Hack this

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Seagate Technology LLC, the world's largest hard drive maker, announced Monday the first manufacturer to sell laptop PCs with its new built-in encryption technology.

The hard drives, to be available in laptops made by ASI Computer Technologies, will include a chip that makes it impossible for anyone to read data off the disk, or even boot up a PC, without some form of authentication.

I'm surprised this hasn't been done before now - and whoever has the patent on it is going to be stinking rich. I suspect that Seagate corporate has the patent. Some poor 80k a year slob working for Seagate invents the thing, and due to the contract every company makes engineers sign, any intellectual property developed during their employment would belong to the employer. It sucks when you sign one of those forms because you know if you come up with the "great idea", it won't be yours if you don't keep it a secret and work on it on off hours.

Lost and stolen laptops have wreaked havoc with the organization I work for, so now they're replacing every one's laptops but instead of using a hardware encryption solution, they're using a software solution called Pointsec. It seems to be working on my machine okay, but I wouldn't want to use it on a performance machine. It uses the CPU to encrypt and adds a layer of latency in the IO functions. An embedded encryption chip that is dedicated to the job would be much better.

This is also a boon for privacy advocates. As it is now, Windows leaves traces of everything you do scattered all over your hard drive. It could have bank account numbers, passwords, porn, you name it. If the entire drive is encrypted, there's no way anybody could access the data if the computer is stolen.

It's going to piss off the law enforcement people. Suppose you commit some sort of financial fraud and the fed seizes your computer, which has documentation on it of what you've been doing. The fed asks you for your password so they can see the data (evidence), and you just say, "I can't remember it anymore". If the encryption has a significant bit length, they could hook that drive up to the fastest mainframe in the government's arsenal and try to brute force hack it, and it would take a few thousand years. This, of course, assumes you use a strong password instead of something dumb like your oldest kid's name, and you don't write the password down and leave it next to the computer.

But for most ordinary people, they'll just use it to keep their porn private. As soon as they make large/fast desktop drives with this device, I'll use them.

Disposing of old hard drives is important as well. You don't just give the thing to somebody else to use in a different machine, or toss it in the trash. What you do is take the drive apart, pull out the drive platters (they look like CD's), and get a big magnet and rub the platters with the magnet - both sides and very thoroughly. If you want to be extra sure, you can stick the platters in your microwave and give it about 5 seconds of shock, and hope the whole thing doesn't blow up.

I'm getting closer to building a new machine myself. I want to do a whole new setup in my study, and use my old computer as something of a file server since it does have a lot of drive space, and just network it to the new machine via wireless. I'm going to go ahead and install Windows Vista on the new machine for direct X 10. At some point, new games will not run on XP. And the thing will be a beast.. plus a 24" widescreen flat panel monitor.

I just need to draw up some plans on how the "desk" is going to work. It's not going to be a desk really, but more just a keyboard tray, a section for the mouse and a stand for the monitor and speakers. I've found the chair already - and it's waaaay different. Actually, it's one of those massage chairs, and it doesn't have any legs so it's really low to the ground, but super comfortable - hence needing to build a custom setup to hold the computer components.

I had told myself that once I get a certain amount of money saved, I'd go ahead and spend a few grand on the new setup. I'm about 2 grand from the target now, so it's time to start planning. It's fun stuff.