WD My Book World Edition – Drive letter access over the Internet!

This blog seems to be changing into a storage blog, but recently there are a lot of storage products that catch my eye. The new WD My Book World Edition II is a two drive NAS box, but with key differences! Nice, but not exceptional features, are an attractive industrial design, either 1TB capacity or 500GB with RAID-1 mirroring, Gb Ethernet connection, and EMC (Dantz) Retrospect backup software. The differentiators what WD calls WD Anywhere Access and Data OnHand, which allow you to access your files securely over the Internet as if they were a local drive, i.e., with drive letter access! No FTP access, no navigating through screen after screen and accessing files one at a time over the Mirra… your My Book looks like a local drive no matter where you are, easily browsed with Windows Explorer.

The online user manual instructs you to remove MioNet from your PC if it is already installed. MioNet is a product of Senvid, a Palo Alto startup, that runs on Windows 2000, 2003, and XP, along with OS X, that allows you to access your storage through a secure connection through their servers, similar to Mirra. It turns out that Mionet is written in Java, so porting it to run on Linux, which the My Book undoubtedly uses, was likely straightforward.

To me, this blows away not only older generation NAS boxes like the Buffalo Terastation but also the brand new Seagate Free Agent drives. The Memo AutoBackup application is nice, but the drive letter access over the Internet is a killer app and it kills the Free Agent drives. And the aggressive pricing of $500 for the 1TB World Edition II and $279 for the 500GB World Edition should make them real winners. I want one. Badly. And I hope I can back it up using Mozy.

Drive-by attacks on your home router – don’t leave the default password on your router!

One thing that we’re often advised to do but all to frequently ignore is the warning to change the default password on our equipment. It’s the first thing that I always do when I add a new gadget to my home network, especially when I change to a new router. But I’m afraid that many people can’t be bothered, they figure that there’s nothing worth stealing on their computer, or that by turning off their computer that they’ll be protected. Well, a couple of researchers from Indiana University and Symantec published a paper, available free on the Internet, describing how they were able to gain access to the router configuration via detecting the home router, then change the router settings via JavaScript-generated host scans and http requests. They give an example of a phishing attack by changing your router’s DNS settings to a DNS server under their control that could redirect your attempts to reach your bank to a fake website of their own. Once you enter you username and password, bam, they’ve got you. Or, they could load malware on your computer, or block virus updates.

So what can you do to protect yourself against these attacks?

1. Turn off JavaScript on your browser.
2. Change your router password to something nontrivial.

Seems easy enough to protect yourself, right? I just turned off JavaScript in Firefox, and of course my router password was changed long ago.

Sign-ups available for Windows Home Server beta 2

Microsoft is expanding their beta program for Windows Home Server. You need a computer with enough horse power (512+ MB RAM, 80+ GB hard disk space, 1+ Ghz Processor and can boot from a DVD drive), multiple PCs in the home, and a broadband connection. I just signed up… hopefully they’ll accept me!

Digital image obsolescence – what to do about long term storage?

Archivists have been dealing with the issues around long term storage of analog records for all of modern history. As long as data is written in a simple analog form like writing, it’s simply a matter of preserving the physical medium on which the content is written. I the world of photography, as long as the early Daguerrotypes from the 1800s were well processed and not physically damaged, they can still be printed today. Ansel Adams donated his negatives to the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography, and students, with permission, can make prints in the darkroom from his negatives (well, maybe copy negatives, anyway). But what about today’s digital captures? Fifty or one hundred years from now, will our descendants be able to see the digital images that we’re capturing today? Given the ephemeral nature of data storage devices, will our hard disk drives last ten years? If we store them on CD, how long will people have access to drives that can read them? As an example, 8″ floppies were all the rage twenty-five years ago. How many people could find a device to read them? I had the source code from programs that I used in graduate school on 9 track tape? How hard would it be to find a drive for them? And that’s only 25 years ago. What about fifty, one hundred, or two hundred years from now? There’s a good chance that Ansel’s negatives will still be around then.

This issue was addressed maybe fifteen years ago in an article in Scientific American. I actually reviewed some grant proposals from a PBS station who wanted funding to develop self-describing file formats for this purpose. But the purpose of this post is to say that this issue is reaching the mainstream. There’s a new website, savemymemories.org, that addresses this very issue. It was put together by members of the International Imaging Industry Association, Acme Works, Creative Memories, HP, Sprint, and Kodak. The site talks about storage media, software, file formats, archival storage methods, backup strategies, how to organize your photos, and so forth. This is a worthwhile read for anyone using a digital camera that hopes to leave records for their offspring in the distant, and not so distant, future.

I’m not so worried about the long term storage of my digital images. I intend to keep copying them to new external hard drives as higher capacity ones become available in the future, as well as continue to back up off-site using Mozy. But my big concern is file format… since save my images as RAW when using my Nikon D70, I’m especially vulnerable to Nikon going out of business and losing access to the techniques for reading the RAW files. Canon shooters should be equally concerned. If I could convert them to a lossless file with the same capabilities, I’d be happy. I’d also feel safer is my camera used the new Adobe Digital Negative (DNG) format, but, alas, I don’t think Nikon will ever support it.

GrandCentral – a more intelligent phone number

I’m always looking for ways to use technology to make my life easier or to save money. GrandCentral, a service that I’ve been using for a few months, is a perfect example. Their tagline is “One number… for life”. Basically, the idea is that when you sign up for their service, you can select a phone number (from a limited pool of numbers) which you give out in place of your current phone numbers. You then enter up to three phone numbers on the free service (up to ten for premium accounts), and when someone calls your GrandCentral number, the caller will be asked to give his/her name. The cool thing is that GC will call all of your specified phones and will announce the recorded name of the caller. You can then decide to accept the call or let it go to the GC voicemail. You can listen in on the voicemail and pick up if you choose, just like a home answering machine. Here is a list of the features from their home page:

• One Number…for Life^TM
  Pick a number that will not change when you move or change jobs.
• ListenIn^TM on Voicemail
  ListenIn on your messages from any phone before answering.
• Screen Your Calls
  Know who is calling every time, even for blocked numbers.
• RingShare^TM
  Upload your MP3s to play for your callers instead of the standard ring.
• Block Callers
  Block telemarketers or annoying callers and never get bothered again.
• Switch phones mid-call
  Switch from cell to office or home your callers won’t know.
• Customize by Caller
  Pick phones to ring, greetings to play and music to hear based on who is calling.
• Voicemail Everywhere
  Get your voicemail online, through the phone or in your email.
• Voicemail Storage
  All of your voicemail messages will be saved online, for LIFE.

What makes this really compelling, and the original idea behind the company, is that you can change your real phone numbers as many times as you want, with cell phone service provider changes, job changes, moves out of state, etc., and your universal GrandCentral number can forward the calls appropriately.

Now there are a couple of tricks where you can use GC to save some real money.

1. Get unlimited incoming calls on your cell phone (Sprint, Tmobile, etc.) for one price.
   Many providers like the ones listed allow you to designate unlimited incoming calls from a single number. If you make that one number your GC number, you can specify on the GC site that the caller ID will be YOUR GC number rather than that of the calling party. This fools the cell phone service and makes the incoming call part of your unlimited service. For Sprint, it’s something like $5/mo.
2. Make unlimited outbound calls for free (while in beta, at least)!
   On the GC website, you can create an address book, and from the address book there is a click to call option. Just click the button and GC will bridge the outgoing call to that number to an outgoing call to your GC number, and, voila!, a free long distance phone call!

If anyone has any other tricks to add using GrandCentral, please feel free to reply. I, for one, hope that GrandCentral succeeds and stays around for the long haul!

Unbox, TiVo and Netflix

The world of movie rentals is getting shaken up, and all to customers’ benefit. I love the idea that Netflix will be offering streaming movies to all account holders in the future, with one hour of viewing for each dollar of monthly payment. I travel a fair amount, and there’s never enough to watch on TV that’s worth viewing, it seems. With the new Netflix streaming, there will always be something to watch, assuming that they provide decent content through this channel. It still hasn’t been rolled out to my account yet. Why do I always have to be the last!?!

Yesterday, Amazon and TiVo announced a partnership to allow one to download a movie from the Amazon Unbox program onto your TiVo. Previously, you could only download the content onto your PC for viewing, similar to Movielink. Now through this partnership you can either rent a movie for $1.99, purchase it outright for between $9.99 and $14.99, or purchase a TV program for $1.99, and store it on your Series 2 or Series 3 TiVo. All purchased content remains in your Amazon “media library” for future download. If this works, it could give Netflix and Blockbuster a run for their money!

Joost – the next big thing?

I know I’m late in posting about Joost, but I must say that everything that I’ve read about it sounds intriguing. TV distribution by P2P, “channels” just like a regular TV, and, best of all, free. I signed up for the beta but haven’t heard from them yet. I’m really curious to see how well the model scales when the network is polluted with users with flaky, intermittent, broadband connections. I’m also curious to see how much system resources are used, like CPU, HDD, etc. Hopefully they’ll give me access to the beta soon.