post

Your Old Copy Machine a Security Risk?

If this is true (and it appears so, I’m just using conditional since it’s so insane .. beyond insane) discarded old photocopiers may represent a huge security / privacy risk.

Nearly every digital copier built since 2002 contains a hard drive – like the one on your personal computer – storing an image of every document copied, scanned, or emailed by the machine.

Used, discarded copiers then get sold without the previous owners having a clue about all the data they just let go of. In a way it’s worse then disposing an old computer with a “live” hard disk – at least in the case of the computer, you know what information may still reside in it…

A random pick of 3 units from a warehouse showed data from sex crime and drug related police investigations, building designs, payment records with names and social security numbers, and detailed medical records from drug prescriptions, to blood test results, to a cancer diagnosis – with names of the patients.

A huge, huge timebomb.

Read the full story on CBS News


Watch CBS News Videos Online

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve)

post

Dell Warming up the Storage Paradox

Michael Dell has warmed up IDC’s Storage Paradox during his town hall meeting today. IDC originally estimated:

“the world will produce 988 exabytes of data in 2010 – but only 601 exabytes of storage will be available.”

Dell’s accelerated version:

“This year the amount of digital data will surpass the digital storage capacity available. If we don’t do something, we are going to lose that data.”

Like I’ve said before, I’m not worried:

  • Last I checked, data storage was not a natural resource, it is manufactured. Why wouldn’t market forces take care of balancing demand and supply?
  • Just where exactly would the excess “data” exist? Right now I am typing this post – but if I don’t save/post/send it, it does not get stored anywhere, it won’t become data – it won’t exist at all. (for simplicity forget caching and autosave). Does IDC count our thoughts as data?

Clearly, Michael Dell must also realize the paradoxical nature of this statement, since he offers a solution: the Dell PowerVault MD3000i.

The On-Demand model is another solution, effectively reducing storage requirements: since we work natively online, it will be easier to share & link, we don’t have to send and store redundant copies of the same file.

Related posts: Between the Lines, InfoWorld and The Register