I'm flipping through the pages of the Tigerdirect.ca print catalog that arrived this morning in the mail. (I ordered from Tigerdirect once, and had a bad enuf of an experience that I'll never do it again. In short, they never shipped an item I ordered -- a spare battery for my daughter's digital camera -- and made me go through all kinds of hoops when I was kind enuf to alert them that they had sent me a VGA graphics board I never ordered.)
Page 23 boasts of the Super-Secure CryptoStick USB Flash Drive. Here's the problem with it: The USB drive is labled CryptoStick in big blue letters. First rule of security: don't advertise your security. The drive should be labeled innocuously.
An even better idea: a secure flash drive should advertize itself as 128MB model. Plugging it into a computer, it should show 128MB total disk space. The other hundreds of megabytes should be invisible to unauthorized access. What can't be seen can't be searched for.
A warning: Encrypting your drive can be deadly. A friend, who travels in Liberia, encrypted his notebook computer's hard drive. Now he can't unencrypt it, and he doesn't know why.
Less seriously, I was delayed going through airport security because of a USB drive. This one was a gimmick, the drive "hidden" inside a pen given to me as a gift from a company. Xrays showed security there was something long and metalic in my luggage, but they could not figure it out. The luggage went thru 3x before I clued in, pulled the pen out, and was finally cleared. Hiding the USB drive in the pen isn't so secure, either!
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