A Twitter spam test, not an Apple iPhone 4 post ... #FF @richi

  The Long View (Computerworld)

If you're anything like me, you're heartily sick of Twitter spammers. It's Friday, so might I crave your indulgence for a little experiment here in The Long View? (I promise: there's nothing here about the Apple iPhone 4.) The microblogging service seems to be plagued with thousands of bots, mindlessly tweeting gibberish. Any search for a popular term -- such as, ohhh I don't know, Apple iPhone 4 -- seems to throw up a huge, steaming pile of automated tweets from an army of fake Twitter users. But what's really going on here?

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Review: encrypted hard drive, unlocked by fingerprint

  The Long View (Computerworld)

I don't know about you, but I'm fed up of reading news about how yet another company has carelessly lost yet another batch of private customer data. Sadly, the story is all too familiar: Typically, an employee takes a copy of the data away on some sort of portable storage, which inexplicably goes missing.

I mean, how hard can it be to make sure that the data are encrypted? Actually, pretty hard, as it turns out -- at least for 'regular' users.

Software-based whole drive encryption can be a pain to use, if Joe the marketing guy just want to take his stuff home to work on. Odds are that the version of Windows he has at home doesn't include BitLocker, Microsoft's native Windows disk encryption scheme -- if he uses Mac OS at home, fuggetaboudit. And add-on software such as TrueCrypt are just that -- add-ons, which can be too much of a roadblock for 'average' users.

Enter: automatic, hardware encryption, where the cryptography magic and its user authentication are contained within the storage device itself. Apricorn, Inc., based near San Diego, sent me one of its latest biometric devices for review -- the Aegis Bio (in this case, the new 640 GB version).

Let's see how it performed...

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