Seagate to the rescue in an Orwellesque world…
This morning I read the newspaper. I read about the dutch police that slowly compromises our privacy. Sure, crime is a problem, but among the things I read were about face recognition (i.e. having yourself photographed in your car everytime you pass certain checkpoints), license plate recognition… keeping track of someone’s internet activities, mobile phone usage statistics… it frightens me.
After having breakfast I fired up my pc (for studying purposes) and through Hotlinks I saw exciting news in my feed reader: Seagate Preps Hard-disk Encryption Technology. I’ve played with encrypted partitions myself, but so far I haven’t yet encrypted my entire system. I really hope that 3DES (or stronger) encryption becomes standard issue on hard drives soon and that it will make use of OpenPGP smartcards (or similar) to have the key stored. And of course that it is truly a hardware solution and that I won’t be restricted when it comes to choosing an operating system. Next thing up is making usage of OpenPGP with email a standard and everyone can rest assured… as long as you hit the streets wearing a paper bag on your head, that is…
The police does not like being watch, so why should we?
One can circumvent most video-cameras with a simple trick: Wear a hat with infrared lights all around. Although people will not see anything strange, it will show up as bright spots on an normal surveillance camera hiding your face in the process.