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."

Comments

Don't Forget..

[Pharmboy]

Yea, but you still have to bring your own virus and spyware. It will be years til they provide that.

Or you can go one better...

[Afecks]

...check out VirtualPrivacyMachine. DamnSmallLinux made completely anonymous with Tor.

Re:Or you can go one better...

[temojen]

Or just bring your own Laptop. Putting your confidential information in someone else's computer is not safe. ever.

Well, that's great

[the-amazing-blob]

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.

Re:Well, that's great

[nizo]

One solution would be to sell flashdrives with a builtin lcd monitor and keyboard; not only would they be hard to lose but the extra functionality would be awesome!

I like this concept

[technoextreme]

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?

Oh?

[temojen]

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.

Re:Oh?

[Pharmboy]

This is referring to a computer with NO operating system at all. You have to provide everything, it's completely diskless, just a usb port. If they did anything, it would have to be at the proxy or some kinda tftp boot.

Having a whole operating system on a flash drive isn't that unusual. I have been using Knoppix for years, like a million other people. The flashdrive would just be faster and smaller, and you could write to it and save some files if you chose to.

Re:Oh?

[temojen]

How do you know it has no OS?

Re:Oh?

[ComputerSherpa]

You guys are all assuming that your precious data is worth stealing in the first place. You may not be as interesting to other people as you may think.

The key issue

[putko]

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.

Trust?

[wtown]

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.

Is the network the flashdrive?

[cgrand]

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.

Windows?

[Libor Vanek]

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...

Re:Windows?

[Pharmboy]

Author probably never tried to take his Windows XP disk and boot in different box with different mainboard, video and network card...

Piece of cake. Just install flashdrive, answer Yes and NO alot, reboot 12 times, download two drivers each time, then call for authorization to activate your computer yet again. Setup time would be less than two hours each time. This is much better than bringing your own laptop....

USB would need a security layer.

[G4from128k]

This sounds like a security/privacy nightmare. What stops the host PC from copying the drive or infecting it with malware from the prior user. Even if the USB drive uses an encrypted filesystem, once you type your password into the PC to access any file on the user data partition, you have no guarantee that it won't access every file on the drive. I can also see this giving corporate security managers the screaming heebie jeebies over the thought of returning road-warrior executives bringing infected USB drives inside the the corporate firewall (yes, you can scan for malware but you're still susceptible to zero-day attacks and delays in AV updates).

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.

vmware with no HD image perhaps?

[tepples]

Then how do you know it's not a virtual machine that's emulating a diskless PC?

Re:vmware with no HD image perhaps?

[DavidTC]

So, you think computers in hotel rooms are just going to have their cabling laying around where people can get to it?

Cause we all know they do that with the phones and TVs.

Oh, wait, no they don't. They build them into things or at the very least have the cables non-detachable.

Gee, if they do that with a 30 dollar phone and a two dollar cable on it, I wonder if they'll do it with a 300 dollar computer and a two dollar cable on it. Not to mention the 15 dollar keyboard and 5 dollar mouse they don't want people making off with.

I'm sure they'll leave all that accessable where we can just unplug it at will, instead of putting in those computer cases that are sold exactly for the purpose of blocking access to the cabling while leaving the front accessable.

Just for laughs, at the next hotel you stay in that has an internet connection, try unplugging the TV. See how far you get. You can unplug them at cheap places that just buy a TV and put it on a table, but those are not the places that will be offering computers.

Re:Flash drives don't last forever

[v1]

There are "spare" cells in flash drives just the same as there are "spare" blocks on hard drives. There are usually two controller chips in a USB drive (plus the flash chips) - they include the memory controller and a usb (or firewire if you happen to have one) bridge. The memory controller manages the memory and remaps cells that go bad, transparent to the usb/fw bridge. Anyone with a flash drive probably has some bad cells in it, just like hard drives 10 years ago that came with a label printed on the top listing all the bad blocks the new drive shipped with.

Parent talks about "wear balancing" - interesting concept though I have not heard of it used on flash drives before... would be a nice idea but not too fun to implement.

I use my flash drive several times a day at least, it's a 4gb SanDisk Cruzer Mini. Perfect for hauling around all the maintenance, repair, and update software that I use daily. I don't know why people buy those giant drives that don't fit well in a pocket and block adjacent USB ports. SanDisk also has a lifetime guarantee on their drives, so if mine ever does use up all its spares, I'll just trade it for a new one. Lacks a write protect switch though, which would kinda be nice.

Also a less known factoid about USB drives... the fast ones - USB 2.0 "High Speed" (not to be confused with the "Full Speed" snails) only work in powered USB hubs. Can't plug them into the keyboard ports. I wish they'd fix that. I'm tired of having to crawl behind a computer to jack into one of the powered ports. Thankfully most manufacturers are placing a powered usb port on the front of their machines nowadays. (sometimes two)

Would be nice too if Apple would fix OS X so it didn't reset all the #@*& USB buses 1.5 seconds into boot, so we could boot X off our flash drives.

the NeXT big thing...

[ross_winn]

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...

We used to do that with floppy disks

[HermanAB]

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...

Bad example

[Wudbaer]

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.