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GlobeTrotter: Mandrake-based 40GB Linux Mobile Desktop
joestar writes "Mandrakesoft & LaCie have just launched "GlobeTrotter", a ultra-compact 40 GB bootable USB hard-drive pre-loaded with Mandrakelinux 10.0 Official. It may be plugged to any available PC with a USB 1 or USB 2 port, automatically recognizes the host-PC's hardware, and then is ready to use. Multiple uses can be imagined, from the office/internet workstation to the multimedia jukebox! The concept is quite similar to Mandrakemove, excepted that it's way more powerful than a USB-key based system! And for $219 it's a credible alternative to a laptop."
It's not really an alternative to a laptop imho - check its weight. Always recall that transportable doesn't make it portable. ;)
"I don't mind God, it's his fan club I can't stand!" E8
to hijack data off a system that you dont have the password to log into yourself..
?SYNTAX ERROR IN LINE 42
I think this is great. Not only can you take along your preferred operating system, but your files, too.
Maybe my hardware is old, but can most boxes boot off USB these days?
How is this different from just using a regular external hard drive? My roomate has installed Mac OS X on his iPod and exclusively uses that as his mobile platform. Just find a Mac and plug it in.
1) Download Mandrake
2) Get the cheapest 40 GB hard drive with USB support you can buy.
3) Voila!
After reading the article, I wonder what exactly makes it so special? Perhaps the convenience of the entire setup, but for 40 gig, you would expect a lower price. I can get a USB enclosure for a hard drive for $30.00 here or perhaps elsewhere for even less. A 200 gig HD from tigerdirect.com is $89.99. Don't get me wrong, I am really excited to see Linux systems set up like this, but the price kind of threw me off.
With USB2, its feasible, but I surely wouldn't boot off a USB1 device unless realy no other options are available. Or the machine has so much ram, I barely acces my swap.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
am I the only one that finds the default Mandrake theme really ugly?
Why didn't they just go with Plastik or whatever?
because a drive that imagines users to use it would probably make for a better selling product than a mobile USB drive.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
I've never seen "USB" as an option in the "A, C, CDROM" selections in any BIOS setup program I've ever touched. Is it handled somewhere else, or is it just very rare among ~1-year-old hardware?
Carrying along a bootable CD and a USB storage device sort of defeats the purpose.
Loadlin would be a natural for this thing...
Presumably this is only for newer motherboards that can boot off USB.
because if anyone uses these on any site where I am responsible for IT infrastructure and security they will definitely appreciate something with smooth contours.
;-)
You know where it will end up
But seriously, these things sound like a major security problem waiting to happen. Imagine some 'visitor' who comes to your establishment, plugs into an unused computer and starts probing and sucking at your network.
It's a damn nightmare
Or you could just carry a Knoppix cd with you.
(and if you are really paranoid about the machines you might come up against a bootable USB-CDrom drive).
Perhaps it's a credible alternative to a remote login to your main computer. You are still going to need to find an existing computer to plug this thing into though.
'He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.' - Douglas Adams
First off, I think it's great that a distribution is doing this. If you're a Linux evangelist, I would imagine a Live-CD may not do everything you want to do.
But, the main point of this post is to ask how is this a viable alternative to a laptop? I always defined viable alternative as a product that offers a similiar product set designed to do the same job. How exactly is a hard drive loaded with Linux comprable to a laptop?
There is no way that an external hard drive is equivalent to a laptop. This thing doesn't have a keyboard or screen. What are you going to do on the plane, show it off to the other passengers? Viable alternative. mutter.
http://xkcd.com/386/
Very true unless there's no hard drive in the workstation. If everyone using it is also using this external HD one wouldn't be needed.
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
...to grab the entire contents of a G5 at the Apple Store.
Say hello to my little sig.
Imagine ... a beowulf cluster of these.
Why don't you imagine a beowulf cluster of slashdot moderators modding you down instead...
Oh no! They're coming after me!!
Little Bricklets
This'll only be useful when 95% of computers support booting from USB. Right now, only 5% do, so you'd just be pissing away the $219.
--Jon
Cleanstick.org: Dumb weblog about nothing
Update your BIOS firmware!
I've never NOT seen it among motherboards manufactured in the past 3 years. Even our server (Dual Athlon MP)motherboard has it.
But does it run..... nevermind.
wow. who would've thought of such an idea?
..erm they have. http://slax.linux-live.org/
/end rant
im suprised somebody hasnt already
not to mention many other distros, many of which are made for just such a feat..
http://featherlinux.berlios.de/ but in all regaurds, atleast its now "cool"
to have a usb key drive, with a top 5 distro on it.
(top 5, rh, suse, mandrake, slackware, debian)
who knows where this will take us. but i invision a future where we'll all cary this little chip around,
with all our personal information in it, personal files, etc. ("big brother's dream")
so that we can be more "productive & efficent"
lord knows where the personal privacy will sease and "common good" begins.
USB 2 case (with keyboard power cable for those PC's with lame USB ports) $32 - Bascon Computers
Knoppix $0 - the web
Portability Priceless
Fits in your pocket, you can carry your system all the time. Most places are starting to care about USB drives so check before you plug in.
The nice thing is you always have your code, your custom toolchain, music, etc. Like you never left home.
(OK, so you have to set up Knoppix and that will take an hour or two, far less than it takes you to build that XP box from scratch) - ob Windows vs. Linux dig
I've been doing a lot of home support lately and carry with me an Insert Rescue CD and USB drive for those cases where I need to do backups or need to work with the windows drive in some way. Functionality-wise how is this different from a Knoppix CD and USB drive? I don't see this as new or special.
Sean.OutaHere()
Umm i dont think so.. to be an alternative it would need a keyboard and display and network...
This just replaces a smaller flash drive... More storage...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Maybe the super-new ones *might* have this option - but not any of them I've seen and I've seen some brand new (past month) boards.
It sure will be sweet when this is mainstream; boot up a copy of whatever OS and do some troubleshooting or virus removal. Or even just some easy file copies.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
- If the CD only needs to boot, load USB drivers, and hand off control to the USB drive, it can be shrunk to a business-card CD. I'm guessing that a business-card CD + 2.5" hard drive isn't any less convenient than one full-size CD.
- With 40GB available, you can have 58 times as many programs available as you can with a 700MB CD.
- Hard drives can be written to as well as read from, so you can use it to carry documents and MP3s along with you, and don't have to stream these over the network like you'd have to with Knoppix.
In short, it's waaaaay more functional than a bootable CD.It would be simple to use whatever system you come across as a linux system. Simply plug in the drive, boot, bootstrap, emerge system, compile a kernel, build some choice packages, wait a few days and voila, instant gentoo box.
-Note: this is a joke.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Hardware/Laptops_N otebooks/Q_20934463.html
that suggests there are a few laptops anyways that can boot from USB HD's. A Google search for "motherboard bootable USB" returned >250 hits.
No man's an island, unless he's had too much to drink and wets the bed.
Why it is so expensive? You can get a USB 2 box for a 2.5 inch drive for $25 (Check Fry's or Outpost) and you can get a 40GB 2.5 inch drive for less than $100. It follows that they charge about $100 for the OS, whih is way too much: in my opinion they should not charge more than $40. Today the laptop drive are so cheap, you can get am 80GB drive for for $150(Pcprogress, basoncomputer). Moreover, Bason computer sells firewire/usb2 boxes with 80GB laptop drives inside for $209. (the empty combo box is about $60). You could buy this 80GB box, install linux yourself, save $9, you have twice the size and have both firewire and USB2 ports!
I did this about 2 months ago, I installed my preferred Linux distribution, SuSE 91 on a combo box.
LaCie is traditionally a Mac company, and for this reason they charge a lot. NEVER BUY FROM THEM.!
You forgot to point out that slackware was doing this on zipdisks how many years ago now ?
Myself, I gave up on modern "portables" some time back. Battery life sucks so bad, they always need to be plugged in. They heat up like a mo-fo. The keyboards invariably suck. And their hard drives are serious underperformers.
Since I need to plug in anyway, as a contractor, when I need to go on-site, I take my Shuttle XPC in a little cart, with a real buckling-spring UNICOMP keyboard. It's got 2GB of RAM and a fast CPU, can run VMWare handily so I can launch Winders from my Debian system as necessary.
I just use the monitor at whatever desk the client decides to assign me for the day.
If I carry a laptop any more it's a Tandy Model 102, and I just use it for editing text. Now that thing is portable... 20 hours on 4 AA batteries, passes the drop test, and has an excellent keyboard. I transfer files to/from via the serial port.
We're working on a memory/flash storage expansion for it at http://bitchin100.com/remem_project.html
-- John.
It needs hardware encryption so that the disk is useless without the right pass-phrase, and optionally a hardware token like a separate USB pendrive (or compact flash, whatever) with a really big one-time pad on it. And I mean real encryption like AES or Blowfish, or at least triple-DES. Not something that Joe-Bob and his little beowulf cluster can crack in a week or too.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
They are a primarily a Mac periferal company and for this reason overcharge you a lot (100% or so) Of course, Mac users are too stupid to realize that they pay too much.
On the other hand, linux users are very cheap, for them even a difference of $5 or $10 matters, they know all great online places with no brand name, cheap hardware manufactured in Asia, they will never buy overpriced stuff from LaCie.
Today the market is saturated with cheap, no brand name portable stuff from Asia, pocket portable drives, pocket DVD writers for half price, etc. The Asian manufacturers cut corners, no technical support, no installation manuals, no software. Anyway, linux users dont need all these things. No Nero is needed for burning DVDs under linux!. Since these Asian things are so cheap, if they break just throw them away, you can afford it, for the price of one brand name item, you can get two non brand name items.
IBM Thinkpad A30p
'Nuff said
Besides, you have fun configuring and customizing linux yourself, according to your needs.
Configuring and customizing the OS is one of the greatest pleasures related to the linux experience, please DONT TAKE THIS AWAY FROM US!
With 40GB available, you can have 58 times [google.com] as many programs available as you can with a 700MB CD.
If we're talking typical case (knoppix) then since the harddrive likely won't be compressed, its only a matter of 20 times as many programs.
Moving on to the days of DVDs things are going to get even less impressive in that regard...
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
Damn, it is hard to please the slashdot crowd. It's too expensive, how is this different from knoppix?
Well, I find it very inexpensive and convenient. Yes, I could probably do this myself, but I happen to like Mandrake's distribution and this gives me the chance to support my favorite distribution in an all-in-one package that is easy to use.
If you think you can do it reliably and more cheaply than Mandrake, please by all means give them some competition.
But I, for one, love Mandrake. It is the fastest distribution of the latest round I tried (Suse 9.1, Fedora 2, Slackware 10) and it is very stable. I also happen to like Suse 9.1 quite a bit for certain uses, but overall lean much more strongly towards Mandrake, but I digress.
I love this idea. You will be able to take your desktop with you everywhere without needing to use Knoppix. Knoppix is very nice, but this gives you another way to reach portability and will be faster since it runs off a HD, rather than off the CD. You can take music, documents with you and have your fully personalized desktop available anywhere where a computer is available.
This is more convenient than a laptop in some regards as it doesn't need to be recharged and is less conspicuous and thus less likely to be stolen.
And I don't know about you, but I can find a computer I can plug into just about anywhere, whether it's at a friend's or a relative's house, the library...
I think Mandrake is working very hard and they are making incredible progress. I have tested their 10.1 Beta 2 and it is already very, very good, although I would caution new users to wait for the *Official* release, not community, and definitely not RCs.
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
While I'm here posting, just thought I'd link to NewEgg's huge selection of 2.5 " enclosures, the model numbers really makes it easy to research them.
And here is an article on ibm.com about how to do the trick where the kernel is booted from a floppy/CD, finds the USB mass storage device, mounts it, and uses it as the root filesystems. And another article here. Looks pretty straightforward.
Well, can you do a USB RAID on x86 hardware? I've read about a five-USB-floppy OS X (IIRC, it might have been OS 9) RAID, but never anything on x86.
Of course, a two-JumpDrive RAID 0 might be kinda nice, especially if one only has USB1.1...
Ahh, Bitchin100 earned a bookmark :) I use mine for more than editing text though, it's a handy little serial terminal for all sorts of tasks. (I seem to have lost the picture of mine plugged into the console port of an oc-192 terminal with the config prompt up.)
Look for an older, larger laptop with option bays that'll accept batteries. Consider that the machine load-shares between them, so the demand from each individual battery is lower, which makes them more efficient. (Two batteries, each of which runs the machine for 2 hours when used alone, will probably give you 5 hours when used together.)
Pretty smart. I could of course lug my own laptop around but that is a lot more expensive and you will be working on a laptop. Not a high end pc.
This is more like knoppix but with its own HD for easy storage of preferences and adding new applications.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Consider a Pentium M based laptop. The laptops that suck are usually based on desktop Pentium 4 chips, those are the kind that sucks batteries and the CPU burns hot like a fire, because they weren't meant to be put into a laptop, period.
Several models can take 2GB of RAM, and can be had with 2MB cache and a 2GHz clock rate. Being P6-based means that it has a good instructions per cycle (IPC) unlike Pentium 4 chips. You can get efficient laptop hard drives that still run at 7200 RPM.
One problem with those mini CDs, though - if you encounter a machine with a slot-load drive that can't boot off of USB, you can't boot the drake installation.
Well, you can try, but one would be an idiot to put any other than a full sized CD/DVD in a slotload drive - it may go in, but it probably isn't coming back out.
I had a externel scsi hd that I could plug into ANY Mac and boot MY desktop.
This is a little old for mac users
http://Lenny.com
"I've never seen "USB" as an option in the "A, C, CDROM"
You young whipper-snappers with your "CD-ROM boot" and your "network boot" are all a bunch of sissies and don't know it! Why, back in my day you were given one option: floppy drive! Hard drives were too expensive and required a team of oxen to get the durned things spinning, so everything was on a truckload of floppy disks.
And when I say floppy, I mean floppy! Those things were flopper than you were when you walked in on your grandmother and I this morning! Have you ever tried putting a pancake into a disk drive?
Them rich snots down the street, they had one of them new-fangled "double density" drive. Managed to get PC-DOS down to less than half a dozen disks (unless you included GW-BASIC!). Us, we were stuck with single sided, single density. Do you have any idea how many of those it takes to fit just one Library of Congress on? Station wagons full!
"Network boot..." bah! We had a network! It didn't just look like a garden hose, it was a garden hose! We'd roll one of our floppy disks up and shove it in and blow it on through to our friends in order to share our music files!
You ever hear Asia being played by your internal speaker, boy?
well yeah. but i thought the whole idea, was usb
;)
not zip. zip was a good idea at the time.. but pesh
usb owns zip nowadays. heh.
you're right though. however. slax-linux is mostly
a live-linux version of slackware, on livecd or usb
and its actually quite nice. i like the whole idea
of custom module building etc, so you can talor it to your needs, easier. thats something knoppix and many others should really look into.
but yeah, peace, smartass
Agreed. I get home from work at 6pm and don't have to plugin til between 11 and midnight. (for reference I'm on an IBM Thinkpad R40) Sure better battery life would be good, but 5.5 hours is longer than most flights, bus rides, etc.
Yeah, I hear you. But slick hackers like myself used to punch holes in our single sided floppies to utilize the other side. Sure, they claimed that the double sided floppies were thicker... but I never had a problem.
My old thought was: "Who needs a HD if you're not running a BBS?"
If you've set up a PCBoard, WildCAT, or Searchlight BBS - you're old. If you've used an acustical 300baud modem... you're as old as me.
And hell, I'm not 30 yet! (started hacking a Atari 800xl when I was 7years old - serious programming).
I can't tell from the website whether it has a fan. If it has a fan it is probably too noisy. Can someone with any LaCie 2.5" external drive tell me whether their's is quiet?
That's great that it gets its power from the USB port. Having to carry around an AC/DC adapter would significantly reduce the portability.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this, but I rather think it's strange that a Linux distro would be in favor of forcibly rebooting a machine just to start your own. I mean, at my office and all the offices I've worked at previously, computers stay on 24/7 and only reboot when IT decided to dump a bunch of Wind0ze updates on us. The Unix/Linux boxen never rebooted unless there was hardware failure involved.
Even if someone isn't present that day, there's usually something going on that shouldn't be disturbed, even if it's browser windows being open or a notepad window editing text. Finding a machine thats 'safe' to cycle power on is pretty unusual.
I was really excited about the prospects, especially if it were hijacking the main machine's hardware via USB live through Windows or another Linux install, but I fail to find any real value in this offering. It's interesting, sure, but not if it requires rebooting.
Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.
This makes me wonder, is it possible to do this sort of thing off an iPod? think of the possibilities.
What's great is that this is a device whose time has come. It's imminent ubiquity seems inevitable, giving Linux a very big leg up on Windows.
I used to have a LaCie 40gb Pocket Drive (5400rpm). I sold it due to lack of money for food and rent. Anywho, the 2.5" is quiet, and there is no fan. I was also able to power the drive from FireWire.
My new Maxtor(5400rpm) offer no such luxury (although it also is fanless and pretty quiet).
You may consider me a noise freak by the way. I have a fanless C3 733mhz with a fanless 60watt psu as my main computer.
Well, can you do a USB RAID on x86 hardware? I've read about a five-USB-floppy OS X (IIRC, it might have been OS 9) RAID, but never anything on x86.
It was OSX, using the included software RAID tools. Windows XP should be able to do it, but refused to do it with floppies; I don't know if it would handle USB hard drives. Linux would have no problem. Remember the whole point of software RAID is that it's all done in software; being x86 or not has absolutely no relevance. It just depends on whether your OS can do it. Linux can.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
You have some excellent points, but I think the one about the keyboard is unfair, at least towards ThinkPads. I am no IBM lover, but the ThinkPad has a damn fine keyboard. I feel as confortable with it as I do with a full desktop keyboard, sometimes more so.
But, I still have to find a laptop that won't fry my nuts when used as the name implies...
Sigged!
coLinux (http://www.colinux.org/) should be integrated with the said solution: You should then have clean interfaces from IE, Windows Explorer (using WebDAV), X windows (with a copy of cygwin installed on the same USB hard disk) - all with a single click of button.
A good NAT proxy would also be required (to run on windows) to complete the solution.
-v
it usually appears there only if you've got something plugged already in.
and then it's just completely missing from some, but some fairly 'old' computers have the option while some a bit more modern don't.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Not entirely sure why I would want to but having it connected to a 40 gig disk sounds handy..
El Torito is still a black voodoo kludge if you ask me. It's a miracle bootable CDs work at all.
:)
I've heard quite a lot played through the internal speaker, there was a program called "pianoman" which included a large library of tunes. Find it in the Simtel archive.
Hint: You didn't need your OS to include BASICA / GWBASIC if you had a real IBM, since it was in ROM and would start if no bootable media were found. Others who ripped IBM's boot code but couldn't steal BASIC because of copyright would fail with the message "NO ROM BASIC".
Geek points if you know what the GW stands for.
It shouldn't work. Not as in it destroys your thinkpad, but 2k won't allow debug to access real ports to change the value there.
Try this, which has no side effects, to make sure:
debug
-o 70 2e
-i 71
It will give you some number XX, that is the correct value. Write it down.
-o 70 2e
-o 71 ff
If kernel allowed you to write to that port you now have overwritten 2e.
Exit cmd. Restart cmd.
debug
-o 70 2e
-i 71
Now the output should be XX if NT does the right thing and ff if it doesn't. To get your right value back
-o 70 2e
-o 71 XX
Disclaimer: The procedure just reads a byte from CMOS offset 2e, attempts to overwrite it, and attempts to restore the value if it had indeed overwritten the byte. But it has been ages (more like 6 years) since I used debug and I don't have any windows box at home so I can't test and say this is 100% safe. Proceed with caution.
How do you configure X to work with any random monitor? I've been trying to do something similar.
Even better, encrypt the filesystem and put the key on the CD so that it performs as just that, a key, to limit access to the thing. Would be the same as setting a BIOS password for a notebook to avoid information theft, only that it would actually work if your encryption is strong enough. Shouldn't be a too big performance hit, either.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
*smashes head on desk*
Duh...
Come to think of it, Windows would only allow RAIDing internal drives (whatever it's partition manager can touch - not a USB drive, IIRC). Of course, if it were burned right, a CD-ROM RAID would be just wrong, but interesting...
...makes this overpriced POS look just like the yesterday's news it is.
Why would anyone in their right mind pay over 200 bucks for an external 40GB harddrive that's too big to fit comfortably in your pocket or on a keyring, yet just the right size to make it easy to misplace or be stolen. Factor in all the inherent advantages of solid-state over mechanical storage and this looks like a no-brainer to me. (as in, anyone that buys this would have to have no brain)
Replacement for a laptop? I don't THINK so. The lack of any onboard I/O is going to pose something of a problem for anyone without a direct neural feed.
I dunno how the hell you'd burn it, but damn, that would be wrong.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Maybe when windoze is in airplane cockpits we'll have to worry about USB ports in chair arms. Maybe somebody will hijack the headrest-mounted Playstations. Oh, wait, I think playstations and DVDs are just in JAL/INA.
Imagine how bloody angry ms would be if someone placed windoze on USB sticks. That could really mess up ms' licensing scheme.
Regardless of which OS is on a USB stick, what really will become a problem is abusers who use customized "OS-Sticks" (a term I'm coining and will continue to use even if some big powerhouse pickes it up and tries to hijack it as their own...) to wreak havoc on the Kinko's and other places where computers might be carelessly (by then) be deployed with their peripherals ports left (physically) unsecured or left installed.
With an OS-Stick, the user's privileges are all in hand, unless the BIOS of more or all computers has control over the data flow and control of the machine.
"Firewall-in-a-BIOS", anyone?
David Syes
Let's start displaying Tux with a family (wife/partner/spouse/whatever (industry/standards bodies), along with offspring or adoptees (we users and adoptees/friends of FOSS/Linux/GPL, etc)...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Corporate perceived risk of unmonitored systems (or my instigation by this commentary) will likely spark a frenetic rush to secure sensitive systems.
I think that with these OS-Sticks likely taking off, legally loadable with Linux, but very unlikely to have windoze loaded legally (except for sysadmin purposes, I suppose), sysadmins everywhere should be worried about machines being shut down, booted by these OS-Sticks, and then pilfered or trashed out by malicious types.
Imagine a pissed off, marauding employee going around booting up and instantly killing partitions. Or, someone doing it to an Internet cafe, or worse, to a police station, hospital, transit or power station, etc. Or, to a store. Just ONE compromised system will spark a frenzy to check out the others.
Imagine if a person hides a USB-based device on their person (well, given the pocket and bag checking some sensitive companies carry out, I imagine a desperate data corruptor or data thief will hide theirs in a suppository--assuming hand wands and cavity searches are not in corporate style...) and entered a government, military, or sensitive information facility and STOLE data... the LLNL and Sandia/New Mexico data device losses will pale in comparison to this, even if peripheral or virtual data port logging is being done.
So, I posit that VMWare and the various BIOS makers can carve out a new market for themselves:
VMWare:
DITCH the stand-alone or networked OS-loaded nodes, hook them up to the protected/isolated central or workgroups server (something I've been advocating for environments large and small where trust and security are issues, ESPECIALLY in companies)...
Phoenix/other BIOS makers:
We make BIOS that don't let ANYTHING boot or run if it is booted by a peripheral media device... First it has to boot to the master server, then send credentials, then do XYZ...
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act and other regulations might very well force the financial sector as well as others to secure their data, especially where offices have too much free, unmonitored access.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
This may be a bigger pain in the ass than Y2K. Imagine all the scrambling around.
Imagine ALL the financial and banking and retail shops that have ground-level operations with all their pretty "we exist, we live" displays. All of them will/could be moving up to higher-level digs, forcing another irrational exuberance in the retail space market that'll try to jack up rents or leasing costs.
Companies will have to scramble like crazy to once again inventory ALL their systems, networked AND stand-alone, just to make sure nothing can be (easily) ripped from them, and to make sure that the machines cannot be read, then used as propagators.
It would be quite embarrassing if a company were jacked, then used for relaying their own information. And, if a data thief is caught in an office, but manages to destroy the medium sufficiently, the charges against him/her might be reduced, if the data was not propagated or not removed from the premises or the secure room. But, that depends on locales (some places might cut your head off if you see state secrets, while others may release you with reduced charges if you or your hirers could not benefit from the act, though trespass, tampering, unauthorized removal or relocation (like USN "rape", "penetration, however slight, constitutes rape"), however non-removed, still constitutes theft.
But, the security industry can come up with some bastion or firewall or improved monitoring and access/credentials tools to slow down these weird ideas.
One rule I have is NEVER offer up destructive information without at least a few antidotes our counters. After all, it may be a matter of time before certain thoughts REALLY ARE illegal, but offering a fix might diminish the punishment meted out.
David Syes
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"