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Stash Your Hard Drive In The Attic
RegardsSJ writes "Robert X. Cringley on his PBS website mentions a $479 wireless, fanless 120gb network storage/file server appliance (running linux) in his column. He thinks the killer app for this one is for keeping your porn storage hidden, if you're busted by the cops. I think his concept is weak, given the wireless signal is traceable (security through obscurity?), WEP is breakable, and the fact that you have to have the thing plugged in somewhere... The company selling the device is martian.com. Anybody use one?" Now that it's possible to stream audio and video through various boxes originally serving other purposes (like TiVo and PlayStation2), this looks like a good companion piece, too.
Hiding pr0n (or anything) is the killer app for excellent encryption, not for a WEP-accessed drive array. ::obligatory plug:: OS X lets you create read/write/mountable disk image files that are encrypted with AES-128. Very cool stuff to play with.
;)
Just don't put its password in your keychain, or those feds will get a chuckle as they double-click the image file and it unlocks with your autologin.
"I would, for one, but my friend David from the UK points out that such a device hidden away from sight would be ideal for storing data you wouldn't want confiscated by the police. Nestle a Martian box under your attic insulation if you have something to hide. "
Who knows what the people at PBS have to hide from the cops.
Yeah, but who would want one of these things? I would, for one, but my friend David from the UK points out that such a device hidden away from sight would be ideal for storing data you wouldn't want confiscated by the police.
The author doesn't mention porn in his article... get your minds out of the gutter
Police have been known to sieze computers that simply had data that might be used as evidence, even when the owners hadn't done anything wrong. Is there any legal defense against this, like "I have my website, my financial records, and tomorrow's homework on that fileserver... you can't take it away from me!"? Or does this come under the heading of "why you should always have multiple good backups"?
No need for smartcards for encryption, just use EFS on win2k+ or a loopback encryption scheme under linux (do any of the mainstream filesystems support encryption?)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
This is just an Epia Mini-ITX motherboard in a bog standard Morex Cubid Mini-ITX case. I have both sat here on my desk and its a great little silent linux server.
They cost a lot less to buy what this company wants to charge you. Sure they added wireless card/hard drive/memory but $500 still seems a bit expensive.
Check out http://www.mini-itx.com for details of the motherboard / case. They also have an online store for Europeans...
BTW, you can easily get 2 hard drives in that case if you take out the included hd enclosure so you could make one with a lot more space than 120gb...
Maybe that's the only sort of data that
http://milkshake.dexy.org
As mentioned elsewhere, you could hack it so that you could power it down remotely (powering it back up would be interesting if it's hidden in the insulation, though). Still, a metal detector would find it....
First, thermite doesn't explode. It reacts quickly and violently, with extremely high heat. The parent poster was right, a multistage computer controlled ignition system would work and be tits.
For those you who think it burns and/or requires oxygen, your wrong. This is the equation for a thermite reaction:
Fe2O3(s) + 2AL(s) -> AL2O3 + 2Fe + energy
That's right. Powdered aluminum and powdered rust make thermite. It's ignition temperature is so high that it is normally lit with burning magnesium metal. It reacts so hot that a small amount (like a kilo) can melt a hole through the engine block of a car and keep going through the concrete. That'll definitely be suffucient to melt your porno.
That's why you encrypt in such a way that you can give them a password and it will decrypt some things, but it still won't decrypt the "interesting stuff", whatever that may be in your case.
See Rubberhose for one possible implementation of this idea.
Knowing a lot of healthy physicists that have been exposed to many times the power of a cell phone (like my boss that works with equipment that pulse around 10 kA and 5 kV), it would seem that small sources like that would not be much a threat.
Also, I have seen various results for the number of cell phone users that have cancer, and many of them indicate that they are less likely to get cancer than the population in general. I don't have the papers with me now, but I am sure someone less lazy than me can find it on google.
I also looked up the heat loss of the head in a book of physical constants of mine, and the head radiates around 4.6 W of energy, so unless the cell phone (around 1 W I believe) zaps a very small part of your brain like a magnifying glass, you should be able to dissipate the heat rather quickly between radiating it and cooling by the blood. I can't imagine it being any worse than a mild fever, otherwise you would be able to feel it with your hand or something.
Just be sure to write a script into your .bash_logout that wipes your .bash_history & all relevant log files...
Not that I've done this or anything...
Wonder if I should have posted this anonymously...
LFS. Have you built your system today?
Surprised its not been mentioned before. Assuming its 802.11b, I get 5MBps speeds right next to the AP. In a room next door with my laptop I get 2MBps over wifi. A room further away is an erratic 0.5MBps.
Now a 120GB hard drive over a wireless link? Possibly enough to stream DivX, forget about DVD, and to fill the drive would take over two days!
"I've heard from people that the military actually microwave some media to make sure one can't recover the data that's stored on it."
No, microwaving recordable-CDs is commonplace amongst anyone who needs to securely delete a CDR. [4 seconds, put a glass of water in the microwave too, and make sure all your windows are open]
Anyone with more money (i.e. corporate, government, military) pays for someone to come and take their CDs and grind them up using special cutting machines.
Admittedly, the military do seem to have a thermite fetish, and perhaps many people here would be interested if they could buy a hard-drive with electronically-activated thermite pre-installed.