Hah, youngster! When I started with PC's (I was on DEC Mini's before that), they didn't even have hard drives of any kind. Only 8-sector single-sided floppies. Before the MFM & RLL stuff came out, we were trying to get 5-Meg SCSI (Still Can't See It) drives to work - mostly unsuccessfuly. The IBM XT, with its built-in 10-Meg hard-drive, was a quantum-leap forward from the original PC.
And we still managed to get an entire UNIX-V7 clone installed and running on anything with at least 192K of RAM (the Coherent O/S). Before XENIX, even - and WAY before LINUX.
The floppy drives for the Commodore 64 & 128 were basically outdated technology even in their heyday. However, each drive contained a 6910 (or 6902?) processor, just like the computer itself. Furthermore, almost everything involved in reading and writing was programmable: Track stepping, sectors-per-track, bytes-per-sector, and even the GCR (Group Code Recording) lookup table. All of the details were extensively well-documented (mostly by enthusiasts, rather than Commodor). I think the communications between drive and computer was serial (although using some sort of DIN connector), so it ought to be possible to cobble together an interface.
I never got hold of the last, most-evolved batch of drives for the c128, but I vaguely recall that they were actually capable of supporting double-sided floppies. There were both 5.25" and 3.5" drives. I'm wondering if it wouldn't be worth hunting down a set of drives (and possibly a c128) in order to read and recover various obsolete media (for example, I have old CP/M & ISIS-II 5.25" floppies, old 8-Sector IBM single-sided 5.25" floppies, DEC Rainbow 5.25" floppies, Commodore-64 single-sided/single-density 5.25" floppies, and Atari 520-ST 720K 3.5" floppies), as well as stacks of PC-style double-sided/high-density 5.25" floppies (and no computer with a 5.25" drive).
Making a hybrid PC/Commodore "Media-Conversion" box out of one of my old PC "husks" might actually be an interesting and worthwhile project...
Information on the laptop will be replicated to some centralized storage
place so that the student can recover it in the event that the laptop is lost,
stolen or destroyed.
Generally, a nice idea - automated backups. However, the overall design (no passwords, etc.) seems to imply that this information will all be stored in the clear. That means the centralized repository can be regularly scanned by any party with access.
Maybe if they added functionality to allow for encrypted directories (or "drives", ala TrueCrypt), and ensured that any virtual-memory/swap-partition was always scrambled with a boot-specific randomized key...
Can't be that hard to make an RFID-Tester, so anyone vaguely savvy would check for RFID. Then it's just a question of how to disable it. Subdermal - cut out a patch of skin (easily located with your tester). In-Bone - chop off a limb. Abdominal - inject several more to act as scramblers, so no good read is available. Furthermore, if the kidnappers just don't want her to be found, keep her locked up in a Faraday Cage well away from RFID sensors.
In other words, I don't think it really buys you or your child anything, and it certainly presents a lot of gruesome downsides for the "fixes" kidnappers might routinely start implementing. Sure, initially a few cases will be solved using RFID - but then, it will become common knowledge. At that point, predators will develop countermeasures, while the general public relaxes into a false sense of security.
Of course, once it's nigh-universal, the chip becomes your identity (at least, to a first-approximation check). We then get chip-forging, freaking, etc., so people can pretend to be other (or elsewhere) in an automatically-credited manner. The crypto-ID database only has to be compromised once to make the entire system suspect - and thus, useless.
Getting signal through a Faraday Cage (grounded, full-surround steel container) sounds like a pretty good trick, to me. Do you have a reference I could read?
If we presume the traditional three score and ten for an average lifespan, that means there are 613,620 hours to a human life. Be extra generous and assume an even million (a whopping 114 years). Now estimate how many "lives" are lost in the extra commute-time. For example, assume 50 million people take an extra hour each way, to commute - that's 2*50 million = 100 million = 100 "lives" per day. There certainly comes a point of diminishing returns for society as a whole...
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Hah, youngster! When I started with PC's (I was on DEC Mini's before that), they didn't even have hard drives of any kind. Only 8-sector single-sided floppies. Before the MFM & RLL stuff came out, we were trying to get 5-Meg SCSI (Still Can't See It) drives to work - mostly unsuccessfuly. The IBM XT, with its built-in 10-Meg hard-drive, was a quantum-leap forward from the original PC.
And we still managed to get an entire UNIX-V7 clone installed and running on anything with at least 192K of RAM (the Coherent O/S). Before XENIX, even - and WAY before LINUX.
The floppy drives for the Commodore 64 & 128 were basically outdated technology even in their heyday. However, each drive contained a 6910 (or 6902?) processor, just like the computer itself. Furthermore, almost everything involved in reading and writing was programmable: Track stepping, sectors-per-track, bytes-per-sector, and even the GCR (Group Code Recording) lookup table. All of the details were extensively well-documented (mostly by enthusiasts, rather than Commodor). I think the communications between drive and computer was serial (although using some sort of DIN connector), so it ought to be possible to cobble together an interface.
I never got hold of the last, most-evolved batch of drives for the c128, but I vaguely recall that they were actually capable of supporting double-sided floppies. There were both 5.25" and 3.5" drives. I'm wondering if it wouldn't be worth hunting down a set of drives (and possibly a c128) in order to read and recover various obsolete media (for example, I have old CP/M & ISIS-II 5.25" floppies, old 8-Sector IBM single-sided 5.25" floppies, DEC Rainbow 5.25" floppies, Commodore-64 single-sided/single-density 5.25" floppies, and Atari 520-ST 720K 3.5" floppies), as well as stacks of PC-style double-sided/high-density 5.25" floppies (and no computer with a 5.25" drive).
Making a hybrid PC/Commodore "Media-Conversion" box out of one of my old PC "husks" might actually be an interesting and worthwhile project...
Generally, a nice idea - automated backups. However, the overall design (no passwords, etc.) seems to imply that this information will all be stored in the clear. That means the centralized repository can be regularly scanned by any party with access.
Maybe if they added functionality to allow for encrypted directories (or "drives", ala TrueCrypt), and ensured that any virtual-memory/swap-partition was always scrambled with a boot-specific randomized key...
In other words, I don't think it really buys you or your child anything, and it certainly presents a lot of gruesome downsides for the "fixes" kidnappers might routinely start implementing. Sure, initially a few cases will be solved using RFID - but then, it will become common knowledge. At that point, predators will develop countermeasures, while the general public relaxes into a false sense of security.
Of course, once it's nigh-universal, the chip becomes your identity (at least, to a first-approximation check). We then get chip-forging, freaking, etc., so people can pretend to be other (or elsewhere) in an automatically-credited manner. The crypto-ID database only has to be compromised once to make the entire system suspect - and thus, useless.
Getting signal through a Faraday Cage (grounded, full-surround steel container) sounds like a pretty good trick, to me. Do you have a reference I could read?
Or go essoteric, and call it a wyrm. Typically acts more like a dragon, anyway.
If we presume the traditional three score and ten for an average lifespan, that means there are 613,620 hours to a human life. Be extra generous and assume an even million (a whopping 114 years). Now estimate how many "lives" are lost in the extra commute-time. For example, assume 50 million people take an extra hour each way, to commute - that's 2*50 million = 100 million = 100 "lives" per day. There certainly comes a point of diminishing returns for society as a whole...