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USB FlashDrives The New PC?
olddotter writes "Yahoo has an article about how large capacity USB drives might be redefining the concept of the personal computer. The article is windows specific, but think knopix on a flash drive." From the article: "When you check into an average hotel room and find -- alongside the alarm clock, hair dryer and DVD player that once were bring-your-own items but now are as standard as the furniture -- a cheap PC for guests to plug into, as our truly personal computing environment travels with us."
Yea, but you still have to bring your own virus and spyware. It will be years til they provide that.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
...check out VirtualPrivacyMachine. DamnSmallLinux made completely anonymous with Tor.
It would be nice to have that accessability in hotels, but I have one small problem with USB drives. They're too freaking small. I keep losing them.
I have always been fascinated by the programs that can boot off a flash drive because I don't own a computer yet. These programs are quite useful and so far I know of three. (Open Office, Mozilla, and an HTML editor) Does anyone else know what programs can be booted off such a drive?
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
They crap out after so many read/writes. If a company can make a better flash drive all the better.
I wouldn't trust a hotel (or net-cafe) computer with a USB stick with my private keys, certificates, or banking password. Even if you boot off your USB stick, how do you know it's not booting under Xen? I think it's more likely that the hotel computer has malware already. chambermaids are not sysadmins.
There's nothing magical about USB, or even a local disk.
The key issue isn't that the data is on a USB disk, but that it is easy enough for you to carry around all your data (including OS and apps). E.g. compact flash would suffice. Or serial flash.
Furthermore, just having secure access to the data (perhaps over the internet) would suffice. Imagine a system where to boot up, the PC fetches your data off the web. Perhaps you use a kind of use-once key to access some of the data, with which the PC computes.
The thing I've not been satisfied with yet is the idea that the PC itself would engage in a man-in-the-middle attack. E.g. it stores a copy of whatever data you've accessed (off your USB, compact flash or network storage) -- and the bad guy gets that stuff later. There's no defense against this attack, because the PC is doing the processing.
E.g. imagine a compromised PC running something like bochs. It emulates a real PC, but gives away your secrets.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Assuming that you are willing to trust that this machine isn't (either by design or by tampering) just grabbing and logging all of your data.
Granted, I'm sure protection mechanisms would be built in to address this, but I think I'd still be a bit skeptical.
I'm puzzled: once I was told the network is the computer and now I learn the flashdrive is the computer.
I'm totally at a lost.
Now only if Windows can correctly boot on completely different box... Author probably never tried to take his Windows XP disk and boot in different box with different mainboard, video and network card...
Perhaps this would work if the client machine were truly memory-less (no HD, no NVRAM, no flash ROM, etc.). Then the machine could be a secure blank slate for whatever the USB user needed to do. Given the prevalence of flashable firmware on everything (and the need for persistent machine configuration data), I doubt this is very feasible.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Then how do you know it's not a virtual machine that's emulating a diskless PC?
This is, for all intents and purposes, what NeXT tried to do in the late 80s. The optical drive they used was ruinously expensive. The software was limited. Now, twenty years later, theidea is coming into its own. Devices like the USB key, the microdrive, and the Palm LifeDrive are actually spacious enough to make all of this work. Twenty years ago Jobs said you should be able to walk up to any personal computer and make it your own. Ten years ago Ellison said that you could access anything from anywhere. In five to ten years these visionary things may just really happen. Funny how the world works, isn't it...
Ross Winn "not just another ugly face..."
Why wouldn't there just be a monitor and keyboard?
The article assumes that the processor/memory etc are bulky by definition. Movement towards miniturization and disposable computing mean that having an entire system may become nearly as cheap and small as the stick of memory you are booting off of.
The only way to be truly secure is to have full control over the system you are using, so bringing your own entire machine will be a necesity for the crowd for whom inovations in hotels are usually designed for: business people.
Also a USB key with an OS compiled for an alternative archetecture would be useless in a hotel box.
The only two things which a handheld device cannot offer are a full sized display and interface. Why not just make everyone's handheld device interface with a monitor/keyboard/mouse console? Leave architecture compatibility issues to the user. Leave security to the user. Just provide a pleasant work environment.
Geez, I must be getting old. These young whipper snappers are so used to networked computers that they all think removable media is a new idea...
Oh well, what the hell...
Ideas like this one are always based on one assumption: that everybody will be totally happy with the same keyboard layout. While it might be true US-wide for US-only customers, it's not true in Europe. All the European languages require keyboard layouts more or less different than the typical English QWERTY - such as the German QWERTZ or French AZERTY, not to mention all those weird accented characters that the Swedisch chef need to correctly spell his "bork! bork! bork!". Don't get me started with Slavic languages, especially those of Cyryllic alphabet... No European hotel would seriously consider offering this service as it would lock-out foreign visitors. Personally, I'm just totally happy traveling with my powerbook as my personal computer, all I want from the hotel is to have Airport and access to their printers.
Forget the sheets - think about the fact you're reusing the blankets from the previous parties (and the previous parties' leftovers).
Speaking of the drives, Best Buy just finished having a sale of Memorex 2G sticks (retail $199) for $159 at the cash register, then another $30 for the rebate. Granted, you're looking at $10+ in taxes at each level, but it's still a heck of a discount. Not much more than some of the stores' retail prices for 1G, although I don't think anyone is going to pay the upper end of a 1G price scale. Those things were nearly impossible to find using the StoreFinder Inventory. I didn't want to order one and was going to my doctor's office in Chicago a couple of days after they sold out here in Indy, so I placed a pickup order there.
Then, I happened to be picking up some laptops for our DARPA team from a repair shop, and when I went back to my car, there was a Best Buy sack (this was on the far side of the BB parking lot) which was on the passenger side of my car, so I opened it up. There was a 2G stick in it. Unopened. So I figured I'd do the nice nerd thing and track down the new owner. If they paid via credit card or cheque, it shouldn't have been a problem to track them down. Unfortunately, they paid in ca$h???? So I sat there for another hour, sitting & reading, sans A/C as it was fixed, then stopped working and I hadn't had time to take it back to be re-repaired. I don't tolerate heat very well, but I felt it was the decent thing to do. After an hour, I wasn't sure what to do, so I ended up putting it onto my lanyard, feeling badly for not having another way to find the owner.
BTW, it's said you can't (or shouldn't) format NTFS, but both of mine seem to be working fine. I had the handle (which holds it on the lanyard) break off and had to finagle a fix, but also contacted Memorex. They told me to file it as a warranty issue to get a replacement cap. (???)
One of my friends, who has a 512M stick, asked me what I was going to do with 4G of stick memory and I asked him what he did with 512M. He said he rarely comes close to capacity. I thought about marking one of them with tiny lettering: ICE (In Case of Emergency), sort of like the fad with cell phones, but a text file with the important info, in addition to the usual phone numbers (a list, and who they are - more options than a cell phone) as I usually have them around my neck; e.g. I'm allergic to morphine; my pain receptors have been exposed weekly exclusively to methadone for nearly ten years, so other pain meds may not work correctly; what other meds I'm taking; why all of this is so; etc.
Here's an article from PC Magazine detailing how to stock up on what you can carry around, bootable, as well as what utilities you can tote about worrying about (on the Windows side) things which have to have components in specific directories, entries in the registry, etc.
You chose a really bad example up there ;-). At least in Europe fraud using manipulated or even completely bogus ATMs is not too infrequent according to police reports. Apparently there are a lot of mostly Eastern European gangs that either "enhance" real ATM systems with add-ons for the card reader and the keyboard that, while often not discernible on even closer inspection to the non-expert, can log the users PIN codes and grab the transmitted card data. Sometimes they even use complete real-looking fake-ATMs that trick you into entering your PIN and swallowing your ATM card afterwards. Until you have contacted the bank to get your card back from the presumed read ATM they are already spending your money using your real card and the PIN you gave them.