Losing a laptop can cause a lot of grief, the lost photos from the holiday in Swiss Alps is ofton the smallest problem, private information in the wrong hands can be a lot bigger, especially when it is not only your own information.
With a standard Windows XP installation the protection is very poor, even when using boot up bios passwords and a password protected account. There are many ways to crack a laptop.
The main problem is, that most data on the harddrive is in unencrypted form – making it possible for anyone with physical access to the drive to read the data of the drive. How to protect the sensitive data
There are some different ways to keep your sensitive data safe
1)Keep the data completely of the hard drive.
Use the laptop as terminal. Boot from a live-cdrom or the image of one. But don’t keep the data of the hard drive. Access the data via an encrypted network connection like ssh or vpn. The advantage is that if the file data is only stored in the ram it should be completely of once the laptop is restarted.
One efficient way to this is to use remote access protocols (VNC, Windows Terminal Service…etc), in this case the data will never be on the local laptop since everything will be going on on the server.
2)Keep the data on the hard drive but encrypted
Encrypt a partition: an encrypted drive can be an efficient protection. Just be carefull that backups or other copies of the data are not saved outside the encrypted partion.
You can use a encrypted data partition, along an unencrypted system partition for
Encrypt the data file by file:Possible, and maybe a solution if it is very few files which is only accessed rarely. This can be done by GnuPG or similar.
Conclusion
As a ordinary home user, with mostly none-sensible data I find an encrypted partition to be the the obvios choice, since it requires no server and use free software (truecrypt) it is very cheap. The data can still be compromised, but it is difficult and requires time and resources.
In practicality this means, that one can access and edit the Google Calendar from any computer, and have it synchronize with the cell phone calendar anywhere by a few clicks on the cell phone.
Just a few days after the launch of the games the first interesting news appears.
The first reviews of the games has appeared. It sounds like some of the games is quite OK. But it is pretty simple games. Playing Doom on the Linux firmware seems the most advanced game by far.
We could hope that new independent games will appear soon, since the reverse engineering of the Ipod games has started. In time it is the hope that this will make it possible for people to write their own Ipod games. This could spawn a new community.
Apple latest announcement included games for the Ipod.
When Apple Tuesday announced the New Ipod models, the biggest surprise to me was that Apple will be selling Games through the Itunes Music Store. The games include classics like Tetris, Pac-Man and Texas-hold-em.
Most Geeks know that it has been possible to play games on the Ipod for some time. All that is needed is an alternative firmware like Linux or Rockbox, and then it is possible to play Doom or use the Gameboy emulator to play Gameboy classics.
On David Naylors block he presents a meta search tool called Zippy. I just tried it out, at it gave a lot of cool information on my website. It tells you exactly which pages has been indexed by which search engine things. I told that most of Tech Tag has been indexed by Google, MSN and Yahoo, and that it in no way is indexed by ask.com. I will be looking in to this in the next couple of days.
Cspace promises an instant messenger with file sharing, remote access and a high security level. A beta product which seems a viable alternative to other desktop sharing products.
When I help family and friends with IT problems remote access to their desktop has been extremely useful. Control of the desktop speeds up the process of detecting the problem and finding a solution compared to the situation when I rely on phone descriptions. The current solutions I know of have different weaknesses. Like the price, that some are Windows only, that some are insecure or that it is difficult to establish a connection when people use nat-routers to share an Internet connection.
Cspace features
The features of c-space is that it provides you with a decentralised encrypted instant messaging service. Which should provide a high level of security. The second feature is the possibility to transfer files between, and the main feature is the possibility to remotely control the desktop.
Using cspace
Even though cspace is beta software, it seems to be pretty functional. The documentation however is scarce. It is however pretty simple to set it up, I however had a bit of trouble in making it work with the firewalls on the two test systems (norton and zonelabs). But that seems to be something which should be solvable. It however established a connection over the Internet and through two nat-routers without any problems, and with the firewalls turned of, it was also established a remote access connection.
All in all, a promising software which I will be trying out some more later.
