Friday, April 29, 2011
What if one loses a Pendrive or a U.S.B Hard Disk?
Nothing much you can do about it if you are a Microsoft user.
If you are paranoid and buy some expensive stuff with password protection and or use encryption before saving, you can say, alright I lost it but there is no use for the petty thief.
In a world where everybody is getting very selfish and living in self contained compartments, if you accidentally lose one, the one who finds the gadget may not go all out to find the owner.
Best way to protect your data is to not to carry in a portable medium.
Cloud Linux and saving in a cloud is a good option and that is why I used to support it very enthusiastically but even there, there are some major problems when a hacker attacks a servers or a server farm.
So there is no full proof method to save data.
Other option is to be somebody like me who make life principles very simple and have very little substance to hide or boast about except my Linux Images stored all over the place.
If I lose them no problem the Linux tracker will have almost all my Images except the very old ones and it is a matter of sitting down and painfully downloading them again on a portal which is painfully slow in the 3rd world.
When I come to think about it it is time for people with common interests to get together and to Form Citizens Bureaus and possess servers of their own and maintain them on a voluntary basis with trust as the bond and the friendship as the driving force.
This is a wishful thinking of the futuristic world, "I am dreaming of" but I may not live long enough to see that eventuality.
It is in fact, a force in need.
Everybody getting paranoid and everybody has something to hide or use the knowledge he or she possesses for capital gain in this present world of greed and profit
But no common decency.
WiKiLeaks was something that had to emerge and I only saw the good side of WiKiLeaks.
We saw the panic side of it.
Bad Americans diplomacy and duplicity.
We see a similar round of duplicity when BunKi Moon decides to make his own world of wisdom, just to make sure his job is secure for another two years but throw the U.N.O. credentials and caution to the wind.
Transparency is only a word but not a practice proclaimed at high level.
We cannot expect it to get better or established at grass root level.
In this this context looking after ones data is one's own prerogative.
If for common decency if one wants to save your family photos and a paltry sum of money from a hacker at large, I have a solution for you.
Go Linux.
You can have a Linux distribution in a Pendrive or in your USB hard disk with boot time protection with password.
One can save one's common decency.
I have not tested this as a possible scenario in my live CD/DVD encounter and in future this is something I am going to promote or test as a virtue of Linux.
So I expect the Linux developers to think seriously about it including UNetBooIn.
Even Knoppix has now introduced root password facility not as a default but one can enforce it after installing it in a hard disk.
That is a good thing that is emerging for simple guys like us who sometime has to make political statement of some sort in a country where democracy is owned by a single party.
One race or one religion or one government is enforcing scrutiny on dissenters.
If these political guys or police get hold of a tiny statement in a Pendrive or a hard disk as evidence, is it violation of privacy or arbitrary use of force?
If the prosecution produce the data in a court of law there is no defense.
This is where even Polippix and Incognito have a place when police states emerge in the pretext of law and order and disciplined society where simple justice and common sense and decency may disappear forever.
I think Linux Developers should give us the utilities to protect common decency.
That is the political will to change the bad practices of all kinds.
