Get an account on rsync.net and have all of your 15 machines rsync their data there. Might take long the first time, but from there on it will just fly. You could even use a trivial cronjob to do it for you...
You must be joking! He has 8TB ! It would cost him $3840 PER MONTH to back up with rsync.net (yes, at the bulk discount rate). I'm sure you can fit a whole system with 8GB space in under $1000 if you go for the cheapest $/GB drives (probably 1.5 TB). Also you would fit most likely 4x2TB drives (only the drives) in $1000. With these numbers is very hard to see how you can do it yourself and NOT have huge savings compared to $3840 per month. Let's say each month you give one system (which is up-to-date) to a friend to keep it on his cable/DSL line. With $3840-$1000=$2840 available you are still ahead even if you use some monkey to install and configure everything at some ridiculous $250/hour (or pay yourself that amount). You would be still ahead if you would pay your friend a hefty one-time $500-$1000 for the privilege of keeping your system! And after you decide you have enough redundancy or you run out of friends everything is free! Or you can fedex every month a copy (=4-6 hdds) to somebody (encrypted if you like). It's just too easy...
This "diode" trick is working only because many (most? some?) USB ports limit the current close to the specifications (500 mA). If you take a look at the pdf I posted you'll see that in all modes the charger is supposed to actually adjust (drop) the voltage at certain currents. If you have one of the more powerfull USB ports the phone will say "Not charging". Yes, there's a message that says that... And the motherboards with such powerfull ports are actually what you're looking for normally because you can power your external hard drive or whatever USB powered gizmo you have easily without overloading the port.
For people who have only one-two devices and they're Nokia it's fine (when you upgrade you don't have to buy car charger, etc) but when you start having more stuff that charges over this cylindrical connectors you get pissed because it's very hard to find one of these "universal" chargers with the right tip (impossible in my experience with the small tip) and even if you find it you need to add at least one resistor if you want to charge a nokia with it (and even so it's not sure).
The "data" restriction I don't think it's so big. All phones I had for the last years had bluetooth, (shitty) browser, (shitty) camera, some kind of internal memory or flash card and could act as modems. They were also the variety of phones you forget at the pub and when you return it's still there.
... is what you want. Yes, you can use it with Windows (with or without cygwin bloat). Use -c and a short --timeout and you're good to go. If you're using it over ssh you're looking at three layers of integrity (rsync checksums, ssh and TCP), two of them quite strong even against malicious attacks not only against normal stuff. Put it in a script with a short --timeout; if anything is wrong with the link your ssh session will freeze completely, as soon as your --timeout is reached rsync will die and your script can respawn a new one (which will resume the transfer using whatever chunks with good checksum you have already transfered and will again checksum the whole file when it finishes).
Maybe, some (I haven't seen any, ever). Those two I mentioned came with CST-60: http://www.sonyericsson.com/cws/products/accessories/overview/cst-60?lc=en&cc=us (ignore the US plug). I can imagine what you're talking about but if you look at the plug you see this can't work the way you're claiming to work (well maybe if you "use the force"). Actually there are three accessories coming with the phone (stereo headset, charger and USB cable). None have this feature you're taking about, although I've seen some probably useful adapters on ebay. But again simply mentioning ADAPTERS makes me right as my point was that they just don't work in a specific case. Having to use adapters is the whole point, if they would be working you won't be needing adaptors.
Wrong! The Sony Ericsson charger's 'fastport' adaptor has both a male (to plug into the phone) and a female (for accessories like headsets) connection. One at each end, so you can listen to music whilst it is charging very easily.
The fact that you can buy some stuff that can let you listen to your headphones while charging (you can even make one yourself with duct tape and scissors) doesn't prove anything. Worst case scenario you could buy an iPod shuffle and then you can charge your phone while listening to music. This is not the point. Simply using "can" and "adaptor" together makes *you* wrong.
The market at least in the EU had already pretty much standardised on USB charging.. every non-nokia phone I've had used it. Nokia of course had to be different, but there's only 2 nokia charging standards and adapters are readily available (and since ~70% of the phones you see around are Nokias, it's a sort of standard).
What this does is codify what was already happening.
In what world is this already happening?! We bought at the office recently two Nokia, two Sony-Ericsson and one Samsung. They are beyond craziness with respect to connectors.
- both Nokias have the "standard Nokia" thin connector that doesn't comply to ANY reasonable electric standard so you can't just connect it directly to USB or any power supply of any reasonable parameters. Specifications here: http://www.forum.nokia.com/info/sw.nokia.com/id/3378ff2b-4016-42b9-9118-d59e4313a521/Nokia_2-mm_DC_Charging_Interface_Specification_v1_2_en.pdf.html - one Nokia HAS a standard mini (or micro?) USB connector but it won't charge over it - the other Nokia has a USB connector that LOOKS like mini but it doesn't fit anything but a specific Nokia cable. It still doesn't charge over it - both S-E are equally crazy. You need to connect the headphones to the bottom of the phone via a proprietary connector! This is where power and USB cable also go! Still they would charge over USB but you need the proprietary cable and you need to have the proper drivers in the OS (yes, to charge). Because everything connects there you have interesting combinations like you can't charge when listening to the headphones or you can't listen to the radio while charging (because radio needs the headphones plugged in for antenna) - Samsung has some kind of crazy flat connector, did not take a close look but certainly not USB of any kind - for S-E and Samsung the old chargers don't fit the new phones.
Oh, in case you didn't know they lock out (iPhone) A/V cables now! And not only one-time, by mistake - there's a war going on and each firmware version is blocking some more cables, just to have after some weeks new cables on ebay for like 1/5 of the price of the original cables (but they work only until the next firmware...).
This seems like the phone I have been waiting for. When will it be available in the Netherlands? How much will it cost?
THIS is the phone you've been waiting for?! It doesn't work with your current provider (which is GSM for sure); actually it doesn't really work anywhere except USA and colonies (yes, I know there are some CDMA other providers even across Europe but the coverage is poor and sometimes even when they are technically compatible 100% there aren't roaming agreements in place).
The existing GPS applications don't work with it so navigation is out of the question.
So what's left? I guess mp3's will play all the same and you can do some browsing over wifi and probably using it for PIM as well. Surely they'll release eventually some GSM version and there will some decent applications for it (if Palm doesn't run out of money first) but for now this device isn't something desirable, especially in the EU.
The hardware part is a VERY good point. Unless your "friends" break something that can be easily replaced for 5-10$ forget it, you'll have to replace the machine or live with it (if it's only partially broken). Many people couldn't care less about hardware or computers (if they would they would have their own netbook probably); they poke your screen, push the keys sometimes like you would push some broken elevator button, lift the device from a corner despite screeching noises and so on. It's a very nice thing to help other people until you end up with the short end of the stick; you get let's say some broken pixels and you have to live with them for 1-2 years and they get to check their email 7 times instead of 6 times today.
Frankly I think there is some demand for such a thing; heck Amazon still sells the NSLU2 for close to $100 (and even more on some European local sites). However at this point this new gizmo is close to vaporware to me. Let's say I'm sold, where do I get it? The site referenced in the article is really not that helpful:
- doesn't look like somebody I want to do business with (sorry) - Availability: Ships in 1 to 2 weeks - read the specs (WTF?):
* Dimensions (L x W x D): 4" x 2.5" x 2"
* Power requirements: 110V/220V
* Drive connection: USB 2.0
* Network connection: Gigabit Ethernet
* Web browsers: Safari, FireFox, IE (v. 7 and above), Chrome, Opera
* File access: Windows Explorer, Mac Finder - ships only to American Samoa, Canada, Guam, Puerto Rico, United States, US Virgin Islands
Well and that ain't the whole story. To quote from wikipedia:
During the convention's first three days, more than 300[50] individuals were arrested by police,[51] including journalists (AP photographer Matt Rourke was one),[52] health-care workers and lawyer observers.[53] Some were released, but nearly half received felony charges.[53]
It was more or less the same at 2004 RNC: people (1800 accordingly to wikipedia) were arrested, many just just for being in the wrong place. Not only reporters/lawyers/health care volunteers were arrested but also people completely unrelated to the protests that were going about their business (delivery men, people just going/coming to/from work, etc). I thought at that point this is something realy massive and NYC will be sued to oblivion, Bush will lose a lot of popularity and maybe resign and so on. But no, nothing like that...
Sure, you might only need lower specs (after all 640k RAM should be enough for everybody) but people prefer 500GB to 160GB hdds and 2GB RAM to 1GB RAM (I also provided the link to a forum where both such discussions are "hot"). The point is that Microsoft licensing for such devices (ULCPC XP license more specifically which is the only reasonably available for notebooks) are preventing the manufacturer from using more than 1GB RAM and 160GB hdd (there are some other restrictions for CPU, display and so on but the RAM and HDD are the ones that are burning most people). So not only Microsoft is forcing the customer to buy a license they might not want (because they run Linux) or don't need (because they already have one that can be used with that machine) but also the customer is forced to buy a machine with specifications artificially capped to 1GB/160GB RAM/HDD. Now if you want to buy something that is let's say 1GB/120GB RAM/HDD it doesn't matter for you because you are under the cap. But many other people would want to buy something more powerful. And the difference in price and consumption is really minimal, probably you could double the RAM and HDD only by giving up the windows license. As it is now people who want something better have to buy Windows (included with the purchase) and HDD and RAM and basically keep the new, perfectly good parts in a drawer.
Just wait... pretty soon it'll be illegal to provide an open accesspoint.
It's been already illegal in Italy for quite a while. Yes, in its most pure form i.e. not if you have an open access point and somebody does something evil, no. You are breaking the law just by having an open access point (with internet access), even if nobody ever connects to it.
Not only linux versions are hard or impossible to find but because of the licensing agreements with M$ (for XP) the hardware specs are crippled to 1GB RAM and 160GB hdd. So if you want a larger hdd and 2GB RAM (many people do, take a look at forum.eeeuser.com) you need to buy them yourself and then decide if ebay is worth the trouble for the parts you took out (which might be a bad idea in case you need to send the device back for warranty). So not only you pay extra for windows with no way out (even if you want to use linux on the machine or if you already have a transferable license for XP or why not even Vista) but you also pay for a 1GB RAM stick and a small(ish) hard drive. These add up to quite a lot, easily 20-30% of the tag price.
"Passwords are hashed with salt. It would be an unprecedented event to reverse engineer our passwords."
Yea, sure, like most users will choose good passwords when registering for such forums. Having the salt will slow down an attack against all passwords at the same time, but that's all. A normal brute force attack even against a "light" dictionary will probably reveal enough passwords for any evil purpose (like spam). And really for a forum that's called "WebHostingTalk" they should be better at, well, WebHosting. And really the security of the backup server is trivial compared to the production server. Of course it needs to be considered seriously but it is a much easier problem: you don't have to deal with tons of services, demons, mysql, tangled forum/gallery/etc software and most importantly you need to keep it online only a fraction of the time and it doesn't need such a fast connection if you do the backups with any intelligence. What's more you can encrypt everything towards a public key (it can be done either by the production machine or by the backup server). The secret key can be safely backup up in any fashion you like offline (it's a tiny, tiny file).
Usually a reboot on a server DOES require a human to fix it. But yes, it's not intended for servers because they tend to be pretty well locked up (unless it is your home server and you'll be better off running Linux anyway and in any case it doesn't matter if the server goes down until you go home and can enter the password). The UK government loses laptops by the thousands, truecrypt would do a lot of good here. The argument that you shouldn't carry the data on the laptop is moot as some users have only one computer. Even if you don't have tons of secret documents you still have some pictures, some IM accounts, maybe some bank info in your browser cache and so on. Are you trying to say that you just don't care if somebody has access to your notebook? Can you give me access to have a look? Also there's the case when the disk breaks under warranty. I understand you buy another desktop which you keep secured so you don't keep private data on the notebook but what do you do when the disk on the desktop dies and you still have warranty? Destroy it physically (and take a loss because otherwise you would be entitled to a replacement)? If you have it all encrypted you just send it back without worries for what info has your computer ever saw. The installation is a breeze, the performance hit and other disadvantages are minimal and the OP obviously wants to bother with encryption. What's the problem then?
I don't know about recent incarnations of Windows but traditionally the file names are stored in clear in EFS; I see this as a huge disadvantage.
The problem with the propagation of the "encrypted" attribute to mostly any NTFS filesystems where you copy files to can't be underestimated. Probably well (security-wise) intended the problem is that users copy files to external drives and are somehow under the impression that having the external drive itself is enough to have access to the info on it. The problem can be from annoying (copy files from computer A, can't read on computer B) to full-scale disaster (make regular backups on external drives, test them in an uninformed fashion by browsing around and opening random files, have hdd crash or windows reinstall - poof all your files are gone, including the ones from the untouched hdd in your safe).
And of course any solution that encrypts a bunch of folders on a windows machine is bound to be incomplete with info leaking everywhere. Even if you are scared to have obvious encryption on your machine I would still recommend truecrypt (system/full) disk encryption. You can customize the password prompt to your liking (or have nothing at all, just looks like system has crashed/locked up), you can install multiple OSes and boot by default in an unencrypted one, you can have the decoy encrypted OS and so on.
I think many of us recognize the potential power of twitter-like thingies. With this in mind I recently joined. It is beyond disappointing.
- the site itself is barren, with basically no features - it is just like a '98 site in a bad way (not in a "Google-like" minimalist way) - can't get updates by SMS in Europe. OK, fair game, it isn't free. But you should be able to at least post by SMS, right? Somehow although they do offer local numbers (very nice) I wasn't able to actually verify any phone so can't update by SMS - they had updates by Instant Messenger as official feature for a while but couldn't make it work (why?! at least it should be practically free for them unlike SMS) - there are some 3rd party solutions to update by IM but none work (plus you have to trust the 3rd party) - same as above for updates by email
So now the truth is "Flamebait". Well I guess so, especially if there are enough Appple fan boys with moderator points. But the point still stands: both Microsoft and Apple try to control what you do with YOUR hardware (I'm talking here legally not technologically). But Apple goes the next step and just doesn't give you the control technologically. Without jailbreak you can't just boot from something else, you can't just wipe out the device and install linux on it, you can't install apps. In fact you have a very limited user with a couple apps you can run and that's it. If you want to install anything (even your own apps!!!) you need to go to Apple and beg (and usually pay) them to do the installation.
I guess everybody on/. knows how freakinglishly locked are the iPhones even compared to Windows Mobile devices so this doesn't come as a surprise at all.
I think this is where things will start going south. Probably those 1000$ will pay for tips for the (2nd this month) business trip (to some sunny island) of one of the executives of the company/bank/fund where you decided to invest...
Sure, but they won't know if they data they guessed is right. If they guess the password correctly, it successfully decrypts the data, and you know it was right.
Well if you know how the data should look you would also know you have the right data while guessing!
while it would theoretically take thousands of years to brute force it, random chance has them guess the right sequence on the first try (it could happen). You wipe the data though, and there is no chance for anyone to get it.
If we are to totally forget the order of magnitude needed for random chance to guess the key at first try then we can say that by chance "they" could actually guess your data at first try! Even if you wipe the data! Even if you vaporize your hdd!
Slashdot Mirror
Get an account on rsync.net and have all of your 15 machines rsync their data there. Might take long the first time, but from there on it will just fly. You could even use a trivial cronjob to do it for you...
You must be joking! He has 8TB ! It would cost him $3840 PER MONTH to back up with rsync.net (yes, at the bulk discount rate). I'm sure you can fit a whole system with 8GB space in under $1000 if you go for the cheapest $/GB drives (probably 1.5 TB). Also you would fit most likely 4x2TB drives (only the drives) in $1000. With these numbers is very hard to see how you can do it yourself and NOT have huge savings compared to $3840 per month. Let's say each month you give one system (which is up-to-date) to a friend to keep it on his cable/DSL line. With $3840-$1000=$2840 available you are still ahead even if you use some monkey to install and configure everything at some ridiculous $250/hour (or pay yourself that amount). You would be still ahead if you would pay your friend a hefty one-time $500-$1000 for the privilege of keeping your system! And after you decide you have enough redundancy or you run out of friends everything is free! Or you can fedex every month a copy (=4-6 hdds) to somebody (encrypted if you like). It's just too easy...
Run from a stick (or from a basic web server) on a computer without a lot of privileges?
This "diode" trick is working only because many (most? some?) USB ports limit the current close to the specifications (500 mA). If you take a look at the pdf I posted you'll see that in all modes the charger is supposed to actually adjust (drop) the voltage at certain currents. If you have one of the more powerfull USB ports the phone will say "Not charging". Yes, there's a message that says that... And the motherboards with such powerfull ports are actually what you're looking for normally because you can power your external hard drive or whatever USB powered gizmo you have easily without overloading the port.
For people who have only one-two devices and they're Nokia it's fine (when you upgrade you don't have to buy car charger, etc) but when you start having more stuff that charges over this cylindrical connectors you get pissed because it's very hard to find one of these "universal" chargers with the right tip (impossible in my experience with the small tip) and even if you find it you need to add at least one resistor if you want to charge a nokia with it (and even so it's not sure).
The "data" restriction I don't think it's so big. All phones I had for the last years had bluetooth, (shitty) browser, (shitty) camera, some kind of internal memory or flash card and could act as modems. They were also the variety of phones you forget at the pub and when you return it's still there.
... is what you want. Yes, you can use it with Windows (with or without cygwin bloat). Use -c and a short --timeout and you're good to go. If you're using it over ssh you're looking at three layers of integrity (rsync checksums, ssh and TCP), two of them quite strong even against malicious attacks not only against normal stuff. Put it in a script with a short --timeout; if anything is wrong with the link your ssh session will freeze completely, as soon as your --timeout is reached rsync will die and your script can respawn a new one (which will resume the transfer using whatever chunks with good checksum you have already transfered and will again checksum the whole file when it finishes).
Maybe, some (I haven't seen any, ever). Those two I mentioned came with CST-60: http://www.sonyericsson.com/cws/products/accessories/overview/cst-60?lc=en&cc=us (ignore the US plug). I can imagine what you're talking about but if you look at the plug you see this can't work the way you're claiming to work (well maybe if you "use the force"). Actually there are three accessories coming with the phone (stereo headset, charger and USB cable). None have this feature you're taking about, although I've seen some probably useful adapters on ebay. But again simply mentioning ADAPTERS makes me right as my point was that they just don't work in a specific case. Having to use adapters is the whole point, if they would be working you won't be needing adaptors.
Wrong! The Sony Ericsson charger's 'fastport' adaptor has both a male (to plug into the phone) and a female (for accessories like headsets) connection. One at each end, so you can listen to music whilst it is charging very easily.
The fact that you can buy some stuff that can let you listen to your headphones while charging (you can even make one yourself with duct tape and scissors) doesn't prove anything. Worst case scenario you could buy an iPod shuffle and then you can charge your phone while listening to music. This is not the point. Simply using "can" and "adaptor" together makes *you* wrong.
The market at least in the EU had already pretty much standardised on USB charging.. every non-nokia phone I've had used it. Nokia of course had to be different, but there's only 2 nokia charging standards and adapters are readily available (and since ~70% of the phones you see around are Nokias, it's a sort of standard).
What this does is codify what was already happening.
In what world is this already happening?! We bought at the office recently two Nokia, two Sony-Ericsson and one Samsung. They are beyond craziness with respect to connectors.
- both Nokias have the "standard Nokia" thin connector that doesn't comply to ANY reasonable electric standard so you can't just connect it directly to USB or any power supply of any reasonable parameters. Specifications here: http://www.forum.nokia.com/info/sw.nokia.com/id/3378ff2b-4016-42b9-9118-d59e4313a521/Nokia_2-mm_DC_Charging_Interface_Specification_v1_2_en.pdf.html
- one Nokia HAS a standard mini (or micro?) USB connector but it won't charge over it
- the other Nokia has a USB connector that LOOKS like mini but it doesn't fit anything but a specific Nokia cable. It still doesn't charge over it
- both S-E are equally crazy. You need to connect the headphones to the bottom of the phone via a proprietary connector! This is where power and USB cable also go! Still they would charge over USB but you need the proprietary cable and you need to have the proper drivers in the OS (yes, to charge). Because everything connects there you have interesting combinations like you can't charge when listening to the headphones or you can't listen to the radio while charging (because radio needs the headphones plugged in for antenna)
- Samsung has some kind of crazy flat connector, did not take a close look but certainly not USB of any kind
- for S-E and Samsung the old chargers don't fit the new phones.
I see this as a BIG MOVE for Europe.
Oh, in case you didn't know they lock out (iPhone) A/V cables now! And not only one-time, by mistake - there's a war going on and each firmware version is blocking some more cables, just to have after some weeks new cables on ebay for like 1/5 of the price of the original cables (but they work only until the next firmware...).
This seems like the phone I have been waiting for. When will it be available in the Netherlands? How much will it cost?
THIS is the phone you've been waiting for?! It doesn't work with your current provider (which is GSM for sure); actually it doesn't really work anywhere except USA and colonies (yes, I know there are some CDMA other providers even across Europe but the coverage is poor and sometimes even when they are technically compatible 100% there aren't roaming agreements in place).
The existing GPS applications don't work with it so navigation is out of the question.
So what's left? I guess mp3's will play all the same and you can do some browsing over wifi and probably using it for PIM as well. Surely they'll release eventually some GSM version and there will some decent applications for it (if Palm doesn't run out of money first) but for now this device isn't something desirable, especially in the EU.
The hardware part is a VERY good point. Unless your "friends" break something that can be easily replaced for 5-10$ forget it, you'll have to replace the machine or live with it (if it's only partially broken). Many people couldn't care less about hardware or computers (if they would they would have their own netbook probably); they poke your screen, push the keys sometimes like you would push some broken elevator button, lift the device from a corner despite screeching noises and so on. It's a very nice thing to help other people until you end up with the short end of the stick; you get let's say some broken pixels and you have to live with them for 1-2 years and they get to check their email 7 times instead of 6 times today.
Frankly I think there is some demand for such a thing; heck Amazon still sells the NSLU2 for close to $100 (and even more on some European local sites). However at this point this new gizmo is close to vaporware to me. Let's say I'm sold, where do I get it? The site referenced in the article is really not that helpful:
- doesn't look like somebody I want to do business with (sorry)
- Availability: Ships in 1 to 2 weeks
- read the specs (WTF?):
* Dimensions (L x W x D): 4" x 2.5" x 2"
* Power requirements: 110V/220V
* Drive connection: USB 2.0
* Network connection: Gigabit Ethernet
* Web browsers: Safari, FireFox, IE (v. 7 and above), Chrome, Opera
* File access: Windows Explorer, Mac Finder
- ships only to American Samoa, Canada, Guam, Puerto Rico, United States, US Virgin Islands
Well and that ain't the whole story. To quote from wikipedia:
During the convention's first three days, more than 300[50] individuals were arrested by police,[51] including journalists (AP photographer Matt Rourke was one),[52] health-care workers and lawyer observers.[53] Some were released, but nearly half received felony charges.[53]
It was more or less the same at 2004 RNC: people (1800 accordingly to wikipedia) were arrested, many just just for being in the wrong place. Not only reporters/lawyers/health care volunteers were arrested but also people completely unrelated to the protests that were going about their business (delivery men, people just going/coming to/from work, etc). I thought at that point this is something realy massive and NYC will be sued to oblivion, Bush will lose a lot of popularity and maybe resign and so on. But no, nothing like that...
... it sucks.
Sure, you might only need lower specs (after all 640k RAM should be enough for everybody) but people prefer 500GB to 160GB hdds and 2GB RAM to 1GB RAM (I also provided the link to a forum where both such discussions are "hot"). The point is that Microsoft licensing for such devices (ULCPC XP license more specifically which is the only reasonably available for notebooks) are preventing the manufacturer from using more than 1GB RAM and 160GB hdd (there are some other restrictions for CPU, display and so on but the RAM and HDD are the ones that are burning most people). So not only Microsoft is forcing the customer to buy a license they might not want (because they run Linux) or don't need (because they already have one that can be used with that machine) but also the customer is forced to buy a machine with specifications artificially capped to 1GB/160GB RAM/HDD. Now if you want to buy something that is let's say 1GB/120GB RAM/HDD it doesn't matter for you because you are under the cap. But many other people would want to buy something more powerful. And the difference in price and consumption is really minimal, probably you could double the RAM and HDD only by giving up the windows license. As it is now people who want something better have to buy Windows (included with the purchase) and HDD and RAM and basically keep the new, perfectly good parts in a drawer.
It's been already illegal in Italy for quite a while. Yes, in its most pure form i.e. not if you have an open access point and somebody does something evil, no. You are breaking the law just by having an open access point (with internet access), even if nobody ever connects to it.
Not only linux versions are hard or impossible to find but because of the licensing agreements with M$ (for XP) the hardware specs are crippled to 1GB RAM and 160GB hdd. So if you want a larger hdd and 2GB RAM (many people do, take a look at forum.eeeuser.com) you need to buy them yourself and then decide if ebay is worth the trouble for the parts you took out (which might be a bad idea in case you need to send the device back for warranty). So not only you pay extra for windows with no way out (even if you want to use linux on the machine or if you already have a transferable license for XP or why not even Vista) but you also pay for a 1GB RAM stick and a small(ish) hard drive. These add up to quite a lot, easily 20-30% of the tag price.
"Passwords are hashed with salt. It would be an unprecedented event to reverse engineer our passwords."
Yea, sure, like most users will choose good passwords when registering for such forums. Having the salt will slow down an attack against all passwords at the same time, but that's all. A normal brute force attack even against a "light" dictionary will probably reveal enough passwords for any evil purpose (like spam).
And really for a forum that's called "WebHostingTalk" they should be better at, well, WebHosting. And really the security of the backup server is trivial compared to the production server. Of course it needs to be considered seriously but it is a much easier problem: you don't have to deal with tons of services, demons, mysql, tangled forum/gallery/etc software and most importantly you need to keep it online only a fraction of the time and it doesn't need such a fast connection if you do the backups with any intelligence.
What's more you can encrypt everything towards a public key (it can be done either by the production machine or by the backup server). The secret key can be safely backup up in any fashion you like offline (it's a tiny, tiny file).
Usually a reboot on a server DOES require a human to fix it. But yes, it's not intended for servers because they tend to be pretty well locked up (unless it is your home server and you'll be better off running Linux anyway and in any case it doesn't matter if the server goes down until you go home and can enter the password).
The UK government loses laptops by the thousands, truecrypt would do a lot of good here. The argument that you shouldn't carry the data on the laptop is moot as some users have only one computer. Even if you don't have tons of secret documents you still have some pictures, some IM accounts, maybe some bank info in your browser cache and so on. Are you trying to say that you just don't care if somebody has access to your notebook? Can you give me access to have a look?
Also there's the case when the disk breaks under warranty. I understand you buy another desktop which you keep secured so you don't keep private data on the notebook but what do you do when the disk on the desktop dies and you still have warranty? Destroy it physically (and take a loss because otherwise you would be entitled to a replacement)? If you have it all encrypted you just send it back without worries for what info has your computer ever saw.
The installation is a breeze, the performance hit and other disadvantages are minimal and the OP obviously wants to bother with encryption. What's the problem then?
I don't know about recent incarnations of Windows but traditionally the file names are stored in clear in EFS; I see this as a huge disadvantage.
The problem with the propagation of the "encrypted" attribute to mostly any NTFS filesystems where you copy files to can't be underestimated. Probably well (security-wise) intended the problem is that users copy files to external drives and are somehow under the impression that having the external drive itself is enough to have access to the info on it. The problem can be from annoying (copy files from computer A, can't read on computer B) to full-scale disaster (make regular backups on external drives, test them in an uninformed fashion by browsing around and opening random files, have hdd crash or windows reinstall - poof all your files are gone, including the ones from the untouched hdd in your safe).
And of course any solution that encrypts a bunch of folders on a windows machine is bound to be incomplete with info leaking everywhere. Even if you are scared to have obvious encryption on your machine I would still recommend truecrypt (system/full) disk encryption. You can customize the password prompt to your liking (or have nothing at all, just looks like system has crashed/locked up), you can install multiple OSes and boot by default in an unencrypted one, you can have the decoy encrypted OS and so on.
I think many of us recognize the potential power of twitter-like thingies. With this in mind I recently joined. It is beyond disappointing.
- the site itself is barren, with basically no features - it is just like a '98 site in a bad way (not in a "Google-like" minimalist way)
- can't get updates by SMS in Europe. OK, fair game, it isn't free. But you should be able to at least post by SMS, right? Somehow although they do offer local numbers (very nice) I wasn't able to actually verify any phone so can't update by SMS
- they had updates by Instant Messenger as official feature for a while but couldn't make it work (why?! at least it should be practically free for them unlike SMS)
- there are some 3rd party solutions to update by IM but none work (plus you have to trust the 3rd party)
- same as above for updates by email
So, yes, nice idea but poor execution.
So now the truth is "Flamebait". Well I guess so, especially if there are enough Appple fan boys with moderator points. But the point still stands: both Microsoft and Apple try to control what you do with YOUR hardware (I'm talking here legally not technologically).
But Apple goes the next step and just doesn't give you the control technologically. Without jailbreak you can't just boot from something else, you can't just wipe out the device and install linux on it, you can't install apps. In fact you have a very limited user with a couple apps you can run and that's it. If you want to install anything (even your own apps!!!) you need to go to Apple and beg (and usually pay) them to do the installation.
It wasn't such a long time ago when Microsoft was claiming that basically you can't donate (or use!!!) a PC without the original OS.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/04/18/1623240
I guess everybody on /. knows how freakinglishly locked are the iPhones even compared to Windows Mobile devices so this doesn't come as a surprise at all.
1) Invest $1000.
I think this is where things will start going south. Probably those 1000$ will pay for tips for the (2nd this month) business trip (to some sunny island) of one of the executives of the company/bank/fund where you decided to invest...
Sure, but they won't know if they data they guessed is right. If they guess the password correctly, it successfully decrypts the data, and you know it was right.
Well if you know how the data should look you would also know you have the right data while guessing!
while it would theoretically take thousands of years to brute force it, random chance has them guess the right sequence on the first try (it could happen). You wipe the data though, and there is no chance for anyone to get it.
If we are to totally forget the order of magnitude needed for random chance to guess the key at first try then we can say that by chance "they" could actually guess your data at first try! Even if you wipe the data! Even if you vaporize your hdd!