Minor annoyances

A couple of minor annoyances with my current gaggle of gadgets:

• The Samsung monitor is fscking gorgeous, but with its 2ms response time and 3000:1 contrast the jitter coming through the VGA input is annoying as heck. I'll have to get either a graphics card or a motherboard with a DVI output. (The jitter could be coming from the KVM switch, but that would open yet another can of worms. I'll have to deal with it pretty soon in any case.)
• The Zoom H2 won't record four channels in any mode but 44.1KHz, 16-bit WAV. So much for recording concerts with audience reaction, or an evening's worth of surround-sound at a circle. Minor; it'll do two channel surround-sound, and that's good enough for circles. I can get audience reaction by recording from the first or second row.

Clearing my tabs: USB drives: threat or menace?

Portable Devices Pose Growing IT Security Threat

Jeff Moss, organizer of the DefCon hacking convention, said the lack of an industry standard for encrypting data on portable drives is hampering efforts to boost the security of such devices.

“Something definitely needs to be done because these devices definitely get lost or stolen or [are] given to friends,” said Moss.

Gotta watch out for those friends, all right. But "an industry standard for encrypting data on portable drives" isn't the solution. What are you going to do? Hand out a 256-bit key with every device? And what will you store the key on?

Joe Gabanksi, network administrator for the city of Lake Forest, Ill., said municipal IT personnel first noticed a problem with portable devices after distributing removable storage devices to employees about two years ago.

Officials hoped to help employees more easily transport data, but found after a scan of the IT environment that a host of unauthorized devices were also linked to the network. At that point, Gabanksi said, the city’s IT managers realized that the unofficial policy of connectivity-at-will needed to tightened.

“We found considerably more activity on the network than we had ever anticipated,” he said. “We had the iPod, digital music players [and] universal flash drives. We were shocked to see how much end users had already used them.”

Gabanksi said the discovery spurred concerns over how to monitor and manage data coming in and out of his environment. Thus, the city moved to require that users register any devices they wish to connect to the corporate network.

Well, you can lock down every machine on your network so that it won't boot from removable media, and encrypts everything that it writes to a USB drive or CD-ROM (using some form of obligatory key escrow so that when the machine crashes you don't lose everything it wrote), but that only works within a closed and very tightly-controlled organization where hardly anyone has to share data with anyone else. As soon as you want to hand somebody a batch of files on an encrypted drive, you have to deal with key management.

It's a tough problem, all right. I really admire that problem. Thoughts?

More gadget lust

Lenovo announces the ultrasmall, low-energy Blue Sky desktop PC

September 12, 2007 (Computerworld) -- Lenovo Group Ltd. today announced the Blue Sky desktop computer, its smallest, quietest and most energy-efficient desktop.

Available at an introductory price of about $399 after rebate, the new ThinkCentre A61e (its formal name) ships next month. About the size of a telephone book, it weighs 8 lbs. and is about 25% smaller than the previous ThinkCentre model, Lenovo officials said.

Blue Sky is also the first full-functioning PC to run on 45 watts of power, meaning it can be powered by a solar panel or roughly the amount of electricity needed for three compact fluorescent light bulbs, a Lenovo spokeswoman said.

It will run either the Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Athlon 64x2 dual-core processor or the AMD Sempron processor, with several choices of ultrasmall hard drives, ranging from 80GB to 750GB. It has 4GB of memory and comes preloaded with either the Windows Vista Business or Windows XP Professional operating system.

The question is: is it really quiet? Gizmodo has more detailed specs. And there's no PCI slot, so it's not much use for studio recording, but I have that covered anyway.

Flashes of insight

A New Old Idea - Economist.com

WHEN most people switch on a desk lamp, they usually want a little extra illumination. But not John Goodey, an engineering student at Oxford University. When he flicks the switch and turns on his lamp, a sensor on his desk downloads music tracks digitally encoded within tiny flickers in the lamp's light. The music is then relayed through a pair of nearby speakers. This unusual set-up offers a glimpse of a future in which light, rather than radio waves, is used to send information. The concept, known as optical wireless or free-space optics (FSO), promises better security and higher data-transfer rates (up to 10 gigabits per second) than existing radio-based communications technologies, says Dominic O'Brien, a leading engineer in the field and Mr Goodey's research supervisor at Oxford.

FSO is already used in a few niches: to connect networks in nearby offices without having to string cables between them, for example. But plans are afoot to extend the idea into a number of new areas. For example, the subtle flickering of car headlights and tail-lights could be used to transmit speed and braking information to other vehicles, to help prevent collisions. Traffic lights could alert cars when they are about to change, or broadcast the latest congestion update to waiting vehicles. In the home, FSO could be used together with interior lighting to provide extremely fast internet downloads. Since light does not travel through walls, there would be no need to worry about neighbours snooping on your e-mail, or piggybacking on your broadband connection.

Obviously nobody told them about windows -- although they're mentioned later in the article.

That said, it's still a cool technology; laser diodes and LEDs make it easy and cheap these days.

I don't normally like call-in shows. ...

... but this time I'll make an exception.