[NCLUG] Good news from the hardware front

[Chad Perrin]

On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 10:27:26PM -0600, Jim Hutchinson wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 5:57 PM, danbob <danbob at hughes.net> wrote:
> 
> > The Memorex Traveldrives also list Linux as a supported operating system
> > on the box. I bought my 8gb version for that reason at Best Buy, and
> > told the manager that that's why I selected it. He laughed and said that
> > one of his computer sales staff is a Linux guy, and that while they were
> > somewhat locked in on what product lines they sell, they do keep an eye
> > open for products with Linux support.
> >
> 
> Not really a cheap option but the sandisk cruzer flash drives also have a
> penguin on the back of the box. However, they include some annoying software
> that is a basically a poor implementation of the portable apps menu with few
> uses and for me at least is more of a hassle. I reformatted mine right away.
> Office max had the 4GB ones on sale a while back for about $40. I bet the
> next time they are on sale it will be less. I added portable apps to mine
> and use it all the time at work for putty, firefox and keepass. It's a great
> way to keep my bookmarks and passwords with me but with some measure of
> security. I still have about 3GB of space left.

The reason I got a 1GB USB flash drive is to store sensitive data (like
your password use for a flash drive).  While I'm considering carrying
around some portable apps and doing file transfers on a larger USB flash
drive, the *main* reason I'm looking for something bigger than 4GB is so
I don't have to store sensitive data on my only portable storage device.

See . . . it's generally a *really* bad idea to store such sensitive data
and stuff you use casually on the same storage device that you're willing
to plug into just about any computer.  I don't want to expose that kind
of data to computing environments over which I have no control and that I
can't trust.  I don't know what software may be running on others'
computers -- such as something that might clone the contents of my USB
flash drive.

Obviously, I could just refuse to use it on computers other than my own,
and that would be the end of it -- except that there are a lot of people
in the world who just don't understand concerns like this.  As such, I'd
get people wanting an explanation (kinda like this) for why I won't just
use it.  The primary purpose of a second, larger USB flash drive would be
to act as a buffer against the inconvenience of having to try to explain
my reasoning for not using the 1GB drive to someone who probably won't
understand anyway.

Of course, I could get a second 1GB flash drive, except that -- if I'm
going to get a second one -- I'd rather it be big enough to be more
useful than that.  1GB is probably overkill for the purposes to which
I'll put the one I already got, but insufficient for a lot of other uses.

Anyway, my point in bringing this all up is to point out that you may not
want to store passwords on the same USB flash drive as your portable
apps, even if the passwords are managed by a portable password manager
that encrypts them.  The password manager could be cloned as easily as a
text file full of passwords, and offline brute-forced at someone's
leisure later.

On the other hand, if they're just passwords for things like your Unix
Forums (unix.com) account and you don't much care about that account, and
don't use the password anywhere else where your security might be more
important, maybe it doesn't matter.

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Patrick J. LoPresti: "Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1)
Generates a syslog message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk
quota by 100K; and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!"
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