Andy the Chicken: 2009

Saturday, October 31, 2009

Are DVDs done as a backup medium?

The floppy disk had a great run. From the day they replaced paper tape and magnetic tape, they wowed users with their random access and huge capacity; through successive reductions in size and doublings of capacity, they became such a symbol of storage that they live on as the menu icon representing "save".

Of course, the floppy disk is dead and gone, you knew that. To illustrate: the current standard for digital cameras is 10 megapixels. Just ONE photo from this kind of camera will not fit on a standard 1.44M floppy. There is no problem left for which a floppy disk is the best answer.

I postulate that DVDs are nearly dead in the same way. Although they're the largest storage medium around at a reasonable price (Blu-ray is still premium rated as I write this) hard disks are so cheap and easy to use, that there's no real saving in using DVDs.

Hard disks have come a long way. The first could store 5 or 10 MEGAbytes. The increase has been so rapid that people still talk about 500 MEGAbyte drives, when they mean 500GIGAbyte drives. The latest 1TERAbyte drives are 100,000 times bigger than the first ones; a 1.5Tb drive is a million times larger than a floppy disk.

Imagine you have a few hundred megabytes to store, and compare the task of storing it on DVD's or an external USB pluggable disk drive. The disk drive is still more expensive. As I write this, perhaps $100 (CAD/USD) for 1 Terabyte. If you buy two, you can alternate your backups, and get a really good level of security, beyond those scratchable DVDs. And it's easy... you just plug it in, and copy!

Compare a stack of DVDs. True, they're cheap. A stack of 100 could be $25 to $40, and would store around 400Gb. But look at the effort involved in swapping out all those DVDs: how much is that trouble worth? And how long does it take? And how many times are you going to back up? I think the DVD is dead.

You might point out that DVDs will still live on as a way to play movies. But we're now in the age of the media player. I have a box that will simply play a movie from a flash drive or USB hard disk to my TV. I don't need DVDs any more. And a friend has a Playstation that can play media over a wireless network. No, the DVD is dead. Goodbye!

Friday, May 15, 2009

Freaky security issue

Two security issues that everyone should be aware of. First, some context: I don't know about you, but I have so many username/password combinations, that I tend to use the same one(s) for several purposes. Also, we have some expectation that when we type in a password, it's kept secret, and only checked by a program.

It's true that ethically written programs such as blog and forum software that are commonly available do not reveal users' passwords to the people running the software. But we should all be mindful that there is NO guarantee that this is going to be the case on an unscrupulous site. Register at a site with your email address, and use the same password as that email account, and you're totally asking for trouble. Don't assume that your password is kept secret just because it appears as "********" on your screen. Remember, getting access to your email account is key to getting more passwords, even if they're different, using the "forgot password" feature.

Secondly, be aware that even with ethically written software, if you type your password into the wrong place, it may become visible to the operators. I have been aware of an instance where a user entered his username and password, but failed to click correctly on the password field. It was listed as a failed login attempt, with "usernamepassword" as the user who had attempted the login. Obviously, since the username and password were typed concatenated into the username field, even the ethical software I was using, showed me both the username, and his password.