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.
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.
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.
I claimed earlier, that Calendar synchronization between Google Calendar and Scheduleworld only works one way. But yesterday I read in \\Engtechs very nice guide to synchronization that it works two-ways, consequences were: I had to try again.
At first my results were the same as reported earlier, none of the appointments I had in Scheduleworld would appear in Google Calendar. This however changed when I made a completely new appointment in Scheduleworld which appeared in Google Calendar after a sync. The entire problem was solved by adding a hyphen to all my appointments – and suddenly they all appeared in Google Calendar.
This goes to show two points. First of all, that two-synchronization actually works between the two, making it possible to use Scheduleworld as a middleman for synchronization between Google Calendar and any SynML compatible device, like a cell phone. Second, that this service (in beta) has some weaknesses at the present, making it possible for some appointments to be left out.
After a failure earlier on, I tried syncing Scheduleworld and Google Calendar yesterday and it finally worked. I was hoping (naive - yes) that this could as a middleman providing Google Calendar with the needed Syncml compatibility. In reality I could only make this work one way, exporting from Google Calendar (why they needed my pasword and username I don’t know), and in order to make the synchronization start I had to log in to Scheduleworld and request it.
All in all progress but I don’t really know what to use the one way sync for - unless I’m migrating completely!
When travelling digital copies of important documents can come in handy
When going on my last travel, I realized have many documents I had to bring and how vulnerable I was to losing these documents, this being passport, plain-tickets, hotel-vouchers, insurance and so on. In order to accommodate this vulnerability I scanned the most important documents saved them to PDF a brought them with on a USB-storage. This storage was kept separate from the documents in order to reduce the risk of losing both, and it was encrypted so that the sensible information keept on it would not be accessible to others in case it was stolen.
Scanning the documents
In order to get a digital copy you need access to a scanner (surprise!). Watch out that you don’t scan the documents in to good quality (I use 300dpi, 256 Gray tones). After scanning the documents I would save them in PDF-format since in PDF since it is very versatile while still keeping the print-out an exact black & white copy.
If your scanner software does not support export to PDF this can be accomplished by installing pdf995, which appears as a printer in windows, but in fact saves your print out as a PDF. In other words it should be possible to get an exact copy in most internet cafés Storing the documents
In order to keep the documents accessible one can either keep them on a USB device or online.
If you decide to keep the documents on a USB device they will be safer if encrypted. Travelling-forever has made a small guide on how to encrypt part og a USB device The USB device be either external an hard drive, a small flash USB stick or an mp3 player like Apples Ipod (it can likely be a burned cd-rom too - but I have not checked to se how truecrypt reacts to not being able to write).
The other way to go is to keep the documents at an online service you trust (and save the encryption). I one has not access to a ftp server this could be accomplished by signing up at Box.net, sending all the documents to the Gmail account or any other online way where you trust the documents are safe while still being accessible.
