Rubénerd!

From the I Can't Believe They're Serious department, Bruce Schneier has blogged about a hilarious memory key product (link fixed) that doesn't get its security from sound, well implemented cryptography, but from.. get this... a two wheel physical combination lock that hides the contact pins!

Make sure your important files are locked up with a Combination Lock USB Flash Drive. Each custom flash drive uses two 10-digit dials to provide access to the USB plug and keep your files safe.

The best (and most revealing) part of the product description is in the second paragraph.

A great gift for technology companies, these logoed flash drives show potential customers how seriously your company takes its security.

Yes, yes it does.

What's worrying is I'd wager a nice sushi lunch that if someone like Senator Conroy saw this, he'd buy hundreds of them and use them to carry around sensitive, confidential government data about us. I'm scared, really scared.

After what has seemed like an eternity of searching, I finally was able to track down and buy a Logitech Premium Powered USB Hub. Christmas has come early!

You may choose one (or both) of the following sections to read.

Option one: I don't want to read this entire post

Well okay fair enough! In short, the Logitech Premium Powered USB Hub a spectacular little device that takes power from an external power supply and allows me to plug in four bus powered hard drives into one USB port. It's fantastic, and I'm kicking myself for not buying it sooner! Thank you.

Option two: Please, spare no detail!

Let me regale you with my tale as to why I so desperately needed a powered USB hub and why this one fits the bill so well its a bit creepy. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Despite finding a local Singaporean distributor for the Drobo entirely by accident, and while it would be a real time saver, I'm not rich enough to still spend $600 on what is essentially an attractive, empty RAID box (An arm, a leg and a Drobo) so instead I have a veritable Stonehenge of external hard drives. I miss the days before I started studying overseas and my desktop was my primary machine, I had a large power supply and had all but a few drives internal. That was schweet!

Anyway so I have a specialised, shock absorbing hard drive carrying case for when I'm in aeroplanes that can take two desktop sized external drives and half a dozen notebook sized ones. I have a FireWire 800 ExpressCard (which Apple inexplicably removed from all but their 17" MacBook Pros now, stupid idea) which I plug the desktop drives into, but all the notebook sized drives are USB.

This is a problem because notebook hard drives are bus powered which means they need a dedicated USB port. Traditional USB hubs are no good because they can only support one powered device, which in this case defeats their purpose. With this powered Logitech hub thingy though, I can attach all my drives at once and they're all recognised! Transfer speeds would be fairly terrible if I tried to do intensive work off all four drives at once, but that's not how I intend to use them anyway. It's a convenience thing.

Now the only problem is my OS X desktop and Finder are rapidly filling up with drive icons! Time to run rsync to get them all in check, and maybe upgrade the desktop drives to 2TB ones :)

It's not often I simply republish a post I find on someone else's blog or website, but this particular piece was one of the most well written entries I've ever read, and particularly fitting given my own opinions of the MacBook FireWire debacle over the last few days.

Kyle Buckley on the The Nillabyte Perspective has a fantastic article on Apple's lost interest in the FireWire standard with the new MacBooks, and what we can assume other future products. It's appropriately titled The FireWire Obituary, and while I probably could have summarised it in only a few lines, I feel as though it's just too well written to chop up.

If you're interested in FireWire's history, what it has been used in, and it's now uncertain future in consumer devices, take a gander.

FireWire was born on January 7, 1999 in San Francisco when Steve Jobs introduced the break-through serial interface at Macworld.

At the time FireWire was born, the two most used serial connections were SCSI and USB 1. USB connections were simple, but both SCSI and USB were extremely slow when transferring data. The birth of FireWire brought transfer rates up to 400 Mbps.

The incredibly fast and sustained transfer data rate of FireWire was instrumental in the boom of digital cameras and digital camcorders. The speedy and reliable FireWire allowed for transfers of uncompressed digital content with no loss of quality. For this reason alone, the FireWire standard had been adopted by nearly every professional in the audio/video industry.

The talents of FireWire were not witnessed only by professionals--consumers were also deeply touched by FireWire's capabilities. Consumers quickly fell in love with the protocol and soon more and more computers shipped with the precocious FireWire included. Not only did consumers use FireWire for home video and audio, they also used it for external storage devices since it offered a much faster transfer rate.

The popularity of FireWire was soon threatened when, in April of 2000, USB 2.0 was born. The new version of USB boasted transfer rates up to 480 Mbps, 80 Mbps faster than FireWire. This speed was quickly proven to be manqué and not founded in reality. USB 2.0 transfer speeds rarely surpass 250 Mbps due to USB 2.0 being riddled with ADD and needing constant parent supervision from the CPU. FireWire on the other hand is well disciplined and requires no supervision and can therefore be as fast as it is designed to be.

FireWire continued to have success for years. On October 12, 2005, however, FireWire received a severe blow when Apple dropped FireWire support from its 5th generation iPod. It is not known what FireWire ever did to Steve Jobs to deserve such a shun. Appearing as if Apple was disowning FireWire, more manufactures began to focus more on USB connectivity. Digital camcorders began using different protocol, which results in an inferior compressed video format that can be used with USB 2.0. Several USB enabled external hard drives began to saturate the market and finding FireWire among the USB infestation became the “Where's Waldo” of peripheral connection types.

Yesterday, October 14th 2008, Steve Jobs introduced the new Apple MacBook with no FireWire capabilities. Apple had been the largest supporter of FireWire, and this abandonment was the final nail in the coffin, thus sealing FireWire's fate. During his keynote, Mr. Jobs failed to mention the death.

The death of FireWire is mourned by many audio/video professionals as well as consumers who firmly believe that USB 2.0 is a bastardization of peripheral connection types.