Best computer news

Storage is critical in today’s technologically advanced home and business. Some would say more storage is better, others would say performance is king, but what would you say if you could have both performance, capacity and portability in one simple and attractive kit at a generous price? Today we’ll review Seagate BlackArmor PS 110 – the world’s first truly portable USB 3.0 hard drive – over the fastest consumer storage interface available.
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This purportedly popular fellow has been enshrined in plastic from its celluloid beginnings. Fashioned by Cube-Works into a peripheral, the anime dog, Dodobongo, is a USB watch dog for your PC. He comes with a food bowl which doubles as a sign holder for those times you leave your computer and put Dodobongo in charge of security. He’ll bark or wiggle his head in response to motion. He’ll also waddle up to you to the length of his USB tether. Be aware of the space you put him on, he doesn’t seem to pay much attention to where he’s going. This depressing character is the brain child of design team Uruma and Delvi. They refer to themselves jointly as UrumaDelvi. They are a pair of very modern designers that seem to have a genuine following, something akin to the Blue Dog craze in the US that lasted a year too long.

While he may not be as strong as some security systems released lately, having this on your desk should deter many a hacker or promotion. There’s not much that a USB dog barking and roaming around your desk doesn’t tell about you except that you have ONLY useless information on your computer. It may not be a high profile successory if this is going to make your daily routine even a little bit brighter, do it. Dodobongo can be had from Amazon Japan for about $40 not including shipping. Video demo after the jump.
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Amidst speculation of features of Windows 7 SP1, Intel has confirmed that it is working with Microsoft on USB 3.0 integration. That’s the good news, the bad news is that they are working on getting into Windows 8. Windows 8 is expected to ship in 2012. That’s a little long for our taste. Steve Peterson of Intel thinks that SuperSpeed USB devices will only show up on high end PC’s, and will take another a year or two to reach mainstream. Despite obvious signs that USB 3.0 is on the rise, the titans of the industry apparently haven’t put USB 3.0 as their first priority. Instead, NEC is taking the opportunity to rake in large sums from money with their world’s first and only xHCI USB 3.0 host controller ICs.

We’re still hoping that the rumors of Windows 7 SP1 having native support melded into the forthcoming patch are true. There’s more than a few things we hope get fixed with SP1, not the least of which is the handling of USB autoruns, or lack thereof. At least this means that Intel is working on USB 3.0, we’ll take what we can get. Even though the lack of dedicated, native drivers from Intel and Microsoft won’t keep USB 3.0 devices from being rolled out, upgrade card and driver disc will only add to cost and slow user acceptance. Compared to Linux, which has had USB 3.0 support for some time now, Microsoft is lagging way behind. Yes, we do hope that kind of mud-slinging is all that it takes to get Redmond off it’s duff and on the SuperSpeed bus. We are willing to add some snide comments about Bill’s mother if that will help.
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Asus, you had us at HELO, now you deliver us the USB THReee we’ve been waiting for. Apparently unfazed by the economy’s stagnant state, they are still popping out innovations with their nettop line. Still riding high on the netbook craze that they cashed in on, they continue to hawk their nettop line with the EeeBox EB1501U. Tiny desktop systems claiming sufficient performance for everyday tasks and a much greener, low power consumption footprint. The most surprising addition is the two USB 3.0 ports right next to the slot-loading DVD drive. The Atom processor may be close to its limit moving 5GB/s of data around, but we’d rather spend our money getting close to the limit than staying away from it.

This is a smart move by Asus to add support for faster peripherals early. USB 3.0 makes this a much more future-proof desktop alternative. Large, high powered machines may still run years from now, but their bulk ultimately limits their usefulness. Laptops and tiny desktops can live on for many years performing niche tasks. Hand-me-down laptops make great learning tools for kids as well as gaming stations or even the heart of a MAME cabinet. A nettop may make a decent media center today, and it will make a fine webmail tool tomorrow and network storage device after that. Unfortunately, this doesn’t pack the even lower powered ION 2 chipset that’s all the rage, but it should have enough power to run most tasks you can think of today and tomorrow. Pricing and availability details are still lacking as of this writing.
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There are many who posit that the Internet was developed around a single major goal, the one goal, the cause of more struggles, bloodshed and wars than even religion: The desire to ogle cans. From the era of crude paint drawings to the barely discernible ASCII images on sheets of perforated green bar paper, naked pictures have been sought after since the first hairless apes donned clothing. Whether the internet birth drove porn or just followed it is a chicken-or-the-egg question that will likely never have a satisfactory answer. Everyone needs a little sumtin-sumtin in their lives, but there’s a time and a place for everything. The Porn Detection Stick contains portable software that will scan through all images stored on a computer doing heuristic pattern matching to find out if you have a secret cache of skin pics. Even more frighteningly, it will rummage through the remnants of deleted files as well. So even if you, like my friend Derek, deleted all your porn the day you got married, this tool will still be able to find your filthy, filthy stash.

The tool is currently only designed to hunt stored images so your browsing history won’t be inspected but your temporary internet files may still tattle on you. The drive’s maker, proofpronto, claims the drive has less that .007% false positives. You really should go clean off your drive right now because your boss is ordering a few as we speak. For workplace legal concerns, this really could be a useful tool, a small office could be inspected in weekend “A search of a 500 GB hard drive with over 70,000 images takes only about an hour and a half”. The drive is on sale now for $98 on their site. Here’s hoping they run out of them or something and you get to keep your job.
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SuperSpeed USB is here, you can touch it, buy it and USE it, but where are our USB 3.0 thumb drives? Super Talent has revealed another slim uber-fast flash drive for our portable pleasure in the near future. The drive is being released in two line-ups. The first will be the consumer models, the SuperCrypt, available in sizes from 16GB to 256GB. The second is the more prosumer variation starting a 32GB up to the same 256GB, the SuperCrypt Pro.

Both lineups are equipped with serious hardware-based encryption built into their tiny chassis. The SuperCrypt sports 128-bit ECB encryption while the Pro model rocks with 256-bit XTS encryption, but will likely add to the price-tag. This robust data encryption won’t get them top secret clearance though, there’s still no tamper-proofing that really needs to go along with drives that tout security muscles. The DoD is only allowing drives with physical and digital security certifications back on premises. Hopefully, SuperTalent will craft a Pico version soon, and get it FIPS approved. We’re also still waiting on an overdue RAIDDrive from SuperTalent as well. We love press releases, but until it’s on Newegg, it’s just empty words. This latest promise predicts sales in March. We Are holding our breath.
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There’s a list of 50 products that the governing body around the USB standard has listed as approved by them to carry the USB-IF logo.
This number seems awfully small, especially for those of us still forced to use USB 2.0 to move VMDK’s and encrypted DB archives around. Spending hours a week waiting on data to move adds up and costs valuable work dollars. While this doesn’t seem like many, the number is growing fast. The other thing to consider is that the silicon is what is getting approved and that it will be re-used and re-sold under many other names. NEC’s chipset is now in dozens of the first USB 3.0 upgrade cards and many more core technologies being examined now will be similarly cloned under a single USB-IF product banner.

Unfortunately, there aren’t a ton of the MUST HAVE devices on the market yet. Currently, our top pick for most useful device would be the Sharkoon drive station; anyone doing mass amounts of drive cloning and imaging should have one of these already. Once R&D groups have their imagination stimulated we should have a plethora of interesting products in the chute like Tritton’s. Here’s to 50 more USB 3.0, we’re right here behind ya!
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The Astro Drive A101 is here to win hearts and inspire by being the smallest USB 3.0 device. Well, for today that is, currently there are only 50 some-odd USB 3.0 certified devices out there and this may currently hold the title. We’ll likely be announcing its successor in about 2 weeks so try not to have a heart attack. This drive from Walton-Chaintech bears the Apogee name and follows close on the heels of a speedy USB 2.0 drive from the same company. Due to the extravagant and ethereal nature of the press release, we’re forced to assume that this has similar internals. With 180MB/s read speed and 130MB/s write speed, this will be a very worthy flash drive (There’s even a faster, more capable drive, but that’s for geeks born with silver spoon in their mouth.) If they have a flip out connector and keep the price under $300 for the large 128GB variant, we’ll have our pre-order in before the end of the day (32GB and 64GB models are available as well). Unfortunately, the price and where to pre-order are still absent from their site along with most of the other details that would be important to most of the people that this drive would thrill.

The press release is worthy of a read for fun though. It seems that choosing to use 2 colors in the casing turns this into a super-charged lifestyle drive full of vigor and fashion. They really do go on about the colors, both of them, being really important while details about speed, memory type and pretty much anything else are not to be found. From the text we’d expect to see Ashton Kutcher toting one of these but from the picture they’ll be lucky to get an endorsement from Infra-man. Once we have more details, or at least a second detail we promise to get really excited.
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If you bought your netbook hoping to have a decent MP3 or video player, you probably had a lot of buyer’s remorse the first time you tried to crank up some tunes on it. The underpowered netbook is usually equipped with some really underwhelming. Logitech’s latest Laptop Speaker Z205 is an easy way to give any laptop a boost. The Z205 sports an internal sound card and stereo speakers for quality sound and projection.

The slim unit is designed to fit directly on the top of you laptop LCD. Sitting a little closer to ear level means less volume and less distortion. There’s a carrying case included to making packing this along with you just as easy as it is to plug it in. There have been a few of these to come out int this form factor but none have carried Logitech’s name and reputation. The price is a reasonable $39.99, but it would be hard to pass up the option of an NXT version or slightly bigger drivers. If the size is right for you, they should reach shelves any day now.
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IronKey, we remember when you were just a rugged, secure flash drive. Today, the company is making huge strides in secure computing and enterprise level encrypted operations. The Virtualized USB Key that they are now touting is going to be high security private communications device to handle corporate banking. With some banks now turning around and suing their clients for not securing their own assets, companies are forced to take more personal stake in securing their information.

IronKey has been using their secure and tamper-proof / tamper-evident drives to ferry data securely and more recently to host entire secure operating systems. This latest offering extends the last, with a secure operating system, bootable or run from a window, which connects to a specialized webservice or web site. The drives are locked to only be used for the specific bank service as well the account is locked down to only allow access by the drive. The Iron(Bank)Key can be further secured by SecureID or other token device making for a 3 or 4 factor authentication process for maximum confidentiality. This will most likely be marketed to banks to be distributed by them to their bigger customers, like Coke, Hilton or Bruce Willis as the The Jackal. Owing to that, it will likely be a few years before we get to see these come out to the end user.
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