Another Reason to Run GNU/Linux...

And a pretty important one:

The Home Office has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain routinely to hack into people’s personal computers without a warrant.

So why might GNU/Linux help? Well:

He said the authorities could break into a suspect’s home or office and insert a “key-logging” device into an individual’s computer. This would collect and, if necessary, transmit details of all the suspect’s keystrokes. “It’s just like putting a secret camera in someone’s living room,” he said.

Police might also send an e-mail to a suspect’s computer. The message would include an attachment that contained a virus or “malware”. If the attachment was opened, the remote search facility would be covertly activated. Alternatively, police could park outside a suspect’s home and hack into his or her hard drive using the wireless network.

Er, and how are they going to break into my system to install the keylogger if they don't know the password? Attachments won't work: I'm generally clever enough *not* to open them, and even if I did, they wouldn't do much on a GNU/Linux box. And hacking my hard disc through the wireless network? I don't think so.

Looks like free software is becoming even more about freedom....

Seagate All at Sea

Here's a company with a death-wish:

SEAGATE'S latest batch of drives are not compatible with the Open Sauce operating system Linux.

...


There are a few work-arounds but Seagate Tech Support says they do not know what they are. Instead they are telling man plus dog that their latest drives do not support Linux.

How to run a 21st-century computer company. Not.

Last Night a DVD Saved My Life

Last night, my Windows 2000 box died. To be fair, it was nothing to do with Windows, but a dodgy hard disc. And yes, of course I have backups...it's just that they're not entirely up-to-date, and missing even a few days' data is a pain. I could re-install Windows and hope that gave me access to my data (stored on a separate partition), but this would take a few hours that I don't have, and might not work. Luckily there's a better way.

Booting up the PC with the Knoppix 5.0 Live DVD inside produced not only a working machine in a couple of minutes, with access to all of my data, but a cool 5000 programs at my beck and call. Including K3b, which meant that I could simply burn copies of the data I was missing. Problem solved.

Thanks, Knoppix: you're a gent.

Driving Hard

Hard discs are the real engines of the computer revolution. More than rising processing speeds, it is constantly expanding hard disc capacity that has made most of the exciting recent developments possible.

This is most obvious in the case of Google, which now not only searches most of the Web, and stores its (presumably vast) index on cheap hard discs, but also offers a couple of Gbytes of storage to everyone who uses/will use its Gmail. Greatly increased storage has also driven the MP3 revolution. The cheap availability of Gigabytes of storage means that people can - and so do - store thousands of songs, and now routinely expect to have every song they want on tap, instantly.

Yet another milestone was reached recently, when even the Terabyte (=1,000 Gbytes) became a relatively cheap option. For most of us mere mortals, it is hard to grasp what this kind of storage will mean in practice. One person who has spent a lot of time thinking hard about such large-scale storage and what it means is Jim Gray, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing last year.

On his Web site (at Microsoft Research), he links to a fascinating paper by Michael Lesk that asks the question How much information is there in the world? (There is also a more up-to-date version available.) It is clear from the general estimates that we are fast approaching the day when it will be possible to have just about every piece of data (text, audio, video) that relates to us throughout our lives and to our immediate (and maybe not-so-immediate) world, all stored, indexed and cross-referenced on a hard disc somewhere.

Google and the other search engines already gives us a glimpse of this "Information At Your Fingertips" (now where did I hear that phrase before?), but such all-encompassing Exabytes (1,000,000 Terabytes) go well beyond this.

What is interesting is how intimately this scaling process is related to the opening up of data. In fact, this kind of super-scaling, which takes us to realms several orders of magnitude beyond even the largest proprietary holdings of information, only makes sense if data is freely available for cross-referencing (something that cannot happen if there are isolated bastions of information, each with its own gatekeeper).

Once again, technological developments that have been in train for decades are pushing us inexorably towards an open future - whatever the current information monopolists might want or do.