1. Make backup of laptop prior to travelling. Store "working" backup image at home on your main workstation. 2. Mindwipe the drive (zero it with formatting software particular to the drive - WD offers "Data Lifeguard Diagnostic", Seagate offers "Seatools") 3. Restore a pre-built image of the drive with only the software you need to do your work, including software to securely remote to your desktop at work (where the real work files are located.) 4. Pack laptop, backup software, and copy of factory image 5. Travel to foreign land. 6. If your laptop is searched, or is out of your posession and under the control of an agent of a foreign government, repeat steps (2) an (3) once you recover it. You can't trust it until you repeat those steps. Like a poster above, be concerned about the presence of keyloggers, sniffers, etc. 7. Use restored laptop at the work-site in the foreign country. Remote to your own workstation to pick up, or drop off any business files, agreements, data files, whatever. 8. Before returning, repeat steps 2 and 3 to protect your client's confidentiality and yours. 9. Return to your home country. If laptop out of your personal posession/control, or searched again on return, repeat step 2, then restore your "working" image when you get back to your own workstation.
Not only does this protect your confidentiality, but it may also help protect you from search/seizure when data you have on your hard drive contravenes local laws in the foreign country. For instance, here's a wikipedia link that may be of interest to travellers: List of books banned by governments
Were you to have one of the publications on your hard drive in digital format, and were travelling to a country that banned import of it, you could find yourself in legal difficulties.
Spore... That would be the game that had the 3-installation limit when it was released, which was such an offensive practice that I decided I'd never buy or install this piece of garbage, and would return for refund (unopened) any copy given to me as a gift.
> (c) any evidence that the hard-drive has been 'wiped' or erased since the initiation > of the litigation.
So as long as you wipe or erase the hard drive before litigation begins, or before you become subpoena'ed (aware of the litigation), you're protected if you destroyed any evidence of your activities?
Perhaps a VMWare or other virtual operating system is in order then. Download, burn to optical, revert the guest image.
Perhaps NewYorkCountyLawyer could confirm the viability of this method?
Something about not being forced to testify against yourself. No sense in leaving your equipment capable of testifying against yourself either.
I suspect this is merely a boilerplate change to cover the legal status of ownership/possession of the users' content on the backup media when accounts are deleted. The new terms were quite poor, because they were too broad and vague in what they permitted the company to do, the users interpreted this is the worst possible light, and we have the situation you now see. (It is important to note that the users were not incorrect to interpret the terms in the worst possible light! One should always look at worst-case interpretations of a legal contract.)
The old terms were likely insufficient, and placed the company at risk of a lawsuit for retaining data (on any media, in any form) that the user had deleted. In reality, it is not feasible to search out all copies of a user's content on all live and backup media to over-write it if they delete their account.
By taking ownership in perpetuity, the company mitigates any legal risk from maintaining backups, and the old backup data could be destroyed over time through the process of backup media destruction or re-use in another backup process.
Now the lawyers will have to revisit the boilerplate language, remove it, and craft a new legal framework to cover this situation with much more in the way of specifics (maximum length of data retention, method of data destruction, possibilities for restoration before the maximum time elapses, liability of the company toward the user if the obligation for deletion is not met by the maximum stated time, etc...etc...)
This is how terms-of-service documents get so long and unwieldy, folks.
I had a primary hard drive fail in a linux file server I have at the house. The backup hadn't been taken in a while (yeah, I got lazy), and I really needed the updated files.
A friend of mine told me this method, so I tried it; it worked. I got more than 30 minutes of operation out of the drive, enough to pull ALL of the files off (30 gigs of data) successfully.
1. Put masking tape over the data and electrical connectors of the drive. 2. Immerse the drive in a ziplock bag of minute-rice, with the data/power connectors sticking up. This can't be regular rice, it MUST be minute rice. This acts as a poor man's silica gel later in the process. Close the zip-lock. 3. Freeze the bag of rice with the hard drive in it in the deep freeze for 24 hours. You want it completely frozen, patience is a virtue. 4. Remove the bag from the freezer, and take it to a pre-prepared computer where the drive is ready to be received and plugged in (longer data cable, longer power cable, etc...) You should have another big data drive in the system ready to receive the data from the frozen drive. 5. Leave the drive immersed in the minute rice except for the data/power connector. Remove the tape. Plug in the data and power cables. Try to re-seal the zip-lock bag as much as possible so you don't have rice grains escaping. 6. Orient the drive so it's laying in as natural of a position as possible with as much frozen rice around it. 7. Fire up the system, and try to access the frozen drive. This is the moment of truth. If you're lucky, it'll identify and respond, and you'll have access to the file system. 8. You now about 20 reliable minutes to copy data. You may get more if you're lucky. Copy copy copy. Note: The drive WILL be slow at first, and will speed up as it starts to warm.
Why the minute rice? It performs two functions: First, it keeps the moisture from condensing on, and in the drive's metal parts. Moisture's the killer when you power up a frozen drive. Second, it provides an additional thermal block of "cool" to help keep the drive at a lower temperature while you perform the copy.
After I got the data, I scrapped the original drive I froze (literally, out came the platters and they sit in my stack of platter-shame.) No sense courting disaster a second time.
I've since used this method 2 more times successfully with other people's hard drives. I suspect the recovery specialists use a similar trick, only they'd be smart to use a sub-zero frozen room with no moisture to do their "cold start and copy" process.
"Not only is the CD format alive and well, but it's emerging from the "online" revolution looking healthier than ever. 92 per cent of DRM-store downloaders surveyed by Entertainment Media Research prefer the plastic platters to their MP3 downloads..."
I run into this conservation focussed argument from the Ontario Provincial Government all the time. It doesn't hold water.
I already pay attention to my energy consumption. I use screw in fluorescant bulbs for lighting, I use energy efficient appliances. I turn off things when I'm not using them.
The problem with conservation is that you can only cut out so much, and then you're impacting productivity and hamstringing the economy.
The world's population is growing. More people means more energy consumption. You can't conserve your way into new energy production to meet the needs of a growing population.
"After serial number verification, a new battery will be shipped to you free of charge. When you receive the replacement battery, please use the same shipping envelope and included prepaid shipping label to return the recalled battery to Apple."
How appropriate, they're using an in-the-field hot-swap method.;-)
"The swap's hot, so it doesn't get too hot." (my version of Yogi Berra's logic in the infamous AFLAC Barber Shop commercial.)
I wonder how long before someone who gets one of these constant-flow style of artificial hearts, decides to tweak others by putting forth the claim that they're a vampire?
"Here, look, feel my wrist, see? No pulse. Put your ear to my chest, no heartbeat."
And I wonder if the artificial heart's warranty covers wooden stake damage.;-)
All it takes is one location to roll out BPL, and the HF band is affected world-wide.
I predict the following:
BPL will eventually be regulated out of existence in the USA (by the FCC) and in Canada (by Industry Canada) due to the provable interference with the HF bands. This will not be just due to interference with ham operators - militaries still use the HF band.
Manufacturers of BPL equipment, and the companies that developed the technologies therein, will be desperate to recoup costs. They won't want to see zero return on investment, or get stuck with an inventory that now is only suitable to be landfilled. They will turn an eye to selling in foreign markets, focussing on countries with less laws and regulation regarding spectrum management.
A power utility company in one of these countries will bite, purchase, and roll out BPL.
The ensuing interference will affect the HF band world-wide.
There will be much bitter complaining from those suffering the HF interference, but in the end, they will either find a way around it, or they will effectively lose the use of the band.
Assuming the HF band becomes unusable world-wide due to foreign run BPL installations, there will be great pressure on the FCC to drop any domestic prohibition on the technology, and allow full roll-out here.
Before anyone says how heartless I am to those poor ham radio operators: I am one. I'm just a realist.
Sounds like a perfectly reasonable sentiment to me.:-)
Large intranet bandwidth attracts RIAA attention?
on
Fiber To The Dorm Room
·
· Score: 1
How long before someone at the RIAA connects the dots and realizes that Case Western Reserve University's high-bandwidth intranet is a target rich environment for subpoenas and potential lawsuits against file-sharers allegedly infringing on their members' copyrights?
It's not like they require the song sharing to take place over the internet in order to go after people...
From your story, it sounds like some of the FHP (Florida Highway Patrol) have forgotten their motto: "Courtesy, Service, Protection".
That might be something to drop the Director (Christopher A. Knight) a snail-mail about. The main email address is fhp@hsmv.state.fl.us which you can get from this URL: Florida Highway Patrol Contact Information.
Other people have mentioned the Roadside Breakdown aspect, but I don't think anyone's touched on this aspect yet:
Having the hood of a car up is a well recognized sign of vehicle breakdown, and that the driver could probably use assistance.
In my area of the world, if the police see a vehicle with the hood up without their own yellow police tape attached to the vehicle (to indicate they've dealt with this vehicle already), they'll stop and offer assistance.
How, exactly, is the driver of one of these vehicles supposed to use this very simple and well understood signal? Madly flag down drivers and risk getting run over?
And this is only ONE example of what a bad idea this vehicle is.
There's a difference between "Let's make a lot of money with a great game!" and "Let's manipulate our customers to squeeze every last dollar out of them we can." LucasArts and George Lucas definitely remind me of the latter.
Admittedly, it's a difference that's getting more difficult to find with more and more companies, but I can dream, can't I?
LucasArts cancelled something because it wasn't the right time to milk the most amount of money out of everyone? I'm shocked. Shocked I tell you.
LucasArts also cancelled the sequel to their first Full Throttle game: "Full Throttle: Hell on Wheels", which pissed me off. I was looking forward to that one.
Anymore, if the publisher is LucasArts, I end up thinking, "Nomatter when I buy it, I can guarantee I'm getting soaked. Nevermind."
After the DivX fiasco (the DVD-esque player, not the codec) and now this, maybe they'll start to listen. Customers want to buy and own their products, not rent or license them.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh dear god my eyes. Haven't seen THAT awful image in a while.
I've already waited the delay from the theater to the movie rental stores. What's another month?
I go by the "What's coming out and when" whiteboard in my favorite little movie rental shop anyway. From this perspective, nothing changes.
1. Make backup of laptop prior to travelling. Store "working" backup image at home on your main workstation.
2. Mindwipe the drive (zero it with formatting software particular to the drive - WD offers "Data Lifeguard Diagnostic", Seagate offers "Seatools")
3. Restore a pre-built image of the drive with only the software you need to do your work, including software to securely remote to your desktop at work (where the real work files are located.)
4. Pack laptop, backup software, and copy of factory image
5. Travel to foreign land.
6. If your laptop is searched, or is out of your posession and under the control of an agent of a foreign government, repeat steps (2) an (3) once you recover it. You can't trust it until you repeat those steps. Like a poster above, be concerned about the presence of keyloggers, sniffers, etc.
7. Use restored laptop at the work-site in the foreign country. Remote to your own workstation to pick up, or drop off any business files, agreements, data files, whatever.
8. Before returning, repeat steps 2 and 3 to protect your client's confidentiality and yours.
9. Return to your home country. If laptop out of your personal posession/control, or searched again on return, repeat step 2, then restore your "working" image when you get back to your own workstation.
Not only does this protect your confidentiality, but it may also help protect you from search/seizure when data you have on your hard drive contravenes local laws in the foreign country. For instance, here's a wikipedia link that may be of interest to travellers: List of books banned by governments
Were you to have one of the publications on your hard drive in digital format, and were travelling to a country that banned import of it, you could find yourself in legal difficulties.
Spore... That would be the game that had the 3-installation limit when it was released, which was such an offensive practice that I decided I'd never buy or install this piece of garbage, and would return for refund (unopened) any copy given to me as a gift.
EA can continue to suck it.
> (c) any evidence that the hard-drive has been 'wiped' or erased since the initiation
> of the litigation.
So as long as you wipe or erase the hard drive before litigation begins, or before you become subpoena'ed (aware of the litigation), you're protected if you destroyed any evidence of your activities?
Perhaps a VMWare or other virtual operating system is in order then. Download, burn to optical, revert the guest image.
Perhaps NewYorkCountyLawyer could confirm the viability of this method?
Something about not being forced to testify against yourself. No sense in leaving your equipment capable of testifying against yourself either.
I suspect this is merely a boilerplate change to cover the legal status of ownership/possession of the users' content on the backup media when accounts are deleted. The new terms were quite poor, because they were too broad and vague in what they permitted the company to do, the users interpreted this is the worst possible light, and we have the situation you now see. (It is important to note that the users were not incorrect to interpret the terms in the worst possible light! One should always look at worst-case interpretations of a legal contract.)
The old terms were likely insufficient, and placed the company at risk of a lawsuit for retaining data (on any media, in any form) that the user had deleted. In reality, it is not feasible to search out all copies of a user's content on all live and backup media to over-write it if they delete their account.
By taking ownership in perpetuity, the company mitigates any legal risk from maintaining backups, and the old backup data could be destroyed over time through the process of backup media destruction or re-use in another backup process.
Now the lawyers will have to revisit the boilerplate language, remove it, and craft a new legal framework to cover this situation with much more in the way of specifics (maximum length of data retention, method of data destruction, possibilities for restoration before the maximum time elapses, liability of the company toward the user if the obligation for deletion is not met by the maximum stated time, etc...etc...)
This is how terms-of-service documents get so long and unwieldy, folks.
I see certain managers sending embarrassing emails to the entire office. ;)
I had a primary hard drive fail in a linux file server I have at the house. The backup hadn't been taken in a while (yeah, I got lazy), and I really needed the updated files.
A friend of mine told me this method, so I tried it; it worked. I got more than 30 minutes of operation out of the drive, enough to pull ALL of the files off (30 gigs of data) successfully.
1. Put masking tape over the data and electrical connectors of the drive.
2. Immerse the drive in a ziplock bag of minute-rice, with the data/power connectors sticking up. This can't be regular rice, it MUST be minute rice. This acts as a poor man's silica gel later in the process. Close the zip-lock.
3. Freeze the bag of rice with the hard drive in it in the deep freeze for 24 hours. You want it completely frozen, patience is a virtue.
4. Remove the bag from the freezer, and take it to a pre-prepared computer where the drive is ready to be received and plugged in (longer data cable, longer power cable, etc...) You should have another big data drive in the system ready to receive the data from the frozen drive.
5. Leave the drive immersed in the minute rice except for the data/power connector. Remove the tape. Plug in the data and power cables. Try to re-seal the zip-lock bag as much as possible so you don't have rice grains escaping.
6. Orient the drive so it's laying in as natural of a position as possible with as much frozen rice around it.
7. Fire up the system, and try to access the frozen drive. This is the moment of truth. If you're lucky, it'll identify and respond, and you'll have access to the file system.
8. You now about 20 reliable minutes to copy data. You may get more if you're lucky. Copy copy copy. Note: The drive WILL be slow at first, and will speed up as it starts to warm.
Why the minute rice? It performs two functions: First, it keeps the moisture from condensing on, and in the drive's metal parts. Moisture's the killer when you power up a frozen drive. Second, it provides an additional thermal block of "cool" to help keep the drive at a lower temperature while you perform the copy.
After I got the data, I scrapped the original drive I froze (literally, out came the platters and they sit in my stack of platter-shame.) No sense courting disaster a second time.
I've since used this method 2 more times successfully with other people's hard drives. I suspect the recovery specialists use a similar trick, only they'd be smart to use a sub-zero frozen room with no moisture to do their "cold start and copy" process.
The markets films are released to are (in this order): Theater, DVD/Video, PPV, Premium, Cable and/or Network/Broadcast.
PPV doesn't preceed DVD/Video, because otherwise the purchase and rental markets would suffer.
The movie industry is all about milking the customers completely before going on to the next field of cows.
If the core buyers aren't buying, Someone is.
"Not only is the CD format alive and well, but it's emerging from the "online" revolution looking healthier than ever. 92 per cent of DRM-store downloaders surveyed by Entertainment Media Research prefer the plastic platters to their MP3 downloads..."
I run into this conservation focussed argument from the Ontario Provincial Government all the time. It doesn't hold water.
I already pay attention to my energy consumption. I use screw in fluorescant bulbs for lighting, I use energy efficient appliances. I turn off things when I'm not using them.
The problem with conservation is that you can only cut out so much, and then you're impacting productivity and hamstringing the economy.
The world's population is growing. More people means more energy consumption. You can't conserve your way into new energy production to meet the needs of a growing population.
>Not defending them, but Diebold makes a LOT of ATM machines..
And I was never so happy to walk into the bank today to use my ATM and see that it's an IBM 4783.
> Here in Canada, you vote by writing an 'X' in the box next to the candidate you want.
What amused me was Elections Canada provided nice little pencils for marking your vote.
I guess we have the low-tech version of the changeable column in the voting machines.
"After serial number verification, a new battery will be shipped to you free of charge. When you receive the replacement battery, please use the same shipping envelope and included prepaid shipping label to return the recalled battery to Apple."
;-)
How appropriate, they're using an in-the-field hot-swap method.
"The swap's hot, so it doesn't get too hot." (my version of Yogi Berra's logic in the infamous AFLAC Barber Shop commercial.)
Your computer emits EMPs?
No wonder the BXA classifies encryption as a munition!
( Cue Keanu Reeves: Whoa! )
I wonder how long before someone who gets one of these constant-flow style of artificial hearts, decides to tweak others by putting forth the claim that they're a vampire?
;-)
"Here, look, feel my wrist, see? No pulse. Put your ear to my chest, no heartbeat."
And I wonder if the artificial heart's warranty covers wooden stake damage.
See Alan Crosswell's site for more information on BPL interference in his area.
All it takes is one location to roll out BPL, and the HF band is affected world-wide.
I predict the following:
Before anyone says how heartless I am to those poor ham radio operators: I am one. I'm just a realist.
Sounds like a perfectly reasonable sentiment to me. :-)
How long before someone at the RIAA connects the dots and realizes that Case Western Reserve University's high-bandwidth intranet is a target rich environment for subpoenas and potential lawsuits against file-sharers allegedly infringing on their members' copyrights?
It's not like they require the song sharing to take place over the internet in order to go after people...
The project to create an open source version of Delphi Forums is called Project Beehive Forum.
I wonder if this is going to spark a fight for the base name?
> Where do you live?
I live in the Province of Ontario, Canada.
From your story, it sounds like some of the FHP (Florida Highway Patrol) have forgotten their motto: "Courtesy, Service, Protection".
That might be something to drop the Director (Christopher A. Knight) a snail-mail about. The main email address is fhp@hsmv.state.fl.us which you can get from this URL: Florida Highway Patrol Contact Information.
Other people have mentioned the Roadside Breakdown aspect, but I don't think anyone's touched on this aspect yet:
Having the hood of a car up is a well recognized sign of vehicle breakdown, and that the driver could probably use assistance.
In my area of the world, if the police see a vehicle with the hood up without their own yellow police tape attached to the vehicle (to indicate they've dealt with this vehicle already), they'll stop and offer assistance.
How, exactly, is the driver of one of these vehicles supposed to use this very simple and well understood signal? Madly flag down drivers and risk getting run over?
And this is only ONE example of what a bad idea this vehicle is.
There's a difference between "Let's make a lot of money with a great game!" and "Let's manipulate our customers to squeeze every last dollar out of them we can." LucasArts and George Lucas definitely remind me of the latter.
Admittedly, it's a difference that's getting more difficult to find with more and more companies, but I can dream, can't I?
LucasArts cancelled something because it wasn't the right time to milk the most amount of money out of everyone? I'm shocked. Shocked I tell you.
LucasArts also cancelled the sequel to their first Full Throttle game: "Full Throttle: Hell on Wheels", which pissed me off. I was looking forward to that one.
Anymore, if the publisher is LucasArts, I end up thinking, "Nomatter when I buy it, I can guarantee I'm getting soaked. Nevermind."
After the DivX fiasco (the DVD-esque player, not the codec) and now this, maybe they'll start to listen. Customers want to buy and own their products, not rent or license them.