue or simply lack the tools to adequately wipe data before resale. Sensitive information retrieved included salary details, financial data of specific companies, credit card numbers, medical data, visa applications, details of online purchases, and inevitably, online pornography. The sample totalled 350 hard drives acquired in online auctions. "Given the level of exposure that the subjects of security and identity theft has received in recent times, and the availability of suitable tools to ensure the safe disposal of information, it is difficult to understand why disks are still not being effectively cleaned before they are disposed off," said BT's security research head, Dr Andy Jones. "When organizations dispose off surplus and obsolete computers and hard disks, they must ensure that adequate procedures are in place to destroy any data and also to check that the procedures that are in place are effective -- whether they are handled by internal resources or through a third party contractor," he said. The full report -- which has yet to be made publically available -- reveals that buying second-hand disks is an unreliable way to get hold of storage. Of the 133 disks bought in the U.K., 44 percent of them didn't even work. But of those that did, 19 percent had enough information on them to identify the organization from which they had come, 65 percent had enough data to identify named people, and 17 percent contained "illicit" data. Techworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.