Posts Tagged ‘dailymail’

Must Have Application for Thumb Drives

It’s a sign of the time, you can buy a thumb drive almost anywhere.  I have even seen them in Gas Sta­tions in the Omaha area.

There are many rea­sons to use these dri­ves: size, por­ta­bi­lity con­ve­nience, and sto­rage space, all come to mind quickly.  A lot of my exter­nal users do not even take their lap­tops to mee­tings any­more because they can keep all their pre­sen­ta­tions and such on a thumb drive and just plug into any machines.

On the other side of the coin, there are some inhe­rent risks to the trans­por­ta­tion of these devi­ces.  You may for­get them on site, lose them while get­ting something from your poc­ket, so on and so forth.  No mat­ter the rea­son, if you lose your drive, all of that data is now avai­la­ble to the per­son that finds it.

Here are some exam­ples of the type of data that can be lost by anyone:

Firm ‘broke rules’ over data loss

Home Sec­re­tary Jac­qui Smith has bla­med a pri­vate con­trac­tor for losing the details of thou­sands of cri­mi­nals, held on a com­pu­ter memory stick.

Tax web­site shut down as memory stick with sec­ret per­so­nal data of 12million is found in a pub car park

Minis­ters have been for­ced to order an emer­gency shut­down of a key Govern­ment com­pu­ter sys­tem to pro­tect millions of people’s pri­vate details.

The action was taken after a memory stick was found in a pub car park con­tai­ning con­fi­den­tial pass­co­des to the online Govern­ment Gate­way sys­tem, which covers everything from tax returns to par­king tickets.

Two exam­ples may not seem like a large amount, but if you look at the amount of data that was lost in these two exam­ples you will rea­lize how much data is at stake.

With that being said, I have found a free appli­ca­tion that will help with this.  Rohos Mini Drive Encryp­tion.  This app has a very small foot­print and once your drive is setup, you don’t have to ins­tall soft­ware on any other com­pu­ter to access that encryp­ted file.

Accor­ding to the deve­lo­pers web­site they list the fea­tu­res as:

• Crea­tes a vir­tual encryp­ted par­ti­tion volume (disk) within a USB flash drive free space
• Auto­ma­ti­cally detects your USB stick con­fig and crea­tes encryp­ted partition
• Pro­gram does not require ins­ta­lla­tion to work with encryp­ted par­ti­ton on a guest com­pu­ter. You can start it right from USB drive
• Encryp­ted par­ti­tion is pro­tec­ted by password
• Encryp­tion is auto­ma­tic and on-the-fly
• Encryp­tion algo­rithm: AES 256 bit key length. NIST approved.
• Rohos Disk Brow­ser to open encryp­ted par­ti­tion without having Admin rights
• Vir­tual Key­board — to pro­tect your encryp­ted disk pass­word from a key logger
• Auto­run Fol­der. Saved program’s/file’s short­cut will auto­ma­ti­cally start/open up upon disk connection
• The limit of encryp­ted par­ti­tion size is 2 GB

I find the soft­ware very easy to use and intui­tive.  In no time, I had car­ved 500 megs on one of my dri­ves and was moving files over to the encryp­ted por­tion.  To try out the func­tio­na­lity I han­ded the disk to my co-worker and watched as they put it in and sure enough none of the data sho­wed.  Just an exe­cu­ta­ble.  When run, the pass­word cha­llenge screen comes up.  I really do like the idea of a vir­tual key­board, par­ti­cu­larly if you are on a com­pu­ter that you do not know.  Bet­ter safe then sorry in this world.  Once the correct pass­word is ente­red and accep­ted an explo­rer win­dow is ope­ned and all your files are acces­si­ble.  It did take a few moments for me to see how to add new files to the encryp­ted volume.  Just so you know, in the explo­rer win­dow you can right click and import file.

As I said before, in this world, encrypt everything.  I highly recom­mend this pro­gram to anyone with a thumb drive.

Forget Park Place, I want to buy the Red Square

In case you have not hear about it, Mono­poly is going glo­bal.  Accor­ding to Daily Mail UK, Goo­gle has been in con­tact with Has­bro to make a new Mono­poly game that uti­li­zes Goo­gle Maps.

With the release of the game, you will not only be able to buy the stan­dard upgra­des – House or Hotel, you will also be able to say, put a sta­dium on your pesky neigh­bors house.  Don’t like your current office buil­ding?  Buy the area, put up a skyscraper.

Not only will there be the stan­dard modi­fi­ca­tions to the lots and upgra­des, the chance cards will now give the option to build a pri­son or a gar­bage dump.  The pos­si­bi­li­ties of where to put that are endless.

Accor­ding the article:

Pla­yers start the free game with three million Mono­poly dollars and can buy Dow­ning Street for $231,000, while Pennsyl­va­nia Ave­nue in Washing­ton, where the White House stands, costs $2 million.

Rent is paid auto­ma­ti­cally each day, from $50,000 for a house to $100 million for a skyscraper.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1211686/Monopoly-goes-global-giant-online-game-using-Google-Maps.html#ixzz0QX6bL8Ps

I for one, look for­ward to pla­ying.  I have been wai­ting for a major change in the game for a very long time.  Next one they need to do is Risk.