More U.S. sensitive data found on hard disks in African junk shops

Hard disks found with sensitive U.S. Gov Contractor data... Again.

What is it with the repeat stories today?

Found via Boing Boing, hard disks with sensitive data turned up in Ghanain junk-markets. The data belonged to Northrup Grumman, a U.S. Government contractor.

I'll make this one short and sweet. OS X, Vista, Windows 7 and Linux all include Whole Disk Encryption technology. It's time to make it mandatory.

I'm not one to force people into behaving in a certain way, but this issue stretches far, far beyond simple security. If every modern disk was encrypted and could only be un-encrypted and read through the use of a token on your thumb drive or smart card worms, viruses, email hoaxes, money scams and most every other type of garbage that we all deal with on a daily basis would, if not simply disappear, become so expensive to create that we would hardly ever encounter it. So what are we waiting for?

Hate Crimes again?!

Holder Urges Hate Crime bill.

Again, I'm all for protecting people from violence. But that's why we pay police, arm our citizens, teach self-defence, etc. Protecting people has nothing to do with passing so-called hate crimes bills and their enforcement doesn't reduce those types of crimes. Meanwhile these "Hate Crimes" are decreasing -- and will continue to decline as baby-boomers die and the Thirty-Something crowd takes their place. The same goes for bigotry and intolerance for the disabled. Why? Because this is as close to an "ignore it and it'll go away" situation (there is no such thing, really) as we'll ever have. Children are not taught tolerance, they are taught intolerance when adults behave like, and enforce stereotypes. We simply need to teach our children that some people can't help the way they are -- we accept that people are different; and also that some people can help the way they are -- we accept that some people are just assholes.

Creating and supporting hate crime bills only serves to return us to a time of Separate but Equal.

And that's just stupid.

Boing Boing pointed to a response from Howard Knopf to Richard Pofhl, who wrote a response to a piece that Geist wrote on the 8th of this month. *whew* You can read the whole exchange: follow the links.. My insight is below.
Michael Geist June 8
Richard Pofhl June 12
Howard Knopf June 17
– Compared to the rest of the world, Canada’s file sharing has decreased as its broadband ranking has decreased. In other words, other parts of the world are getting faster speeds and are using those faster speeds to download.
This is the perfect corollary as to why ISPs in the U.S. refuse to – or even admit the need for – upgrade their networks. “Upgrading isn’t the problem” they say. “Traffic is the problem.” That’s a classic cop-out. Instead of upgrading their service, they buy their competitors so that no one can offer better service. All of this is done for one specific reason.
Anyone who says that the ISPs can’t see the future is blind. They know where all of this is going. Eventually, every form of media will be served across TCP/IP (the internet). They are biding their time. If they don’t upgrade their networks, and continue threatening to cut off people’s access, they hope to wait until the media companies are prepared to distribute across their pipes. Then they’ll cut exclusive deals and collude with the biggest ISPs to transform the internet into the technologies it replaced – television and radio.
That is why the ISPs continue to focus on traffic, piracy and bandwidth caps rather than network capacity and transfer speeds. They are not going to build a fast network until they can fully control the traffic that travels across it. And perhaps not even then.

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/WiMhsipu9DM/truth-about-myths-ab.html
http://www.thestar.com/comment/columnists/article/647038
http://www.thestar.com/article/649521
http://excesscopyright.blogspot.com/2009/06/more-myths-about-myths-about-file.html