Perhaps they're not more secure in the literal sense, but they're less of an enticing target. It requires physical presence, and probably some form of breaking and entering. It requires physical transport (which likely means multiple trips), and either a LOT of work on a photocopier, or banking on the fact that no one will miss them. Once you have them, you need to go through them by hand and glean any useful information through manual file sifting.

Digital records are stolen through the Ethernet port. They won't be "gone", so they won't be "missed". They can be sifted, sorted, filtered, and pivoted until they produce useful information. If the records don't produce useful data, it'd be much more difficult to convict the thief of a crime, whereas physical record theft still leaves a laundry list of crimes with which to convict that are easier to prove.

Should the cabinets be locked? Yes...but the only place on a computer you need a crowbar to get what you want is in a game of Half-Life.

Fastest: Seagate.
Best Warranty: Seagate.
Best Cache: WD Red....or the Seagate...the article conflicts between the first two pages.
Cheapest: WD Green.

Seagate notables: Full drive encryption available at a firmware level. AF and Legacy disks are separate models.
WD Red notables: 5400RPM spindle speed.
WD Green notables: None - nothing distinguishable from the Red drive, except a shorter warranty.

Sandra Benchmark results:

Seagate: 167W/168R.
WD Red: 138W/138R.
WD Green: 133W/133R.

Atto results are shown on a messy graph with no clear numbers, but Seagate wins that benchmark as well (albeit with a closer delta).

HD Tune Pro results basically reflect the transfer rates from above. Seek times for the Seagate are 11ms for both write and read, with the WD Red having a 16/17 set of scores and the WD Green being less than an integer higher. Burst rates are again better on the Seagate (276R/304W), with the WD Green being 217/220 and the Red being 217/218.

Crystal mark, basically the same numbers.

Futuremark, prettier graphs with wonderful titles like "video editing" and "importing pictures", with the results a closer race, each drive having its own task at which it wins (even the green). Not much different from the 3TB numbers, and not that much different from each other.

There were no mentions of reliability metrics; presumably none of the disks failed during benchmarking. Consult your usual biases and experience regarding which drive is likely to fail or not - this was strictly a benchmark review, and shockingly, the enterprise-grade drive with the highest rotational speed and biggest cache that costs the most money got the best score.

Yes, but banking breaches/CC Fraud is so common, that the two times it's happened to me, it's been "an errand" - pick up my dry cleaning, get a haircut, cancel my debit card and submit a fraud form, get drinks for company tonight, put some gas in the car. It's that prevalent that it's a well-trodden path, with laws, protections, procedures, canned forms, and an express line to get it squared away. Medical record fraud is a much more difficult problem. You don't need your particular credit card number. You DO need your particular medical file. An SSN change is its own LENGTHY process, as all the rest of your ID cards also need to be changed as well. I don't even know how that works with regards to actually receiving Social Security, either.

Pardon my lack of SQL syntax, but...

SELECT * FROM patient_address WHERE current_prescriptions Contains "Oxycodone" OR "Percocet" AND WHERE area_code EQUALS "212" OR "914".

You now have a comprehensive list of houses to rob in Manhattan where you can get prescription painkillers. Simple B&E, and you've got bottles that can be sold on the street at $40/pill. Or, introduce a middle man - find a drug dealer who will pay a couple grand for a list like that, and make a few grand for sending an e-mail. Send that list - or subsets of it - to 50 different drug dealers, and you've got a year's salary in an afternoon.

If literally nothing else, call the owner of the hospital and blackmail him/her that if they don't deposit a million dollars into your offshore account in the Cayman Islands, that list will end up on Pastebin, and it would mean that the hospital would likely be litigated into oblivion and that person's life is over - WELL worth the million bucks to keep it quiet. For better or worse, we both lack creativity. I'm sure that if I were to spend an actual afternoon attempting to come up with nefarious ways to use data gleaned from a hospital, I could do better. The fact that such a list isn't actual bank account numbers doesn't mean that it's not worth real money to someone.

Sorry for the self-reply, but this is a better DMC routine video; there are hundreds and hundreds of them on youtube...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

While "Hipsters" is the go-to answer to why vinyl records are all the rage, DJs are another part. Some songs are still pressed on 12" singles (most commonly EDM and hip-hop; frequently with instrumental versions as well), but the best selling vinyl pressing for quite some time now has been the Serato Timecode record. It allows DJs to use standard Technics 1200s (and newer models, like the Numark TTX and the Reloop 7000s) to still spin and scratch records, but without being limited by what's actually being pressed because it manipulates MP3 playback on a computer.

Amongst the reasons these records sell so well is because instead of having hundreds of records that get 1-2 plays a night, the same pair of records are played all night, so it's entirely realistic to go through a pair a month, depending on how much pressure is put on the needle. Serato is (or was-for-a-very-long-time depending on who's numbers you believe) the most popular DVS platform, with Traktor in second place, though it's more popular with DJs who use (MIDI) Controllers instead of vinyl. Serato and several other DJ software titles now support the vast number of controllers that have been released, so overall interest in DJing with timecode vinyl isn't quite as popular as it once was. Still, while Jack White’s Lazaretto sold over 75,000 copies this year, it pales in comparison to the number of club jocks who buy timecode records, in pairs, monthly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

My first thought was that this sounds a lot like the famed situation between Windows and Lotus. Personally, I miss Musicmatch.

You can't say "Get with the times" in a comment where Slashdot was scooped by ZDNet five days ago. That ship sailed.

Crow, listen to this guy. Assuming these things have 100MBytes/sec write speed, a simple RAID-1 will take over 22 hours to rebuild.

If you want 8TB of usable space, get 4x4TB and RAIDz2 (i.e. RAID6) them. Even if it's disposable data, the data must be of sufficient use to justify a FreeNAS build over a simple external. It's worth your time to do it right.

I answered most of your questions in this post, but the tl;dr version is that I don't mind ads based on what I post. I mind ads based on what I *don't* post, i.e. data that's extracted from my behavior. What I post is public. What I don't post is private. Not that hard.

I'm not talking about being upset with a situation like me saying "I just got a new car!" and then Facebook serving me ads for accessories or insurance. That's a tradeoff I'm okay with, for the very reason you specify. The think that grinds my gears is entirely different, and an example of it just happened today. I have a few PC repair clients. I call, text, and e-mail them. I do not contact them via Facebook. I do not have the Facebook app installed on my phone, we have no mutual friends, they've never e-mailed me at my e-mail address associated with my Facebook account, and I run Ghostery on my browser. To the extent that I can, I've opted out of whatever tracking Facebook lets me opt out of. So, how did Facebook know that I knew these clients? That's information I've not only not given them, but have gone out of my way to prevent Facebook getting. "Because I use the service at all" is a pretty poor reason why Facebook should have that information.

Agreed. Let me give you another example. Back in June, I went with a friend on a road trip to Pittsburgh. In anticipation of this trip, I updated Google Maps on my phone. I don't use it often, and I have auto-updates on my phone disabled, so it was a bit dated. When we got back home, I learned that Google has a "map history" 'feature' that's a part of the Maps app, that show you the routes you took. I was never notified of this change, and again, wherever possible, I opted out of Google's data collection. Maps is "convenient", and Google showing me ads for rest stops and gas stations while I'm driving is an acceptable tradeoff. Retaining that data, when no prompt was given to me? I had nothing to hide during that trip, but it's disrespectful to take data in that manner without giving the user the option to have it not collected. Depending on the tightness of your tin foil hat, there's no guarantee that they aren't taking that data anyway and just aren't showing it to you. "Don't use Maps then" is the likely answer, and I no longer do - I use CoPilot. The fact that the opt-out wasn't made known to me until after the data had been collected? That's not terribly justifiable.

Who my clients are is privileged information. I sync them with an Exchange server whose owners I know, and explicitly not to Google, Facebook, or anyone else. What I do and don't buy *should* be privileged information (which is why I don't use rewards cards). The cross-referencing is most definitely concerning, especially since the definition of "public" seems to essentially be "any time one human interacts with another", when there should certainly be a spectrum between "private" and "public".

The e-mails that end up in the 'offers' folder are not what I'm talking about, because they're not ads from the mail provider. Wherever ads from the mail provider are shown - that's what I'm talking about. I don't even mind if they explicitly ask me "what kind of topics are you interested in?" as a part of the sign-up. I'm okay with that, because it allows me to choose. If I want ads for tampons in my inbox, that should be determined "because I say so", regardless of the fact that every e-mail I get comes from Newegg, Amazon, and Microcenter. "Ask, don't data mine" is all I'm asking for. I intentionally don't run AdBlock or its ilk because I know that advertising is what makes the internet work. Flash, I block (I wouldn't if it weren't for the ads that play audio), and tracking, I block (courtesy of Ghostery). If they're not tracking, and they're not making noise, then by all means, show me the ads. If you want to know which ads to play, I'll be more than happy to help.

"Don't data mine." It's not that hard.

Two reasons:

1.) it's not a matter of having "something to hide". "I have nothing to hide" succinctly illustrates a foundational change in how privacy is viewed. Privacy is a RIGHT that should be compromised only under specific circumstances, at my discretion. "I have nothing to hide" indicates that privacy is seen as a PRIVILEGE requiring a reason for its desire, i.e. "something to hide". The fact that you consider Facebook picking a Coke ad over a Pepsi ad a worthwhile tradeoff for your privacy is all well and good, and I personally am glad that the option is there. The fact that the system is becoming progressively less respectful of the concept of opting out for no given reason, on the other hand, is the problem.

2.) The major issue isn't the opt-in, but the unilateral way it's done. Retail is a science, and I get that...but the fact that opting out is becoming progressively less possible is a problem. If Google wants information about me, feel free to call and ask. I usually participate in surveys for that very reason - they're respectful enough to ask, and allow me to choose which data I wish to provide. Facebook and Google do no such thing.

There's a certain amount of understanding I can have with behavioral advertising. If I Google for "ski resorts Vermont", and they want to show me ads for ski resorts in Vermont, I'm 100% fine with that. I even try to click on ads when I know that they're incidentally what I'm looking for. However, if they're going to send me ads based on my e-mails and Facebook posts, which I cannot opt out of, then that is a different story.

Also, they changed to using the GRUB bootloader, which is going to make a mess in that respect.

I've used both, migrated between them, and support instances of both for different clients.

tl;dr: NAS4Free better adheres to the UNIX philosophy of "do one thing and do it well". FreeNAS does not - it does more stuff. Depending on your use case, either one of them can be a help or a hindrance.

Both of them essentially solve the same problem, essentially the same way: Get a bunch of hard disks recognized by a computer, and use the ZFS file system and various networking protocols together in order to facilitate data storage. Both of them have the same advantages of ZFS (Data security, "datasets", good performance in software RAID, snapshotting, compression, volume portability) and cons (you'll need plenty of RAM [ECC RAM is strongly recommended], hardware RAID controllers are only useful in JBOD mode, adding disks later on gets weird, etc.). If the ZFS tradeoff is worthwhile for you, then you're in the right place.

Pros, NAS4Free:
--Runs better on lower spec'd hardware.
--Faster startup time and generally snappier web interface.
--Has all the core stuff (SMB, FTP, SSH, NFS, iSCSI), and notably, Transmission.
--"More Open" than FreeNAS with regards to licensing.

Cons, NAS4Free:
--Limited functionality beyond NAS stuff, i.e. no plugins, though there are a handful of tutorials for unofficial methods (I've personally set one up to run BT Sync and Plex, but it took about an hour and LOTS of command line fun).
--Update schedule is erratic.
--I've personally had some annoyances with their Samba implementation; it doesn't always respect "remember password" in mixed environments with mapped drives.

Pros, FreeNAS:
--Extensible functionality with plugins; there are multiple avenues for media streaming and automatic downloading (Transmission, SabNZBd, XDM, etc.). There's also an OwnCloud plugin which is very nice, and an Amazon S3 plugin that allows for real-time replication to The Cloud (tm) if that's worthwhile. Depending on the environment, integration with Active Directory is possible.
--ZFS Replication - you can have your datasets replicate to a secondary NAS somewhere else.
--In-UI updating, automatic or scheduled. This is a new feature in 9.3 admittedly, but it no longer requires updates to be manually uploaded or the NAS to be taken offline for an update to be performed.

Cons, FreeNAS:
--All those extra features come at a cost - you'll need to account for that when buying RAM.
--Plugin updates aren't always immediate when the source program updates; when some programs update internally, it's not always reflected in the FreeNAS UI.
--UI is more daunting at first go. Also, some things are a bit more quirky than they should be.
--iSCSI is a bit more complicated to set up than on N4F.

I personally like the FreeNAS route myself, but that's also based on my extensive use of plugins, because I'm trying to do "one box to rule them all" - FreeNAS fits that bill better. If you either don't care about your NAS doing anything besides speaking FTP and SMB, or you've got an ESXi server running around that does all your other server-like stuff and you just need an iSCSI target, or you're building a FrankenNAS and need to squeeze the most out of your RAM, then N4F is probably more practical for your use case.

I'm guessing that "own" or "have" was supposed to go between "actually" and "install" - and that, good sir/madam, is the difference.

Volume licensed copies operate the same as Office always(ish) has - burn/extract ISO, run installer, agree to the EULA, pick your stuff if you want, let it sit, run an app, add your key via the 'account' menu, let the app activate, and restart. No muss, no fuss, and no internet needed at all except for the activation server (even that depending on whether you have a MAK or KLS).

Everyone else gets the crappy version...

Once you fork over your details, you then download a stub installer. The stub installer asks for the e-mail address and password used when making the purchase. That e-mail is now a part of your Microsoft account, which is now required to allow the software to operate. The stub then downloads everything. Don't want Access or Publisher? sucks to be you. The download will hopefully not-fail, because if it does, it fails spectacularly, and you're flushing temp files and obscure %programdata% directories to give the stub the "fresh meat" signal to try again. The download takes about half an hour on a 15/2 cable modem, but it's better left an overnight ordeal if you have suboptimal DSL. You can't store anything more than the stub, and a service runs in the background to auto-install any updates that come along.

Now, in Microsoft's defense, the SSO function between Win8 and Office 2013 is actually kinda cool, and the account also unlocks the mobile titles (also preferable than entering a product key on a phone). Also, since the license terms are just a smidge different on the consumer versions than the volume editions, the 'streaming installer' enforces the rental terms - it's essentially the only way to enforce a software subscription.

tl;dr - MS treats Volume Licenses like actual software, and retail licenses more like Netflix, so the difference is almost a given.

This becomes much more interesting in 2014 than it was when the DMCA was first passed. Back in those days, "mobile software" was typically shipped on a CD, and installed on a mobile device by way of a docking station. This is far less common now than it was at that time. Moreover, the "this product is yours" logic becomes murky with tablets and other similar tech. I ran into this recently myself. A friend of mine gave me a tablet. He got it in a BOGO sale last year at Verizon Wireless; said BOGO sale only required a one year contract. The contract was fulfilled, and he gave it to me as a gift. As a T-Mobile subscriber, I was hoping to put my SIM card into it and use my data plan. Despite Verizon having no further claim to ownership on the device, the tablet was SIM unlocked, but had the ability to manually add APNs disabled. Thus, they can legally claim "SIM unlocked", but without rooting and manually editing the build.prop file, I can't add an APN to actually use another carrier.

Even beyond that oddly specific example, many tablets are largely dependent on other services. Samsung phones, if wiped without some sort of 'blessing' from Samsung, go into a locked state that require either reflashing or login. This is all well and good, but is removing that restriction technically a DMCA violation? Is the existence of a technological barrier the correct means to determine ownership of a device? On the other hand, if one were to modify a phone's baseband in such a way that has it working on the wrong frequencies, or configured in order to make a mess of the cell tower, does the "it's my phone" argument still hold? If a device is symbiotically linked to online services (it's quite a pain to use an Android device without a Google account, or an iPhone without iCloud, in their default states), how does the use of those services come into play with regards to the expectations of functionality?

Meh, this is why I'm still a Windows Mobile fan at heart - for all its faults, it ACTED like the device belonged to the owner, not Microsoft.