Slashdot Mirror
1GB USB Drive on a Keychain
sparcv9 writes "JMTek looks to be about ready to release a line of keychain-sized
USB drives, ranging in capacity from 16MB to 1GB. The
1GB models are a bit pricey at almost
$900US, but the 16, 32 and 64MB models are all under $100. These
devices require no external power supply, claim a data retention of 10 years, and are 'driverless' -- which means that the drives will work under Linux, according to JMTek (see the 'Operating Systems' row in the specs table.)"
This stuff has been on the market for a long time. Though it is cool stuff.
Though, all I want for yule is a solid state harddrive that's as fast as ram...
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Nothing would last ten years on my key chain. If I don't lose them I break them.
Dozings.com -- Its kinda funny... If you're as crazy as me.
Look Mom its my MP3 collection on my keychain... DOH I dropped it in the crapper.... well whats $900 between friends anyway.
Rule of Life Number 2: Remember, it can all go to hell at any minute. --Jimmy Buffet
According to the product spec page:
67mm w/cap x 20mm x 9mm
60mm w/o cap x 20mm x 9mm
I'm not sure they have anything more than prototypes at the moment, but this is still a pretty nifty advance for people who need more storage for digital video and digital photography.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
IBM has had the same thing out now for a while... I have one.
r od uctDisplay?cntrfnbr=1&prmenbr=1&prnbr=SCC4513&cntr y=840&lang=en_US
Check out the 8mb model for $25...
http://commerce.www.ibm.com/cgi-bin/ncommerce/P
Think of the opportunities for corporate espionage with these type of things. Is there a way to disable USB mass-storage devices in XP or 2000?
I accidentally locked my drive in the car!
I am skeptical aboutthat claim. Something is needed to read and write to the drive. Plaus the line at the bottom of one of the pages:
"* Windows 98 Drivers will be available for download"
My guess is that it may use an exhisting driver, or the package you buy has one.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
if they would market a couple of portable MP3 players that could stream right from one of these. Not only mp3 players, but anything that requires portable storage.. digital cameras with video, etc.
visit my free wallpaper collection, wp.erasei.com
I've got one of the IBM keychain dealies. It's only 8mb, but it's actually quite handy for data transfers. My parents have a slow modem (as opposed to a fast one? anyway) at their house and no CD burner. Sometimes I have to get some work done there and the 8mb of the IBM fits all of my Excel sheets just fine.
While 8mb has been fine for the 6 months I've had the thing, of course these new releases will force me to upgrade.
On thing though, its a serious Pain In The Ass to try and plug one of these things in blind. I've got a USB hub at home, but they really aren't all that common yet.
Pete
The sole purpose of the Internet is to get porn and bomb making plans into the hands of children.
That's because Win98 doesn't support the USB mass-storage standard. Win2K, XP, and most BSD's do... Microsoft laggin behind... who'd a thunk it?
Rule of Life Number 2: Remember, it can all go to hell at any minute. --Jimmy Buffet
or three times the size of my notebook drive, I'll get one.
Your twenty favorite movies on your keychain.
Hello? Tech support?
I've locked my hard drive in my car! p?
In Soviet Russia you dant have to put up with these crappy jokes
For $900 why not buy a PDA... or two? More functional, more storage space, and you're less likely to lose it. It's just ridiculous, and I don't see anybody buying it except to say, "Hey! Look what I got!"
No sig for you.
these guys have the worst kind of popup possible. One of those things that sits behind all your brower windows and won't let you focus it, forcing you to quit the browser. Please, for the same of all thats good in the world, take this story down until they remove it.
the site's a bit low on details, no? i want a bit more tech info. for example, if it's driverless, why list the three(Win32, MacOS, and Linux) OS's they "support" at all? shouldn't anything with USB drivers work? and, oh, why're they making Win32 drivers available, if it's driveress?
personally, i'll hold out for a firewire version. transfering up to 1GB at USB speeds is a bit slow for me.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
But I really don't see what it's good for. Storing lots of stuff? CD-R or CD-RW; your computer probably has a drive already, and you can stash more data than even the 1/2 GB drive. Holding encryption keys? You want something a lot smaller, cheaper and more rugged. Having something neat to put in your pocket? Okay, but that's not going to sell lots of them.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
According to their specs, this thing runs "driverless" on Win98SE, Me, 2000, XP / Mac OS 8.6 ~ 10.1 / Linux 2.4. I assume that just means you mount it and you're good to go?
One thing the specs didn't touch on was how many times the "drive" can be written to? I know that memory like this has a limited life, similar to a digital camera. I think this is a good idea, but it would be a pain to plug this thing in the BACK of the computer, just to access your work. (Yes, most computers still have the USB port in the back.)
also, it's a pity that we are so close to usb 2.0 becoming a vialbe solution. I guess speed is not that important to most people, but i would prefer a firewire or USB2 keychain drive - the cost to build one would be about the same.
So does this compete in the market with zip disks, cd-r's, floppy disks, clik! disks, and portable usb hard drives? seems like a pretty tight market to me...
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
All USB drives are "driverless" because the USB spec details the interface to a "USB Mass Storage Device". Each OS only has to implement one USB storage device driver, and then all USB drives will work on it. Linux's can be found here.
Various companies make them (flash USB key drives), they are a VERY nice solution for sneakerneting, however the reliability sometimes SUCKS (typical consumer grade, not tested before shipping).
We ordered 2 of em from a different company, one worked fine and dandy, the other had a bad connection somewhere internally and would crash the USB bus and only mount about 1/8 of the time. They were $80 each for 64 MB versions (a good price, mind you), but next time, we will only buy locally, so that returns can be much easier.
Test your net with Netalyzr
USB defines a generic storage device. A wide range of products, from actual harddrives to pseudo-drives can be used without any *additional* device drivers. This is why Win98 needs an update -- it didn't come with the generic storage device drivers.
If you thought lost keys were bad before just wait! Now you can lose the car keys and the Laptop HD all at the SAME TIME!. Please order today and for only 3 easy payments of 299.99 it can be yours today!
Vote early. Vote often. Vote CowboyNeal.
I wonder if there's any security mechanism for these things to discourage theft and protect the data in the event of loss. Imagine how many lunch hour thieves would wander through the office pulling these things out of USB ports otherwise.
Please donate your spare CPU cycles to help fight cancer and other diseases
These are teensy little flash memory cards with USB connectors and IDE-over-USB emulation like most of today's flash-memory technologies.
The prices are the same or a smidgen higher than the same size CompactFlash, Smartmedia, Memory Stick or MMC cards.
And they've been out for more than a year, though the 512MB and 1GB models are pretty recent. The idea is they're an alternative to shuttling a small batch of files around on a Zip disk or such, or burning a CD.
As for actual hard drives, for half that $900 figure you can get a PC Card drive for your laptop that holds 5GB though like IBM Microdrives it's obviously a bit more delicate. And you can get pocket-sized 30GB Firewire and USB 2 drives for the same $400 or so these days.
What doesn't get posted to Slashdot these days? When will we be hearing about someone discovering Dim Sum? Or asking for resources on learning how to drive a stick-shift?
Anyone notice the data transfer rates? Is that a limitation of USB or the drive itself?
The AC.
carry all the tools of your trade on your key-chain.....never leave home without your full set of tools and apps! no more CD's to lug around.
No sig here...
Sounds like a good, cynical business model--very fragile yet expensive products target-marketed to savvy techies with high disposable incomes.
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
Since when does McAfee produce hardware?
I can already stick a cdrw in my pocket
Uninnovate - Only the finest in engineering.
M-Systems DiskOnKey seems to offer the exact same features. They're great geek gifts since they cost around $40-$50 for a 16MB version and, like this product, don't need drivers (except for win98). Works fine with MacOS9 and X and Linux.
Importantly, you could have been buying them for the last year instead of having to wait until the 20th of this month. I love mine, beats using a floppy anyday (although you'll want to get a couple USB extender cables unless you're lucky enough to have frontside USB ports).
http://www.diskonkey.com/
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
$600 for 512 MB (Keychain)
compared to
$0.25 cents for 640 MB (CD-Rom)
Enjoy, gadget freaks. I think I'll keep slipping my backups into my coat pocket instead of my jeans.
I guess I'll just wait till the $900 1gb model comes down in price...
Anyone remember how great the Iomega ClickDrive was supposed to be? Now its just another portable pseudo-flash medium.
--Fred
"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American Public." - H.L. Mencken
In recent Linux releases, there is a USB_STORAGE driver that can be included in the kernel; I would presume that's what they're referring to, at least vis-a-vis Linux support.
It's entirely likely that three years ago, W98 didn't include drivers for disk storage devices, thus meaning that if you want to use the device with W98, you need such a "generic driver."
Similarly, Windows NT 4 is getting pretty old; it likely didn't include support for USB storage devices either.
In a sense, this may be regarded kind of like having SCSI support. You do need a SCSI driver to access SCSI devices, but once you've got that, there's no special driver for Seagate drives as compared to Quantum or IBM...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Data Access Rate:
over 1MB/sec (read)
800 KB/sec (write)
So reading/writing that 1GB would take.. ummmm... forever.
I'd hate to send my portable storage device through the washing machine by accident if it's not...
Take your pr0n everywhere!
but maybe not with Linux support.
usbdrive
thumbdrive
"Q" drive
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
Could this at last be the end of crappy, unreliable floppy drives that haven't grown since the days of the 40 MB hard drive? Oh please, oh please, oh please . . .
Not a typewriter
Is that a keychain in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
---
Segmentation Fault ( core dumped )
Didn't I just see this on http://www.fark.com like 3 days ago?
I have always thought that one of these combined with the international kernel patch would make a great security tool.
Put the key for your encrypted filesystem on the usb drive and you cant even tell someone our password. All you have to do is destroy the usb drive and you can't even get to your data.
You can easily disable the ability of a standard user to write to a USB device by using Group Policies. I'll have to go look it up, but there is an entry in the templates to disable seperate hardware devices. Just shut off the USB ports.
Rule of Life Number 2: Remember, it can all go to hell at any minute. --Jimmy Buffet
I first heard about these almost two years ago IIRC.
Grab yourself a Sandisk SDDR-31 CF reader, cut it apart. Buy a USB plug from digikey, cut off most of the cable and solder the new plug very close to the rest of the the part you ripped out. Buy yourself an IBM 340MB ($155) or a 1G ($310) microdrive. Plug it into the pins on the connector you ripped out of the CF reader.
Make yourself a cheap mold out of a little plastic container with a hole cut in the side for the USB plug to stick out of, put your electronics in it and fill it with that 2 part polymer stuff. Instant pocket 1G drive, for under $350.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
Suport Windows ME/2000/XP, Mac OS (ver. 8.6 or above) and Linux kernel version 2.4.0 or above without driver.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...can I use them as an $1800 portable RAID array?
"Oops, I stepped on my drive...good thing it's mirrored!"
You could store one hell of an encryption key on that keychain.
How many bit encryption would that be?
The Terapin Mine Handheld is under $550 from ThinkGeek and it has 10GB of space. Connectivity via USB, 10Mbps Ethernet, PCMCIA.
Also has stereo audio and (still) video out.
Why pay $900 for this when you can have so much more for less?
I don't have a solution, but I certainly admire the problem.
Today the missing drive with atomic secrets was found behind a Garfield coffee mug in an employee breakroom.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
This is very cool. But it is only one component that I need alongside my Leatherman. When they can put my 21 inch monitor on my keychain, then I'll be impressed.
-db
OK, 1GB *might* be interesting, but for smaller sizes (16-128MB), I don't see the gain over flash memory. Did I miss anything?
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
"USB ports allow the fastest data transfer"
a h.
Hahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahhahahahahahahahah
That's funny. What? They're serious?
Hahahahahahahahahha
sin(6cos(r)+5A)
http://65.119.30.151/productimage/22-147-001-01.JP G
Are there any BIOS's out there that support a "boot from USB device" option?
The "Linux on Keychain" distribution is just around the corner!
It would be great to be able to carry around a small distro for testing and/or security audit purposes. Consultants should snap these up.
Does anyone have any info regarding the physical robustness of these products? Can you drop them? Throw them against a wall? Can you get data off them after you've run over them with your car?
How about the technology behind them....how, specifically, do they work?
Thanks
This is a good way to store all those 4096 bit keys with your physical ones. Just don't lose that ring!
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
Why would I want one, when a USB CF reader is $20, and a 1gb IBM Microdrive is $300? I can get 3 times the storage and still have the "driverless" feature
they are touting.
Anyone know if this will wokr on the 3Com Audrey? I haven't been able to find out if generic USB storage devices work on QNX...
---- I made the Kessel Run in under 11 parsecs.
I just thought of something REALLY cool :)
:)
Suppose you and a friend have sensitive data, and you ONLY want yourselves to have access to it. Here's what you do...
Get a USB hub and 2 of these, hook them both up to a linux box, then use RAID to span a partition across them. That way, you can ONLY get the information when both of you are there, and anyone wanting it would have to steal/kill both of you to get it. It makes it a bit more harder brings you that much closer to Mission Impossible
Check out my sysadmin blog!
top of the page:
No Drivers are required.
bottom of the page:
* Windows 98 Drivers will be available for download
Anyone want to explain that one to me? My best guess is that Win98 doesn't support USB drives.
There are USB scanners with great Linux drivers, for instance... but they're not in the majority, because every damn scanner company has to solve the "tell the scanner to scan something and give me the image back" problem with their own half-assed protocol.
This isn't just a Linux thing, too - don't you love it when, running Windows, you can just have a piece of hardware start working without you futzing around with separate driver disks? The only way that happens is when the hardware significantly predates your version of Windows (i.e. not often) or when it follows some standard that Windows already knows how to support. It's so much more fun to install a new hard drive (even internally) than, say, a new video card.
Video cards, at least, are advancing by leaps and bounds and so have an excuse for rapidly changing hardware protocols. But scanners? Webcams?
I just recently started using a DiskOnkey (the 128MB model), and it's a terrific device. They cost about $150 each, and it's about 50% longer (and about 5 or so mm wider) than the Leatherman Micra I carry on my keychain, just to give you a size idea. There are smaller devices (like the Q Drive), but the DiskOnKey is rugged as hell, and so far has stood up to quite the beating.
What's it good for? Well, in my case, I'm using it to hold a set of Windows sysadmin tools (a VNC installer, Terminal Server client software, and a few other utilities), along with a full electronic copy of my company DR plan, and a ton of policy/procedure documents. With all that, I still have room to shuttle files around as well.
In fact, it's been so handy that we're replacing our printed copies of many off-site manuals with these. That way, it's much easier to keep up-to-date, and all we need to access everything is a computer with USB support and the ability to read HTML, PDF, and Word documents.
The coolest thing I found is that they're bootable, too - I just need to put an OS on one and it's an even better toolkit. Is the storage as cost-effective as CD-ROM? Of course not - it doesn't hold nearly as much, and the 128MB device, as I mentioned, cost $150. But it's far more rugged than a CD, and can be used in all sorts of circumstances where a CD can't. Heck, even a lot of the stripped-down PCs that are used in corporate IT shops have free USB ports.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
More closely !
see :
Data Reading/Writing speed
over 1MB/sec. - 800Kbytes/sec
My guess is 1 Gig is 1024 Meg ?
=Filling the key would take 1280 seconds, a small 21.33 minuts.
Hmmm.
Friends of mine could burn 4-5 cds in the time.
Of course you have to have a burner.
But for $900, I could even buy 2 and put one at the office and one at home...
Well, being pessimistic again 8)
Last year I reviewed a Trek Thumbdrive (64MB) (no link because I no longer speak to the website I was working for at the time :))
My verdict was basically: Nifty, sysadmins might be able to find a use for them... I can't see anyone elsehaving much use for one though.
and as some other people have stated, yes, it's a bitch to plug the things in blind.
I bought one of these units (64 meg) a few months back. It sat for quite a bit, but lately it's seen a good amount of use. Nice to see the price has come down as well. The best part is the size. When I purchased mine, 2 gig were apparently available, but they were out of stock, and they were prohibitively expensive.
The size is the best part. They even fit quite nicely in a pocket protector...
Karma: Good. I'm hoping in the same way as pizza is 'good'...
I don't know about keychains, but a regular part of my bag is a small box (say 5 x 3 x 0.75 in) that just plugs in (via cable) into any USB port. USB 2.0 capable and all in all cost about $200. I am quite happy with it.
:-)
Eh? What? Size? Oh, it's 20 Gb
Actually, this is just a box with IDE <-> USB electronics into which you can put any standard laptop hard drive (and I put a 20Gb one in). Draws power from the USB port and is truly plug-and-play. Highly convenient. Recommended.
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
You young whippershnappers have no idea how easy you have it. Back in my day if you needed portable storage that went beyond a floppy we used hardcards. They were full sized ISA bus cards with a 20 to 80 meg hard drive attached. None of this newfangled USB, hot swappable plug and play for us.
I remember transferring lots of files this way. It was fun.
An mp3-player with a USB slot, a digital camera with a USB slot, a Palm with a USB slot.
I mean, my 64 meg in my digital camera's compact flash cards are useless in my mp3 player (64 meg internal, and SmartMedia external). While using my camera, the 64 meg in my mp3 player is useless.
Most storage is used for temporary data. Would be nice to share that storage.
I don't expect that Palm, Nikkon, HP, Diamond, etc will radically change their products interfaces as a result of this one product, but it's nice to dream.
Try an alternate browser.
Does that wool get itchy?
So someone explain to me how this driverless thing works... how could you mount it in Linux? Windows?...
~ now you know
The price on the website cited for the 1G USB drive is $700, not $900.
I was wrong. Doh!
I'm particularly surprised no-one has mentioned the iPod yet. Yes, I know it's Apple, and, that it was intended to be used on a Mac (and primarily as a music device, too).
Mediafour are creating software that will allow the iPod to interface with windows (no mention of Linux, though). Basically it will act just like a glorified hard drive. Here's the article. It's $400, come on! There are Firewire -> USB adapters doing the rounds anyway, so surely you could curtial $900. Oh, and the iPod's the size of a pack of cards.
-
I'd rather have a bowl of coco-pops.
There is also the iPod at 5Gig and costs 399 USD. The catch is that you need firewire on your computer, but still you get a music player as a bonus. On the other hand the iPod, and even the Terapin Mine Handheld are a tad larger than a key ring.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I, too, have the IBM 8MB model. First of all, its AWESOME for storing my GnuPG keyring, and my Whisper32 password file. I finally feel like I'm doing GnuPG the right way.. like the extremists keeping the floppy in their pocket, inserting it only at the moments you need it for encrypting/decrypting. Now to move my critical private files to my pure USB PC and gpg 'em. Should make for a secure, console-access file server.
For the remaining 7.8MB, I keep a bunch of small files that I would need most when I don't have my Thinkpad around -- my Notes ID file, some presentations that I've been working on for clients, and all the things I forget to save when I blow away the laptop.. the ethernet and modem drivers for one! (That's a mean catch-22) I also keep small installers that often give me trouble when downloading.. putty, AdAware spyware removal tool, Netscape 6 installer, LeetSpeak for genning passwords, Whisper32, and AIM95N.
Please people, stop comparing it to a PDA. They don't serve the same purpose at all.
Intelligent Life on Earth
Note that these drives only work on micro~1.oft's version of USB.
There is a spec for USB Mass Storage Device, but M$ does not support it. In fact, any USB device manufacturer who wants access to M$'s proprietary USB storage API libraries has to agree not to support the MSD in any of their products (under normal circumstances, that would be illegal abuse of a monopoly position).
The USB world (i.e. mostly taiwanese and chinese manufacturers) is neatly divided into two camps. About 90% make M$ proprietary USB products, the remaining 10% make products that correspond to the official USB spec. If you have a clued-in taiwanese computer shop in your area, you can get them to order USB compliant devices instead of M$ proprietary shit.
These little drives work on some Macs as well, since Apple licensed the micro~1.oft USB drivers and APIs, so they could take advantage of the market force M$ has dominated. The proprietary USB license adds between $2 and $3 to the end price of each macintosh.
If you want to have some fun, plug a USB/MSD compatible hard drive into an XP machine. Although XP claims to have no knowledge of the Mass Storage Device specification, there is enough of a driver for windoze to reformat the drive with an NT5FS file system. As a bonus, it doesn't even bother asking the user, it just reformats, every single time.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
We start seeing "secure" versions of them that wont let us copy our MP3s and stuff.
I just sayin.
Now I can take my 1 GB encryption key through the airport on my keychain.
now everywhere I go, I'll have my pr0n collection with me on my keychain.
...I can't wait until they come out with a 10GB version!
I Heart Sorting Networks
From their website
Top of Page:
"No Drivers are required. "
Bottom of Page:
"* Windows 98 Drivers will be available for download"
Am i missing something?
Could this be used as part of a crypto key management system?
I wonder if this usbdrive can boot operating systems. The DiskOnKey product line from m-systems say that they can boot systems, but I have had no luck with them so far. In order for it to work, you need a bios that boots from USB-HDD. I have a couple motherboards that do this, but there must be something else that I am doing wrong :(
Has anyone played in this area and has been successful ?
It would be killer to use something like this as a drive on a fanless PC with a tiny Linux install.
This gives a whole new meaning to, "Oh #$%!ing #$%*&! I lost my keys!
Were I to lose such a keychain, I'd be more concerned than if my car were stolen or destroyed. Goodness, my car isn't worth that.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
...a thingumbob[1] that does hardware RAID-0 on two of these things.[2] Then it's perfect.
The fact is, I've a) become really really distrustful of all built-in hard-drives, after having like three or four of them fail (in two different home computers) within a two year period, two of them being "redundant" and failing at once, and not just the controller, and, what's more, with very clean power coming in. I just don't trust anything with moving parts anymore. Truth is, one gigabyte is more than enough for everything I need except media files, which don't need to be dynamically backed up (i.e. they only need one backup EVER, which is no-problem).
Do you know what REAL security is? It's not in having a thirteen-character password with alphanumerics for root...what good is that if your file-system (hmmmm? ext2?) isn't encrypted? Anyone can break into your computer, steal your hard-drive (bad enough), then, to add insult to injury, read the bits off your partition, reconstruct all your personal files, and take up a long-distance relationship with your former girlfriend. Ouch.
Anyway, real security isn't in having a long password: it's in having your hard-drive in your pocket when you leave your home. Plus, I think it would do us all good to have to constrain ourselves to a gigabyte...it would keep me from mindlessly copying huge directory structures to three or four places as version control, or a DVD that I'll only watch two or three times a month...wow, how useful that it's on my hard-drive? or all those CD images that I tell myself make it SO much more convenient to play these games that, really, I only get an opportunity to do a few times a month, and generally just be wasteful just because I "have the space"...it comes to bite you in the end, because there's no convenient way to do a backup. If you really need to copy whole CD's to hard-drive, do it on one mounted "spare" or "media" and keep it separate from your "real" (keychain USB) drive. Now if only linux could boot off USB as I hear a mac can....
[1] that's the official word, not "thingamajig", according to my dictionary.
[2] This is probably a ten-dollar piece of equipment. How hard can RAID-0 be? All you do is double every write and read request, and if you ever get a fail on any read or or write, start chirping like mad and somehow indicate which drive gave it to you. Of course, I'd hate to be the one writing the routine for what happens when the read of the two drives returns disparate bits...maybe you do a few more reads and if the drives stubbornly disagree about the state of the bit, ask the user, in the true linux fashion [whatever the equiviliant is to "Unable to read bit 4 of byte at F332D:2AAE4:F22A." with three buttons, one labelled one, one labelled zero, one labelled retry."] then ask him/her to replace whichever is the older one...
My Sony Clie have proggie called MS Import (MS=Memory Stick) which when running makes it
behave like USB storage device. I just put my Memory Stick card into it, run this program, plug it via
USB cable to Linux and I can mount it as SCSI drive,
having access to all my files on it. Best thing about it, is that you can have several cards.
Yes, it is bigger than keychain, but what the heck,
I carry my PDA with me all the time anyway!
How would you mount such a device under a linux system?
Would it appear as a FAT file system, like the USB digital cameras?
.
.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Sounds like their ought to be an article about this "Dim Sum" because I've never heard about it. Is it open source? Will it run under Red Hat Linux? What about FreeBSD?
Or is this a Microsoft product? Don't drop esoteric references like that and just leave us hanging...
Because when you travel to other locations (friend, business, relatives, whatever) they are not going to have a CF reader. Most will have a USB port, though.
Of course, if you are only going to use this at home, it doesn't make sense. The whole point is that your data is easily portable and easily readable and writeable when you get to your destination.
It's kind of like carrying a CD-RW, except you don't need to rely on having UDF software and a CD-RW drive at your destination. They just need a USB port and you are in business.
You know, I've always thought this was the perfect solution for MY security. I haven't done it yet but I plan on picking up the 8 or 16 meg one and storing my GPG secret key on it. Then its not on an internet connected machine where it can get swiped if the machine is rooted. I just have to make sure I have a GOOD passphrase in case I lose my keys. Actually if I was going to be REALLY paranoid about it I'd put an encrypted loopback filesystem on it and THEN put my key on it. That way I don't have to worry about someone getting my secret key if I lose my keys.
"False modesty is the refuge of the incompetent." - The Stainless Steel Rat
Whoever modded this down is smoking crack
One drawback of NT is that it didn't natively support USB (like AGP). So this really IS ontopic
I'm going to check my metamoderator options now. I hope others will do the same, or idiot moderators will continue to bring down slashdot...
Please don't moderate unless you know wtf is going on
When i first saw the IBM version of this nifty device my first thought was that it would be a great way to deal with all my ssh and gpg keys. Just pop it in and have autofs mount it when either program calls for them. Would be a great way to deal with shared roommate email boxes.
I have not got my hands on one of these things, has anybody done this?
No matter how much dignity and respect you treat your employees with, if you've got sensitive data do you want some Arab janitor dumping your info into his keychain and walking out right past security?
Corporations will have no problem. As soon as the user plugs the device in, the DMI software will automatically send an alert to management software saying "hey, I've detected an unauthorized device on computer 123456781. I've detected it as an Optical Mass Storage Device with serial number 933322331." We'll pop open the screen for that system, get the location of the machine and pay the user a friendly visit. Of course, it's possible the user has already gotten the data and is on his way out the door.
It's the smaller shops that don't use or can't afford the management software that will have problems with this, as well as the companies that have lax desktop security standards and useless AUPs. In those cases, I suggest two-part epoxy. Epoxy the keyboard and mouse cables in (and reduce theft!), and epoxy nice sturdy plastic over the rest of the ports. Voila! With a lot of work, you can probably remove the cover to add devices or replace the mouse and keyboard, although it's probably easier cutting the cable and splicing the new one in.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
USB in general came in very promissing. But I think the expectations were too high and even though it fulfilled many of them, USB has not reached the peak, yet. Looks like the USB specs need to be improved. However, to see this kind of products gives me hope about USB.
I've never liked the idea of putting a PGPG keys on a floppy disk (due to the limited capacity and general flakiness of the medium).
Now it appears possible to keep a whole mess-o' public/private keys on a fob. Send and read secure email from any host.
I could see a pretty decent little business in doing diskless firewalls and routers using an LRP image or an EmBSD firewall image on a microATX x86 box. Just add the configuration files to your keychain, boot it and run in RAM. Sweet.
RW
I have a 32meg disk on key by M-Systems that is just outstanding. I use it all the time. I have two non-legacy laptops (TiBooks) and 2 non-legacy boxes (G4 tower and cube) and serveral pc boxes all sharing space in the house. While they are all networked, the ease at which you can move files of all sorts from machine to machine is just great...
Beware, however, be certain to get one that is "driverless"...it makes all the difference...
best,
/ijk
which means that the drives will work under Linux
Thank you, captian obvious...
I'll buy mine as soon as they write "It's not a beer gut, it's a fuel tank for my love machine" on both sides.
Duffman says, "Oh, yeah!"
Did everyone forget this coming out like almost a year ago or so? Called "Q drives" or something...they were even smaller than the pictures of this one!
Is this any different than the situation with floppies? (Besides the scale, I mean. Most things worth stealing that take a gigabyte in 2001, fit on a 3.5" floppy in 1989.)
This just occured to me.. Imagine the possibilities with this USB key when Linux comes out for the Playstation 2... 1 GB of instant removable storage.
Anyone know what filesystem these keys use? It would definitely be an impressive hack if someone can get the PS2 to view it as a very big memory card. Or, vice versa, take a 8MB PS2 memory card and rig a USB adapter to it somehow for PC storage.. Just some ideas if anyone is bored..
A friend bought one of those for $240 and he travels with it all the time. it fits in his shirt pocket and all he needs is a usb cable. To me this looks like a lot better deal than the $900 1GB keychain. the good thin is if you wish you could replace the 30GB disk with what ever capacity available. I am told 80 GB is the most at this time.
/-\ |-|
If anyone is interested in buying this sort of thing, I do remember seeing good deals on 64MB USB "drives" recently on the various "technology deals" websites. DealNews mentioned this one for $62 recently, and I think I remember seeing one for $49.95 mentioned on some site earlier this month.
One thing that would be nice is the ability to plug this into a portable mp3 player.
Or how bout digital cameras? Maybe even DV cams?
PDA's? Cell phones (to easily transfer contact info, etc)?
What other devices could take advantage of this?
And if you lock down your environment so much, you may be able to have unskilled labor run the deep fryer, but you'll be keeping your knowledge workers from getting their job done. This kind of control freakish behavior is what drove people from mainframes onto PCs into the first place, and if you try to reinstitute mainframe-like controls on your PCs, your users will simply switch to other systems; you don't own them.
Microsoft is great at giving system managers the illusion of security and control. But that attests more to the gullibility of their customers than to any kind of sound security technology.
In any case, I think the point is that a malicious or careless user might use this to transport a virus onto the corporate network. But since Windows is so vulnerable to mail and web attacks anyway, that's probably the least concern to system managers.
i was just wondering if you had found anyway to make your clie sync under linux? last i heard there wasnt any software to do it with the usb cradle.
coldsync should do it.
But I have not used it - I am using infrared.
The issue here is not whether or not it can be blocked, but the extra workload to do so.
As it is a base install, every firm that is worried about this will have to install a policy against it. Undoubtedly, some will forget.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
When can I hook one up to my playstation2? :>
Physical access almost always means total access. I don't know of any OS that can get around that problem (although encrypted filesystems help to a degree). It's just something you have to live with.
Not a typewriter
Does anyone know if it is safe to expose this technology to strong magnetic fields or X-rays? I'm especially worried about airport X-ray machines. I've noticed now that they want to X-ray your keyring, mobile phone, sometimes even your shoes. I can just picture myself trying to convince some airport security drone that my USBDrive isn't a weapon. I'm worried they might even try to confiscate it.
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
Now this one.. ah yes, truly worthy of the +1 bonus this is. Not good enough to waste the valuable time of people with your original nonsense, I see. I'm cutting you some slack on this one, though, since you might be trying to make sure your "I'm an idiot" post is rated as high as the one where you proved it.
is that some pr0n in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
THERE IS NO DATA. THERE IS O
...