If you use a thumb-drive sans security your data is just a vacant USB port away from being thrown up on the internet, assets exposed to the world like some drunken heiress. Even secure devices, whether they use
biometric scanners,
hardware encryption, or even more
extreme measures, all leave a lot to be desired: no standards means limited compatibility, and secure data you can't reliably access might as well be random strings of binary digits. The answer could be IEEE 1667, the "Standard Protocol for Authentication in Host Attachments of Transient Storage Devices." Among other things it would enable you to restrict where your thumb drive will work and, conversely, what thumb drives your machine will accept. If it becomes the standard it was born to be you'll be able to apply the same policies whether you're opening
Windows 7, cuddling with
Snow Leopard, or making jazz-hands with something a little
less mainstream. Will it succeed? CNET's Jon Oltsik thinks Microsoft's support for the standard is a good omen and says "Let's all follow Redmond's lead in this case for the greater good." That's
certainly not something you hear every day, but this time we're game.
posted November 25th 2008 8:28AM
I've lost all the data on my thumb drive! IEEE!!!!
If this is so good, I want to see the IEEE standard 330 iterations ago.
01001001 01000101 01000101 01000101
binary solo!
I hope Iron Key takes this up as well. It'd be nice to have a uniform standard among different platforms.
They should give these things names. It's like they want them to be forgotten. But it seems clever. But not if I have to register my thumb drive if I visit an Internet café while on holiday in Spain or something.
one IEEE to rule them all
hey, its Fonzie! "IEEE!"
wait...
Commas are your friends,
I love their logos! :)
I wonder what standard IEEE1337 would be?
there is none:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/standards.jsp?start=1300&end=1399
I was disappointed also.
"assets exposed to the world like some drunken heiress"—Ouch. Low blow, Tim. Low blow.