Chad's News

Have you ever wondered why a piece of toast always seems to fall with the buttered side down? Turns out it’s not an accident. Likewise, researchers have determined that amino acids, basic building blocks of life on Earth, have a high probability of forming based solely on the laws of thermodynamics. Thus if we ever do make contact with aliens, they may share some of the basic building blocks of our biology. (And they’ll be humanoid in shape… NOT!)

Link: http://www.wired.com/…
(via Bureau 42)

There are well-defined procedures for permanently erasing data from a traditional hard drive. But for solid-state drives (SSDs), which use Flash memory instead of magnetic platters, things are quite different. The problem stems from two peculiarities of SSDs: “they can only erase data in larger chunks than they can write it, and their storage cells can only be written a certain number of times (10,000 is standard) before they start to fail.” Because of these, SSD firmware does a lot of behind-the-scenes manipulations when writing data to the drive.

Researchers at UCSD have determined the following:

1. Built-in erase commands are effective, but are sometimes implemented incorrectly.
2. Overwriting the entire visible address space of an SSD twice is usually, but not always, sufficient to sanitize the drive.
3. None of the existing techniques for individual file sanitization are effective on SSDs.

That being said, law enforcement agencies are finding that it’s hard to do forensics on SSDs because the drive automatically wipes a significant percentage of deleted data without any intervention by the user. This may seem like a direct contradiction to what the UCSD team determined, but the difficulty there was with the purposeful sanitization of data as well as with the erasure of individual files. So while it’s difficult to wipe everything, it’s also hard to prevent some amount of deleted data from being wiped automatically.

The Ars Technica article (link #3 below) briefly discusses the article in link #1, and then goes on to mention other erasure techniques that are coming down the pipeline. For right now, however, they suggest encrypting the drive as a good way to keep private data secure.

Link #1: http://www.usenix.org/…
(via Slashdot)

Link #2: http://news.techworld.com/…
(via Slashdot)

Link #3: http://arstechnica.com/…

Heavy flooding in Thailand is going to cause a short-term drop in the supply of hard drives, so expect prices to increase as demand goes up.

Link: http://abcnews.go.com/…
(via Kim Komando)

Update: Slashdot has an article with more information.

October 25^th was the 10-year anniversary of Windows XP, yet it still remains the most popular version of Windows for desktop users. The linked article from Ars Technica provides a bit of retrospective, then explains why it’s time to move on to something newer.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

Not too long ago, Microsoft released a developer’s build of Windows 8, and some people are upset because Microsoft implemented a new “Metro style” which, among other things, replaces the venerable Start menu with an apps page. The legacy of Steve Jobs is now making itself felt on the desktop. Also keep in mind that the developer’s build is a very preliminary look at what will appear in the final version of Windows 8, and you can currently configure the system to show the Start menu.

Link #1: http://www.techrepublic.com/…

Link #2: http://www.techrepublic.com/…

You may already be familiar with the “Footprints” poem, but some enterprising person created a version specific to Star Wars. And it’s really good.

Link: http://thinklings.org/…

When I first joined Google+, I realized that its lack of games was a problem (my primary reason for joining Facebook was to play online Scrabble). Well that has now changed.

Link #1: http://arstechnica.com/…

Link #2: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/…
(via The Daily Caller)

A New York man, Philip A. Contos, was motorcycle riding without a helmet as part of a protest against state helmet laws. He had an accident, hit his head on the pavement, and died. State troopers say he most likely would have survived if he’d been wearing a helmet.

Link: http://dailycaller.com/…

The linked page generates highly random passwords and delivers them in a secure manner. It’s probably a bit of overkill, but it’s better to trust Steve Gibson, a well-known and reliable source, than some unknown password generator you find via a Google search.

Thanks to Josh for this link.

Link: https://www.grc.com/…

Did you know there’s a new field of research called spamalytics? It’s the study of email spam. The researchers in the linked article did everything they could to receive spam, and they actually replied to and paid for some of the products. One interesting fact is that the vast majority of spam purchases went through only three financial companies worldwide. This could make it quite easy for authorities to disrupt the flow of money to the spammers. Another tidbit from the article: it takes about 12.5 million spam messages to sell $100 worth of that ED medicine whose name starts with a “V”.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/…
(via The Consumerist)

Remember a few years ago when e-book readers started to hit the mainstream? Well, they’ve definitely arrived. Last May, Amazon announced that it was selling more e-books than printed books.

Link: http://www.cnn.com/…
(via Slashdot)

Television manufacturers and the motion picture industry are pushing 3D technology, even though many consumers don’t want it. For me, it’s the glasses and the eye strain that are the kiss of death. I already wear glasses, so putting another pair on over top of them is awkward and uncomfortable. The linked article also lists reduced picture quality as a reason to abandon 3D.

Link: http://www.techrepublic.com/…