I'm willing to guess they serve the same function as solar cells with an RV -- keep the batteries topped off.
A bong squad is going to need a lot more energy than what these solar panels will provide for their equipment. Having the ability to recharge passively is a boon, and in wartime means no diesel noise potentially giving away location to snipers, not to mention fuel costs saved by not having to fire up a generator.
It won't be a US Navy that would be coming the island's way. All it takes is a couple well-armed pirate ships (and no, I'm not meaning the Jolly Roger kind... I'm meaning the type that drop Zodiac boats full of guys with AK-47s and RPGs in the water), and pretty much the wee country is history. This isn't factoring the guys with the subs and torpedos who would just blow the thing up as look at it if they were any competition.
Maybe it is a good thing. With Motorola in capable hands, HTC offering a mechanism for unlocking bootloaders, and Samsung possibly having CyanogenMod support, we might see this effort become something as an option right off the top for Android users.
It at least would get a consistent interface and tools across handsets.
What would be awesome in the future would be to be able to have devices ship with their default ROM, but with a few mouse clicks, be able to download CM and switch to it.
Even nicer would be companies licensing their UIs to CM, so if someone wants MotoBlur (which is pretty nice), or SenseUI, they can be present.
I'm crossing fingers -- it looks like some of the things that have hamstrung the Android community are being taken care of.
5: Throw some development effort at Exchange support and some on phone security. eCryptfs is in the mainline kernel. EncFS is also around, but requires FUSE. It wouldn't be hard for an Android phone to store the key to the SD card in a protected place. Add to this encrypting the onboard filesystems, and that would provide solid protection for data. Add to this options for remote wipe, as well as wiping a phone if it has not seen network connectivity in x amount of days, and that should provide good protection.
Exchange support is a make or break for companies to buy phones. Even Apple is playing Microsoft's game in this department.
6: The best way I've seen bootloaders locked is on the Nexus phone, with the fastboot oem unlock command via ADB. This provides both protection for novice users who would likely stop at installing a SDK if directed to by some "pr0n viewer" app, especially when the dialog about voiding any and all warranties pops up (not to mention completely erasing the device). It also provides clued users the easy ability to unlock bootloaders and re-ROM.
7: One of the best things about Android phones is that they are completely standalone. No syncing required. iOS 5 brings that capability to the iPhone, but if one wants to back up their iDevice and the saved games on it, they still have to plug it in and sync to a Mac or PC. It would be nice if Google could have some built in functionality similar to both Titanium Backup as well as Nandroid where both apps can be saved off on the SD card and to a cloud provider (with the option of encryption), as well as a complete ROM image. Bonus points if there would be a standardized PC application to allow people to plug their phones in and back them up, point/click style.
8: The Atrix's phone/PC idea may be new, but it has a ton of potential, especially if the laptop dock is standardized so it can work with future handsets. This is useful, especially when travelling light, where the only thing one might need is the ability to remote into work, check Web stuff, read E-mail, and do some document writing. In fact, this might be a good place for ChromeOS, although having a regular Linux distro that allows for local saving of files in an encrypted storage area should be an option.
9: Maybe Google can get some type of dock connector standardized. USB is fine, but the advantage of the iPhone/iPad dock connector is a structural component -- being able to hold the device in a dock. One of the biggest iPod/iPhone selling points is that one can just plop their device in any docking station, be it in their car, in an RV, on top of their RV, on their office desk, or on their clock radio and have their music. It would be nice to see a standard similar to this for Android devices.
My only concern is that we may have many 100kw power plant messes on our hands. Two examples:
1: Joe Sixpack sticks his generator on a bicycle rack on the back of his RV, and Jane Ativan rear-ends Joe's vehicle while texting.
2: Joe has one Miller Natural Light too many, heard about a suggestion that he could stick a lens in front of the laser to make it crank out more juice, opens the box with his Sawzall, and blows the thorium powder in the air. He breathes it in, gets ill, sues the maker for having such a dangerous product, which gets his lawyers decide to make a class action suit. Joe gets money for a hamburger, the lawyers get a new Lear jet and several hangars to park it in, and the manufacturer of the generator is bankrupt.
Were it not for the fact that we have so many people whom are only alive because of warning stickers and Darwin repellant, I would prefer small to medium power generators like this -- it would make each house be able to sustain itself, as well as back-feed power to help if someone's generator is down. However, I just fear that the innate moronity of people would result in this being shelved a la the Ford Nucleon.
You hit upon something -- it is far better to sell 10-20 large, multi-gigawatt reactors to power cities than to try to sell millions of kilowatt to megawatt motors/generators.
If it takes one laser to do a reaction, it isn't hard to either have a more powerful laser burn more thorium, or have arrays of lasers. Who knows, there might be economies of scale here, like there are with diesel engines.
Since this is a chemical reaction from what TFA says, I also wonder about what happens to the waste thorium. Is it in a different phase, or an oxide? Do we need to put as much energy into refining the thorium as we get from it? If that is the case, then what we have here is pretty much an energy dense battery, and not a true energy generator.
An array of 40 of those would completely take care of any and all power needs around central Texas for a long time. Especially if one could locate them near town so power line heat loss is minimized.
If someone can do this with a motorcycle, think about a few changes to make the engine run at 3600 rpm in the US or 3000 RPM overseas, or variable RPM with an inverter.
Having the ability to have cheap power, even if it about 5 to 20 kilowatts would change life greatly for villages. This would provide water filteration ability, power for a water pump for running water, lights, HVAC for a building for those too young/old/infirm to take the heat. Slightly larger models can help with desalination (even if it is the primitive process of distilling the water 3-4 times), and then pumping it inland.
Another use for this would be coupling the motor with an inverter and a capacitor bank and having clean power for remote data centers, be it a shed that has a heater to keep the servers running in the middle of Alaska to transmit weather and seismic info, to stations which watch forest 24/7 in case of forest fire, to seismic info near volcanos.
Cars are cool, but the biggest application for this technology wouldn't be transportation (although it would help it), but electricity generation.
There are Bluetooth based ODB II readers for Android. It wouldn't be a big step to have an app that would post the codes the engine or transmission throws on FB, with the GPS lat/long/elevation too, just for completeness sake.
Here in TX, it is more like, "It looks like you have finished over four Lone Stars and have made a significant dent in a bottle of Jack. Would you like to:"
Park on the road, have a taxi pick you up and a tow truck haul your ride home?
Start figuring out credit cards that are not maxed out to come up with your bail money?
Start fire sale proceedings on your your house to pay for the charges stemming from hitting that school bus that is coming up, but has right of way?
Order another bottle of Jack?
Order another six pack of Lone Star so the Jack doesn't cause a hangover?
It does, but cellular carriers have the ability to disable it. I know that by default, Verizon devices won't show up the option for tethering (wireless or USB) unless you have the option on your phone.
Of course, that is easily gotten around with a custom ROM, or root.
I use VPNs all the time on my cell phone, and never for tethering. I don't really trust most wireless networks out there, so having my traffic going through an encrypted tunnel out is something I do as a matter of routine. A lot of "free" Wi-Fi places also have ad injectors (a la Phorm) so having an encrypted link gets rid of third party meddling in what I am doing.
I know this is a revert to older technology, but for price of disks like this, maybe going to a caddy-based mechanism for the DVD writer might be a good idea, and have the disks shipped in caddies? This way, the media would not have to leave the caddy, greatly decreasing the chance of getting scratched. Of course, the media can be removed from the caddy to be read on a normal CD/DVD drive.
For long term archiving, this would be a good idea, as the biggest enemy in most environments to optical media are scratches.
They don't have to wall the US out, all it would take is other nations signing onto an ICANN replacement. Then, even though an IP range may belong to foo.com in the US, everyone else will resolve it to bar.eb (for Elbonia), and their traffic would go to that site. Same with DNS. The international registry may say vendagoat.com goes to the site in Latveria, while in the US, it goes to a company that has had it for a while.
It would be a split, but it would be relatively easy to do if other countries decided that the TLD registry needed to be owned by someone else.
At any time, it wouldn't be hard for other countries, especially in blocs like BRIC to pick up their toys and go home. As of now, the only reason this hasn't been done is out of laziness -- ICANN and the existing IPv4 allocation methods work, so why bother changing? However, this can change at any moment.
It depends on their product. I've used McAfee on AIX, Linux, and Solaris for a long while, and it has been very well behaved.
The reason I've had to put it on these platforms is not that the Solaris cluster running the Oracle transactions is going to get nailed by a virus, but to make the bean counters happy. A lot of business contracts have stipulations requiring machines to have antivirus software on them, and checking this box off can mean a successful deal or a no go.
As for McAfee on Windows, the latest iterations seem to be a lot better than the past, even on backlevel hardware. I rather use Forefront (hell, most businesses license it in their large bundles) because Microsoft's AV is decent and easy to manage/pull reports on.
An attack coming from an IP address in China doesn't mean much to me -- It gets blocked and life goes on.
It could be a botnet client, or it could even be someone who compromised a machine just to make things look like it was an overt Chinese attack. If Elbonia hackers were probing a target, why not use Latveria's machines so the probes appear to be coming from there?
Regardless where the attack comes from, unlike most theaters of wars where the best defense is a good offense, the best defense on this front are solid security guidelines (defense in depth, separation of privs, user security, dedicated backbones for critical traffic, etc.)
In some ways, bbs handles were more identifiable than one's name, and their holders had as much reputation to gain or lose as if they had their real name. Yes, one could just drop the handle and grab a new one, but it would take forever to get people to know that person, and as soon as someone found out they were linked to an old handle, it would be all over the place, and the two handles linked to each other.
Same with my LARP and MMO characters. People recognize those identities, although they don't have my RL name or info attached, and reputation is quite valuable there.
As for the Z brothers, one needs to follow the money. Their whole empire is based on being able to get advertisers aboard, and the more behavioral tracking they can do, the more cash they make. To use an old Texas expression, "they have a dog in this hunt" when they say anonymity must go away.
Why not just a plain old transfer switch? Mains power comes on, generator gets de-energized and stays that way until mains power gets cut.
This way, backfeeding is impossible.
By law, and common sense, having a transfer switch between a generator and a house is mandatory. Even on RVs with built in generators like toy haulers or motorhomes, they either have a transfer switch, or one must either plug the electric cord into the genny outlet or shore power.
er, make that "If everyone is a proxy, everyone is a defendant".
This is why anonymous remailers are almost nonexistent, and a similar fate has happened with TOR exit nodes, where if illegal material passes through, there better be logs or the exit node gets hit with the civil/criminal responsibility.
Exactly. If people start getting caught left and right, it wouldn't take much for people to go to a lower tech solution -- proxy servers and secure VPNs.
If ISPs want to play a cat and mouse game, they can block proxies. However, a bit on a wire is a bit on a wire and there will be always a way to get encrypted data to another site.
What is ironic that any enterprise tool has encryption built in if it was made in recent times:
The EMC devices have Powerpath encryption for LUNs. Someone hacks the SAN, nothing available on the server other than trashing the LUNs.
IBM storage arrays check if they can boot off a key server, and then unlock their encrypted drives in hardware. If this isn't enabled, AIX has EFS (different from Windows's EFS) to ensure that only the user with the right key can attach a directory.
Linux has so many tools, there is a supported solution somewhere. LUKS, TrueCrypt, EncFS, gpg, various userlevel tools accessed via FUSE, PGP, etc.
Windows has plenty of tools. BitLocker, EFS, third party tools like PGP, TrueCrypt, and document level tools like LockLizard or Microsoft's IRM.
Backup programs can encrypt data to tape using hardware encryption and SPIN/SPOUT SCSI commands, or the backup client can deduplicate on its end and send encrypted stuff up, so the backup server is not the weakest link.
Applications can encrypt on a table basis in almost all RDBMS programs. Store the value and a nonce as a salt. This way, even if a table had repeating values, an attacker couldn't discern what repeated and what didn't.
Everything supports two-factor authentication, so even though RSA Security may have had issues, having a token and a password is better than nothing. If someone doesn't want SecurID, there are plenty of other two factor products, such as VASCO's stuff they OEM to Blizzard, SOE, and eBay.
The encryption tools are there, and likely sitting around ready to be configured. It will take some time making a recovery scenario, because key management can be hairy, but if done right, encryption will be pretty much set and forget.
Very true. A thief can always chuck a brick through a car window and get in. However, a lot of European cars have deadlocking mechanisms where a thief is going to have to try to scramble in and out through the broken window... while the inside alarm is blasting at 120+ dB.
However, the thing with car remotes is that a method of compromise merely means a thief just hits the remote, locks pop open, and all items in the vehicle are theirs.
Another thing is that if there is zero signs of forced entry, insurance is not going to cover stolen goods. With forced entry (and a police report to go with it), one has a lot higher chance of getting their claim approved and money back, as opposed to just a story with no real evidence that something was there, then it isn't. This is the same reason why it is important to use high security locks -- so if an intruder gets in, there are telltale signs left.
From what I know, it is the law in SK for sites to demand the registration number.
If a number is needed, perhaps the best idea would be for the SK government to have a website that citizens and residents can log into, and get a one time code that can be put in other places. This way, the law still works, but there is no way an attacker who does not attack the Korean government site could be able to figure that a number entered in actually belongs to which resident.
Personally, demanding a registration number is pointless and stupid. All it takes is someone snooping over the shoulder or sniffing an unencrypted password to get a valid number, and that is what an attacker needs.
What is ironic is that if one looks at cell phone CPUs, anything since the old TI OMAP chips almost certainly have special instructions to deal with the needs of array shifting (for AES), or for exponentiation (for RSA).
Maybe the CPU in the car might be different, but common sense says that dropping a low power ARM chip in to handle this would be the best thing for car makers.
In these days where security is actually being tried by blackhats constantly, it is inexcusable to not take reasonable measures.
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I'm willing to guess they serve the same function as solar cells with an RV -- keep the batteries topped off.
A bong squad is going to need a lot more energy than what these solar panels will provide for their equipment. Having the ability to recharge passively is a boon, and in wartime means no diesel noise potentially giving away location to snipers, not to mention fuel costs saved by not having to fire up a generator.
It won't be a US Navy that would be coming the island's way. All it takes is a couple well-armed pirate ships (and no, I'm not meaning the Jolly Roger kind... I'm meaning the type that drop Zodiac boats full of guys with AK-47s and RPGs in the water), and pretty much the wee country is history. This isn't factoring the guys with the subs and torpedos who would just blow the thing up as look at it if they were any competition.
Maybe it is a good thing. With Motorola in capable hands, HTC offering a mechanism for unlocking bootloaders, and Samsung possibly having CyanogenMod support, we might see this effort become something as an option right off the top for Android users.
It at least would get a consistent interface and tools across handsets.
What would be awesome in the future would be to be able to have devices ship with their default ROM, but with a few mouse clicks, be able to download CM and switch to it.
Even nicer would be companies licensing their UIs to CM, so if someone wants MotoBlur (which is pretty nice), or SenseUI, they can be present.
I'm crossing fingers -- it looks like some of the things that have hamstrung the Android community are being taken care of.
I'd add a couple more:
5: Throw some development effort at Exchange support and some on phone security. eCryptfs is in the mainline kernel. EncFS is also around, but requires FUSE. It wouldn't be hard for an Android phone to store the key to the SD card in a protected place. Add to this encrypting the onboard filesystems, and that would provide solid protection for data. Add to this options for remote wipe, as well as wiping a phone if it has not seen network connectivity in x amount of days, and that should provide good protection.
Exchange support is a make or break for companies to buy phones. Even Apple is playing Microsoft's game in this department.
6: The best way I've seen bootloaders locked is on the Nexus phone, with the fastboot oem unlock command via ADB. This provides both protection for novice users who would likely stop at installing a SDK if directed to by some "pr0n viewer" app, especially when the dialog about voiding any and all warranties pops up (not to mention completely erasing the device). It also provides clued users the easy ability to unlock bootloaders and re-ROM.
7: One of the best things about Android phones is that they are completely standalone. No syncing required. iOS 5 brings that capability to the iPhone, but if one wants to back up their iDevice and the saved games on it, they still have to plug it in and sync to a Mac or PC. It would be nice if Google could have some built in functionality similar to both Titanium Backup as well as Nandroid where both apps can be saved off on the SD card and to a cloud provider (with the option of encryption), as well as a complete ROM image. Bonus points if there would be a standardized PC application to allow people to plug their phones in and back them up, point/click style.
8: The Atrix's phone/PC idea may be new, but it has a ton of potential, especially if the laptop dock is standardized so it can work with future handsets. This is useful, especially when travelling light, where the only thing one might need is the ability to remote into work, check Web stuff, read E-mail, and do some document writing. In fact, this might be a good place for ChromeOS, although having a regular Linux distro that allows for local saving of files in an encrypted storage area should be an option.
9: Maybe Google can get some type of dock connector standardized. USB is fine, but the advantage of the iPhone/iPad dock connector is a structural component -- being able to hold the device in a dock. One of the biggest iPod/iPhone selling points is that one can just plop their device in any docking station, be it in their car, in an RV, on top of their RV, on their office desk, or on their clock radio and have their music. It would be nice to see a standard similar to this for Android devices.
My only concern is that we may have many 100kw power plant messes on our hands. Two examples:
1: Joe Sixpack sticks his generator on a bicycle rack on the back of his RV, and Jane Ativan rear-ends Joe's vehicle while texting.
2: Joe has one Miller Natural Light too many, heard about a suggestion that he could stick a lens in front of the laser to make it crank out more juice, opens the box with his Sawzall, and blows the thorium powder in the air. He breathes it in, gets ill, sues the maker for having such a dangerous product, which gets his lawyers decide to make a class action suit. Joe gets money for a hamburger, the lawyers get a new Lear jet and several hangars to park it in, and the manufacturer of the generator is bankrupt.
Were it not for the fact that we have so many people whom are only alive because of warning stickers and Darwin repellant, I would prefer small to medium power generators like this -- it would make each house be able to sustain itself, as well as back-feed power to help if someone's generator is down. However, I just fear that the innate moronity of people would result in this being shelved a la the Ford Nucleon.
You hit upon something -- it is far better to sell 10-20 large, multi-gigawatt reactors to power cities than to try to sell millions of kilowatt to megawatt motors/generators.
If it takes one laser to do a reaction, it isn't hard to either have a more powerful laser burn more thorium, or have arrays of lasers. Who knows, there might be economies of scale here, like there are with diesel engines.
Since this is a chemical reaction from what TFA says, I also wonder about what happens to the waste thorium. Is it in a different phase, or an oxide? Do we need to put as much energy into refining the thorium as we get from it? If that is the case, then what we have here is pretty much an energy dense battery, and not a true energy generator.
It would be nice if it could crank out 250MW.
An array of 40 of those would completely take care of any and all power needs around central Texas for a long time. Especially if one could locate them near town so power line heat loss is minimized.
If someone can do this with a motorcycle, think about a few changes to make the engine run at 3600 rpm in the US or 3000 RPM overseas, or variable RPM with an inverter.
Having the ability to have cheap power, even if it about 5 to 20 kilowatts would change life greatly for villages. This would provide water filteration ability, power for a water pump for running water, lights, HVAC for a building for those too young/old/infirm to take the heat. Slightly larger models can help with desalination (even if it is the primitive process of distilling the water 3-4 times), and then pumping it inland.
Another use for this would be coupling the motor with an inverter and a capacitor bank and having clean power for remote data centers, be it a shed that has a heater to keep the servers running in the middle of Alaska to transmit weather and seismic info, to stations which watch forest 24/7 in case of forest fire, to seismic info near volcanos.
Cars are cool, but the biggest application for this technology wouldn't be transportation (although it would help it), but electricity generation.
There are Bluetooth based ODB II readers for Android. It wouldn't be a big step to have an app that would post the codes the engine or transmission throws on FB, with the GPS lat/long/elevation too, just for completeness sake.
Here in TX, it is more like, "It looks like you have finished over four Lone Stars and have made a significant dent in a bottle of Jack. Would you like to:"
Park on the road, have a taxi pick you up and a tow truck haul your ride home?
Start figuring out credit cards that are not maxed out to come up with your bail money?
Start fire sale proceedings on your your house to pay for the charges stemming from hitting that school bus that is coming up, but has right of way?
Order another bottle of Jack?
Order another six pack of Lone Star so the Jack doesn't cause a hangover?
It does, but cellular carriers have the ability to disable it. I know that by default, Verizon devices won't show up the option for tethering (wireless or USB) unless you have the option on your phone.
Of course, that is easily gotten around with a custom ROM, or root.
I use VPNs all the time on my cell phone, and never for tethering. I don't really trust most wireless networks out there, so having my traffic going through an encrypted tunnel out is something I do as a matter of routine. A lot of "free" Wi-Fi places also have ad injectors (a la Phorm) so having an encrypted link gets rid of third party meddling in what I am doing.
I know this is a revert to older technology, but for price of disks like this, maybe going to a caddy-based mechanism for the DVD writer might be a good idea, and have the disks shipped in caddies? This way, the media would not have to leave the caddy, greatly decreasing the chance of getting scratched. Of course, the media can be removed from the caddy to be read on a normal CD/DVD drive.
For long term archiving, this would be a good idea, as the biggest enemy in most environments to optical media are scratches.
They don't have to wall the US out, all it would take is other nations signing onto an ICANN replacement. Then, even though an IP range may belong to foo.com in the US, everyone else will resolve it to bar.eb (for Elbonia), and their traffic would go to that site. Same with DNS. The international registry may say vendagoat.com goes to the site in Latveria, while in the US, it goes to a company that has had it for a while.
It would be a split, but it would be relatively easy to do if other countries decided that the TLD registry needed to be owned by someone else.
At any time, it wouldn't be hard for other countries, especially in blocs like BRIC to pick up their toys and go home. As of now, the only reason this hasn't been done is out of laziness -- ICANN and the existing IPv4 allocation methods work, so why bother changing? However, this can change at any moment.
It depends on their product. I've used McAfee on AIX, Linux, and Solaris for a long while, and it has been very well behaved.
The reason I've had to put it on these platforms is not that the Solaris cluster running the Oracle transactions is going to get nailed by a virus, but to make the bean counters happy. A lot of business contracts have stipulations requiring machines to have antivirus software on them, and checking this box off can mean a successful deal or a no go.
As for McAfee on Windows, the latest iterations seem to be a lot better than the past, even on backlevel hardware. I rather use Forefront (hell, most businesses license it in their large bundles) because Microsoft's AV is decent and easy to manage/pull reports on.
An attack coming from an IP address in China doesn't mean much to me -- It gets blocked and life goes on.
It could be a botnet client, or it could even be someone who compromised a machine just to make things look like it was an overt Chinese attack. If Elbonia hackers were probing a target, why not use Latveria's machines so the probes appear to be coming from there?
Regardless where the attack comes from, unlike most theaters of wars where the best defense is a good offense, the best defense on this front are solid security guidelines (defense in depth, separation of privs, user security, dedicated backbones for critical traffic, etc.)
In some ways, bbs handles were more identifiable than one's name, and their holders had as much reputation to gain or lose as if they had their real name. Yes, one could just drop the handle and grab a new one, but it would take forever to get people to know that person, and as soon as someone found out they were linked to an old handle, it would be all over the place, and the two handles linked to each other.
Same with my LARP and MMO characters. People recognize those identities, although they don't have my RL name or info attached, and reputation is quite valuable there.
As for the Z brothers, one needs to follow the money. Their whole empire is based on being able to get advertisers aboard, and the more behavioral tracking they can do, the more cash they make. To use an old Texas expression, "they have a dog in this hunt" when they say anonymity must go away.
Why not just a plain old transfer switch? Mains power comes on, generator gets de-energized and stays that way until mains power gets cut.
This way, backfeeding is impossible.
By law, and common sense, having a transfer switch between a generator and a house is mandatory. Even on RVs with built in generators like toy haulers or motorhomes, they either have a transfer switch, or one must either plug the electric cord into the genny outlet or shore power.
er, make that "If everyone is a proxy, everyone is a defendant".
This is why anonymous remailers are almost nonexistent, and a similar fate has happened with TOR exit nodes, where if illegal material passes through, there better be logs or the exit node gets hit with the civil/criminal responsibility.
Caveat: If everyone is a policy, everyone is a defendant.
Exactly. If people start getting caught left and right, it wouldn't take much for people to go to a lower tech solution -- proxy servers and secure VPNs.
If ISPs want to play a cat and mouse game, they can block proxies. However, a bit on a wire is a bit on a wire and there will be always a way to get encrypted data to another site.
What is ironic that any enterprise tool has encryption built in if it was made in recent times:
The EMC devices have Powerpath encryption for LUNs. Someone hacks the SAN, nothing available on the server other than trashing the LUNs.
IBM storage arrays check if they can boot off a key server, and then unlock their encrypted drives in hardware. If this isn't enabled, AIX has EFS (different from Windows's EFS) to ensure that only the user with the right key can attach a directory.
Linux has so many tools, there is a supported solution somewhere. LUKS, TrueCrypt, EncFS, gpg, various userlevel tools accessed via FUSE, PGP, etc.
Windows has plenty of tools. BitLocker, EFS, third party tools like PGP, TrueCrypt, and document level tools like LockLizard or Microsoft's IRM.
Backup programs can encrypt data to tape using hardware encryption and SPIN/SPOUT SCSI commands, or the backup client can deduplicate on its end and send encrypted stuff up, so the backup server is not the weakest link.
Applications can encrypt on a table basis in almost all RDBMS programs. Store the value and a nonce as a salt. This way, even if a table had repeating values, an attacker couldn't discern what repeated and what didn't.
Everything supports two-factor authentication, so even though RSA Security may have had issues, having a token and a password is better than nothing. If someone doesn't want SecurID, there are plenty of other two factor products, such as VASCO's stuff they OEM to Blizzard, SOE, and eBay.
The encryption tools are there, and likely sitting around ready to be configured. It will take some time making a recovery scenario, because key management can be hairy, but if done right, encryption will be pretty much set and forget.
Very true. A thief can always chuck a brick through a car window and get in. However, a lot of European cars have deadlocking mechanisms where a thief is going to have to try to scramble in and out through the broken window... while the inside alarm is blasting at 120+ dB.
However, the thing with car remotes is that a method of compromise merely means a thief just hits the remote, locks pop open, and all items in the vehicle are theirs.
Another thing is that if there is zero signs of forced entry, insurance is not going to cover stolen goods. With forced entry (and a police report to go with it), one has a lot higher chance of getting their claim approved and money back, as opposed to just a story with no real evidence that something was there, then it isn't. This is the same reason why it is important to use high security locks -- so if an intruder gets in, there are telltale signs left.
From what I know, it is the law in SK for sites to demand the registration number.
If a number is needed, perhaps the best idea would be for the SK government to have a website that citizens and residents can log into, and get a one time code that can be put in other places. This way, the law still works, but there is no way an attacker who does not attack the Korean government site could be able to figure that a number entered in actually belongs to which resident.
Personally, demanding a registration number is pointless and stupid. All it takes is someone snooping over the shoulder or sniffing an unencrypted password to get a valid number, and that is what an attacker needs.
What is ironic is that if one looks at cell phone CPUs, anything since the old TI OMAP chips almost certainly have special instructions to deal with the needs of array shifting (for AES), or for exponentiation (for RSA).
Maybe the CPU in the car might be different, but common sense says that dropping a low power ARM chip in to handle this would be the best thing for car makers.
In these days where security is actually being tried by blackhats constantly, it is inexcusable to not take reasonable measures.