If this technology becomes commonplace, I can see this used as a third tier of storage, between normal HDDs and tape, either used as a live landing zone until it gets copied to tape, or perhaps used in concert with a higher tier landing zone, where the data is written onto the platters already deduplicated, aimed at staying there for long term storage.

Even operating systems are starting to become storage tier aware. Windows Server 2012R2 can autotier between SSD and HDD, and Windows Server 10 has improved on that.

What would be ideal would be some drive maker to come up with some way of creating cartridges of drives, in a RAID configuration. Something like iMation's RDX... except each cartridge having 2+ drives in them, so each unit has not just RAID, but can be scrubbed to find and correct bit rod when the garbage collector goes about its business. This would completely replace tape, but also offer the benefits of tape, as in being offline and out of the reach of a bad guy doing "rm -rf/" on every SAN and NAS he can find with his newfound domain admin rights.

About 10-15 years ago, some drives used to have two read/write stacks of heads, each independent from the other. This was killed due due to people wanting cheap drives.

How will this play to the mobile companies selling Android products? A MVNO is nice, but wouldn't that tick off the carriers, and carriers are the entities that sell Android devices?

Maybe this is anecdotal, but I've found that those battery cases put a dent on antenna reception. If you are in a metropolitan area, it may not be an issue, but a suburban or rural area, this may be a deal breaker.

I wonder what Liquid Metal has over sintered aluminum or other alloys. LM has to have a specialized injecting molding machine that keeps a vacuum during the process. Sintering aluminum and other items have their issues, but it is a relatively simpler process to get precise items coming out.

I would say my HTC M8 is a combination of the two. Replaceable batteries are useful, and my last Motorola phone, the Atrix 2, had one and wasn't considered a porker by any means.

The SD card is more important. Sandisk has 200GB MicroSD cards out. This doesn't give just storage, but the ability to do backups, either with nandroid or with Titanium Backup. Since Titanium Backup uses a very good encryption system for backups (you set a password which encrypts the private key stored with the backup files, and TB uses the public key for backups, only asking for the password to unlock the private key for restores.) To boot, I can copy music to and from the SD card before I load it into the phone. Of course, if something happens and I end up trashing the ROM on the device, I can reload a backup while on the road.

The biggest reason why I won't buy a Samsung Galaxy is because of the fact that it took a major bounty to even get root on the device, much less a custom ROM. The HTC comparable, the One M8 (and the M9 coming out this month) happily runs my custom ROM with XPrivacy and other items. The eFuse issue with the Galaxy is another turn-off. Even with iPhones, if I have a trashed jailbreak, I can use DFU mode and factory restore the device to as good as new. The fact that the Samsung offering permanently disabled functionality is a major minus in my book.

For a corporation, Knox is a useful tool. For an individual, it doesn't do much.

Since the SoC functions are still a black box, I rather just go with a ROM on a moddable handset like the HTC One M8 with XPrivacy installed, where even if a basic fleshlight app demanded every priv under the sun, it won't get it. When it comes to phones, having the ability to block apps from phoning home is a major security feature.

Even better, why can't a company work on virtualization on a handset? That way, one can have a VM for web browsing, one for work stuff, one for home/personal, and one for clients? This is more important and would be more useful (especially if the hardware supported two SIM cards) then yet another black box phone. With online deduplication and having the hypervisor do the encryption, decent security can be maintained on a device without much fuss from the user.

I'm not attached to any of these ideas I posted, so if proven wrong, that is just fine with me... again, they were just thoughts of something that might be useful. TPM 2.0 is part of the Windows Certification spec, but oftentimes, there are many computers that will run Windows 8.1, but are not certified for it. Here is the link: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-...

I've had phish attempts back in 1993 on Solaris and IRIX... Not good ones, but people fakemailing, pretending to be from "root", asking to run a shell script that would send the /etc/passwd file off to an anonymizer address... well before abuse forced Julf to shut down penet's remailer for good.

Easily detected, because I was the only person with root access, but I'm sure college students probably follow directions and kicked the university's passwd files there (although with NIS/NIS+, as well as the real password hashes stashed in /etc/shadow ) there wasn't much to attack, even back then.

To address points 1-3, TPM 2.0 is an item that is required for a machine to pass Windows 8.1 hardware certification, so even though it isn't explicit, the technology will be there. For better, or worse, it will be with us, so might as well make it useful. If BitLocker can be made as easy to use as FileVault, it would be a big bump in the security reputation of both the hardware vendor, as well as MS.

For point 2, a good example of doing it "right" is Boxcryptor. It is a pretty UI over EncFS, but it does work and works decently well. Most customers don't care about encryption, but it can be used in a way to provide clientside protection that is pretty much transparent. The perfect is the enemy of the good, so there would need to be something done to make recovery usable... but this is a solvable problem, similar to how Apple deals with FileVault 2 recovery issues.

For point 3, it isn't a perfect solution, but it can be implemented "right". A MicroSD card slot is one way, where the slot the card is, is permanently set to be read-only (this is part of the SD spec.) To prevent altering data, the encrypted section of the card could be used to store the OS data. Even with this, it still isn't 100% (as an evil maid could pull the card, go to a place that has the SD spec for decoding the encrypted partition, and modify things), but it is secure from most things.

For point 4, 10GB boards and modules (well, over twisted pair copper that is... NICs that use SFPs are still not inexpensive) are falling in price, so it will not be surprising to see them appearing on consumer level motherboards in a few years, perhaps with some TCP offload functionality. Done right, it would be useful, and if worse comes to worst, the functionality can be shut off entirely.

It would be nice to see Lenovo go a step ahead in the consumer market and not just stop with shovelware, but maybe bundle some security features with their products. This would go a long way to fixing their black eye in the press:

1: A TPM chip shipped off and disabled (as per the spec) on all machines would be useful. Windows Vista and newer can take advantage of this and offer solid encryption that is highly resistant to brute force attack.

2: Add clientside encryption to Reachit with a public format, perhaps getting other vendors on board. This way, users have cloud access... but files are transparently encrypted, similar to BoxCryptor.

3: Have a small SSD read-only volume with a custom WIM present for install media as well as drivers. This way, if a machine needs to be reinstalled from scratch due to a HDD or SSD replacement, this can be done anywhere, and no OS media would be needed. This also is useful for recovery as well, especially if there is a way to get to a PE environment which can be used to save off files, run an offline AV scanner, or fix a haywire application.

4: Add firewalling onto the NICs themselves. Around 10 years ago, some nVidia motherboard chipsets had this capability where the onboard NICs were intelligent enough to have the ability to have their own rulesets. This was quite useful, both to keep the OS protected with IP blacklists, as well as to limit the damage a compromised OS can do (for example, block all outgoing port 25 traffic.) As an added benefit, if someone is worried about vPro or other "ring -1" management tools, those can easily be blocked at the NIC.

Some markets just come and go. It might just be that these lines of games might be just as viable as databases for one's Cabbage Patch dolls.

Would it make money? Maybe to a niche market. If I were to do something, I'd focus on price/quality as opposed to volume. For example, the guitar would not be a cheap piece of plastic, but perhaps a real one that can be strung and played as normal once someone got tired of the game.

Also, te game should go further than the last game types. Make different instruments. Allow multiple players to play the instruments at the same time, either coop, or one after the other in a battle of the bands. Even go with odd things, such as a chainsaw and doing WASP or Jackyl songs.

Mainstream-wise, no... this genre isn't going to be in vogue again, but there is still money to be made.

For a more pedestrian use, there is one thing that an engine like this that has a specific power band range would be ideal at... and that would be a generator. Here in the US, it would need to be geared to 3600 RPM unless an inverter is used.

If they were this efficient that they could get that much power output, it might be something to have as a backup generator for a house, as it could run from natural gas, propane, gasoline, or diesel.

Most of the scammers tend to be those casting a wide net. They bought an info dump with thousands of names, phone numbers, and such in it, feeding the numbers into a robodialer, and having people in a boiler room use names of relatives automatically on a scripted speech.

An anti-fraud device, or something asking for info to be called back at will be more than enough protection, because the scammer will just move to the next potential mark on the data dump and try them.

They try to be relatively quick about it. Eventually, bad number blocking sites like Mr. Number and others will have enough entries to have the fraudster's number blocked on devices subscribing to the service.

VoIP scams are easy to do. For example, callerID is fairly easy to forge and it doesn't cost much money to set up a boiler room and staff it with people who do this. This allows a company to be in India, but still call from a US number.

To boot, there are very stiff fines... but have you seen how a lot of the robocall firms are organized? Most have a lot of holding corporations that they work with, one owns the furniture, one pays the employees, one possesses the computer data, so when the main company, say XYZ corp, gets sued, they just file bankruptcy, then a new company, ABC corp gets created, and they are back in business the next day. To boot, all of these companies are registered offshore, so finding the true owners will be virtually impossible unless the company decides to hit a third rail in the US (drugs, guns, and IP violations.)