I would like to see more consumer grade firewalls sporting the ability to block outgoing packets, but offer customizability so people can choose what goes out the door. For example, port 25 out should be blocked by default, and the manual that comes with the router (or software) offer explicit, clear directions on how to enable this port if a user just has to have it as opposed to using a more proper port in their mail software (465 to be exact.) I am quite sure that between ISPs getting enough of a clue to block outgoing 25 on their dialup/DSL/cable networks, and routers which block 25 by default, this will slow down bot spam.
To be even more funky, perhaps have a SOCKS5 server on the firewall box, so applications can get out as they please if configured properly, but programs which just want to blast out packets will be stopped in their tracks. Of course, if this is done, the next gen spyware will be socksified and scan for existing SOCKS configs, but its a step.
There is one big reason: Sysadmins won't have a heart attack if a tape clatters to the floor.
Tape has been engineered for decades for reliability. A tape cartridge doesn't have much in the way of moving parts compared to a hard disk that can go out of whack, and modern tapes like DLTs, it will take more than a clatter to the floor to make the tape unreadable.
Hard disks are great, but way too fragile for serious backups. However, I wish tape drives and tapes would come down in price like hard drives... the first tape drive with a decent price/performance ratio is a DLT-4 for $1000 or so.
To boot, there is no standard for removable hard disk cartridges for an autoloader. Yes, Iomega has the REV removable disks (great technology, can be used as WORM archival media, but expensive and not that much capacity compared to a tape drive), Imation has the Ulysses/Odyssey line, but there is no true multivendor standard for making hard disks as easy to mount and mount and swappable for robotics as tapes, with circutry designed to allow for hot-plugging and unplugging with a high number of insertion/removal cycles. What would be nice is a standard cartridge format for both 3.5" and 2.5" drives that has good shock protection, circuitry that can withstand a large number of hot plug/unplug cycles (USB isn't designed for this), uses the full SATA speed of the disk, and is easy for a company to design a robotic mechanism to label and change cartridges in a library.
I have been using Retrospect for a couple years, and have been happy with it. Retrospect was made around 1989, was pretty much a Mac only product until around 2000 (IIRC). I like the fact that I can backup to an external hard disk, then copy the backup set to tape or a stack of DVDs. Like TSM, it offers synthetic full backups, where one doesn't have to worry about firing off a full, incremental, or differential backup -- just fire off a backup with the options you want.
Caveat: Unlike BackupMyPC or NovaStor, Retrospect uses its own packet writing format for CD and DVD backups.
As another program, Backup Exec is always good, and has been around for a decade or so. I have not tried it recently, but its always worth a look.
These days, to people born after the shuttles started doing missions mainly see NASA doing seemingly esoteric missions. (This is not belittling what they do, its very important to research as a whole, but to untrained people its not exciting.)
What is needed is a mission that is a morale (and funding) booster for NASA and that can be explained in short simple terms to people who have not seen much from NASA except a periodic shuttle dropping off supplies at the ISS. For example, A moon base showing off lots of pictures of the area. However, with the current technology we have now, NASA doesn't have any rockets powerful enough to hit the moon, so will have to reengineer something that has the 1960s kick to get men there, but with 21'st century safety. Even though its not adding significantly to research, doing something basic like high-resolution photos of the side of the moon facing away from Earth would be great PR and would get people to push for more NASA funding.
Pictures of another world taken not just from a random probe or rover, but by live people, expand the imagination and will get more people interested in the concept that space is not just a number in gigabytes marked on their iPod.
BIOS support merely adds features, such as how TPM 1.2 support allows Vista's BitLocker to allow for a PIN rather than a password. Guess the PIN wrong 3 times, BitLocker goes into locked mode, requiring the full key to be typed in.
The hardest part about FDE is getting the drivers into the OS and ensuring that OS patches don't mess with the driver stack that converts read/written plaintext blocks into cyphertext blocks on the HDD.
If someone read Applied Cryptography or another text, then put concepts learned into practice, I wouldn't mind using a product made from them.
What gets me is that PGP isn't competing for this DoD bid. Of all the FDE solutions I have used, I like PGP's because it offers not just a PKI, but an open, standardized PKI that has stood the test of time. This is not to say that other FDE software isn't good. Safeboot, SecureDoc, DriveCrypt, and CompuSec are all very good solutions too.
What is funny is that FDE solutions have been around a long time, almost to the days of PGP 1.0. In 1990, Casady and Greene had a program called A. M. E. (Access Managed Environment) for the Mac that would DES encrypt every sector on the hard disk. FWB also had a solution using their Hard Disk Toolkit for partition encryption on the driver level (only used 2 DES rounds though.)
I just hope the drive offers a way to overwrite the flash part multiple times. I can see people making sure the hard disk is erased before moving a machine between departments or selling them, but then the next owner just checks the flash part, and finds document caches of documents which should never see the light of day.
DVDs right now are the most cost-effective way to backup/archive data. For backups, I personally use Retrospect (because it uses a packet writing format, does incremental backups, and offeres certified AES encryption). For archives, I use WinRAR with parity/recovery volumes, each around the length of the DVD, then burn each.rar or.rev archive to an individual DVD, so if one goes bad, I'm not totally cooked. I also use two different types of DVD burners and check if one burned in one will work in the other, and vice versa.
However, for a large backup set (100+ gigs), its a pain. Sometimes (and this using pretty much any media) one disk will just fail on verify, forcing me to set it as "lost" in the backup set, then redo another backup set copy.
Tape is great, but with modern capacities, you will not be achieving price/performance ratios worth your time unless you pay $500 or more for a new tape drive.. Even the old "tried and true" 75-80 GB DLT IV tapes are not worth it these days. A drive will cost you 200-300 used on ebay (of course trusting unproven ebay tape drives with irreplacable data is another issue), and you will need to find an old SCSI card to connect it to most machines. Then, for the uncompressed capacity of 10 DVDs (which cost $5 or so), you have to shell out $40 a tape.
A new tape drive that is minimally decent (A DAT-72, with 36 gigs native) will cost you $640 to $740 depending on your choice of internal or external, and tapes are $16.00 each. A solid DVD burner will run you $150, and blanks are 25 cents to a dollar depending on how much you want to pay. For 100 gigs of data, a DVD burner + media will set you back $162. For 100gigs worth of data on tape, you are paying $698. Of course,this scales better the more media you get, and this doesn't factor in the time repeatedly swapping blanks which is a big thing.
The best solution to bridge the gap in cost/capacity seems to be Blu-ray media once drives start coming down in price in the next couple years. Right now, the drives and media are too expensive (not mentioning the fact that they are so new that nobody knows how long their archival life is.) However once these come down in price, they should replace DVDs for data archival.
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Clarification: I meant firewalls as dedicated hardware boxes like the DSL routers, not firewalling software like ZoneAlarm.
I would like to see more consumer grade firewalls sporting the ability to block outgoing packets, but offer customizability so people can choose what goes out the door. For example, port 25 out should be blocked by default, and the manual that comes with the router (or software) offer explicit, clear directions on how to enable this port if a user just has to have it as opposed to using a more proper port in their mail software (465 to be exact.) I am quite sure that between ISPs getting enough of a clue to block outgoing 25 on their dialup/DSL/cable networks, and routers which block 25 by default, this will slow down bot spam.
To be even more funky, perhaps have a SOCKS5 server on the firewall box, so applications can get out as they please if configured properly, but programs which just want to blast out packets will be stopped in their tracks. Of course, if this is done, the next gen spyware will be socksified and scan for existing SOCKS configs, but its a step.
There is one big reason: Sysadmins won't have a heart attack if a tape clatters to the floor.
Tape has been engineered for decades for reliability. A tape cartridge doesn't have much in the way of moving parts compared to a hard disk that can go out of whack, and modern tapes like DLTs, it will take more than a clatter to the floor to make the tape unreadable.
Hard disks are great, but way too fragile for serious backups. However, I wish tape drives and tapes would come down in price like hard drives... the first tape drive with a decent price/performance ratio is a DLT-4 for $1000 or so.
To boot, there is no standard for removable hard disk cartridges for an autoloader. Yes, Iomega has the REV removable disks (great technology, can be used as WORM archival media, but expensive and not that much capacity compared to a tape drive), Imation has the Ulysses/Odyssey line, but there is no true multivendor standard for making hard disks as easy to mount and mount and swappable for robotics as tapes, with circutry designed to allow for hot-plugging and unplugging with a high number of insertion/removal cycles. What would be nice is a standard cartridge format for both 3.5" and 2.5" drives that has good shock protection, circuitry that can withstand a large number of hot plug/unplug cycles (USB isn't designed for this), uses the full SATA speed of the disk, and is easy for a company to design a robotic mechanism to label and change cartridges in a library.
I have been using Retrospect for a couple years, and have been happy with it. Retrospect was made around 1989, was pretty much a Mac only product until around 2000 (IIRC). I like the fact that I can backup to an external hard disk, then copy the backup set to tape or a stack of DVDs. Like TSM, it offers synthetic full backups, where one doesn't have to worry about firing off a full, incremental, or differential backup -- just fire off a backup with the options you want.
Caveat: Unlike BackupMyPC or NovaStor, Retrospect uses its own packet writing format for CD and DVD backups.
As another program, Backup Exec is always good, and has been around for a decade or so. I have not tried it recently, but its always worth a look.
These days, to people born after the shuttles started doing missions mainly see NASA doing seemingly esoteric missions. (This is not belittling what they do, its very important to research as a whole, but to untrained people its not exciting.)
What is needed is a mission that is a morale (and funding) booster for NASA and that can be explained in short simple terms to people who have not seen much from NASA except a periodic shuttle dropping off supplies at the ISS. For example, A moon base showing off lots of pictures of the area. However, with the current technology we have now, NASA doesn't have any rockets powerful enough to hit the moon, so will have to reengineer something that has the 1960s kick to get men there, but with 21'st century safety. Even though its not adding significantly to research, doing something basic like high-resolution photos of the side of the moon facing away from Earth would be great PR and would get people to push for more NASA funding.
Pictures of another world taken not just from a random probe or rover, but by live people, expand the imagination and will get more people interested in the concept that space is not just a number in gigabytes marked on their iPod.
BIOS support merely adds features, such as how TPM 1.2 support allows Vista's BitLocker to allow for a PIN rather than a password. Guess the PIN wrong 3 times, BitLocker goes into locked mode, requiring the full key to be typed in. The hardest part about FDE is getting the drivers into the OS and ensuring that OS patches don't mess with the driver stack that converts read/written plaintext blocks into cyphertext blocks on the HDD.
If someone read Applied Cryptography or another text, then put concepts learned into practice, I wouldn't mind using a product made from them.
What gets me is that PGP isn't competing for this DoD bid. Of all the FDE solutions I have used, I like PGP's because it offers not just a PKI, but an open, standardized PKI that has stood the test of time. This is not to say that other FDE software isn't good. Safeboot, SecureDoc, DriveCrypt, and CompuSec are all very good solutions too.
What is funny is that FDE solutions have been around a long time, almost to the days of PGP 1.0. In 1990, Casady and Greene had a program called A. M. E. (Access Managed Environment) for the Mac that would DES encrypt every sector on the hard disk. FWB also had a solution using their Hard Disk Toolkit for partition encryption on the driver level (only used 2 DES rounds though.)
I just hope the drive offers a way to overwrite the flash part multiple times. I can see people making sure the hard disk is erased before moving a machine between departments or selling them, but then the next owner just checks the flash part, and finds document caches of documents which should never see the light of day.
DVDs right now are the most cost-effective way to backup/archive data. For backups, I personally use Retrospect (because it uses a packet writing format, does incremental backups, and offeres certified AES encryption). For archives, I use WinRAR with parity/recovery volumes, each around the length of the DVD, then burn each .rar or .rev archive to an individual DVD, so if one goes bad, I'm not totally cooked. I also use two different types of DVD burners and check if one burned in one will work in the other, and vice versa.
However, for a large backup set (100+ gigs), its a pain. Sometimes (and this using pretty much any media) one disk will just fail on verify, forcing me to set it as "lost" in the backup set, then redo another backup set copy.
Tape is great, but with modern capacities, you will not be achieving price/performance ratios worth your time unless you pay $500 or more for a new tape drive.. Even the old "tried and true" 75-80 GB DLT IV tapes are not worth it these days. A drive will cost you 200-300 used on ebay (of course trusting unproven ebay tape drives with irreplacable data is another issue), and you will need to find an old SCSI card to connect it to most machines. Then, for the uncompressed capacity of 10 DVDs (which cost $5 or so), you have to shell out $40 a tape.
A new tape drive that is minimally decent (A DAT-72, with 36 gigs native) will cost you $640 to $740 depending on your choice of internal or external, and tapes are $16.00 each. A solid DVD burner will run you $150, and blanks are 25 cents to a dollar depending on how much you want to pay. For 100 gigs of data, a DVD burner + media will set you back $162. For 100gigs worth of data on tape, you are paying $698. Of course,this scales better the more media you get, and this doesn't factor in the time repeatedly swapping blanks which is a big thing.
The best solution to bridge the gap in cost/capacity seems to be Blu-ray media once drives start coming down in price in the next couple years. Right now, the drives and media are too expensive (not mentioning the fact that they are so new that nobody knows how long their archival life is.) However once these come down in price, they should replace DVDs for data archival.