(Rate This Article)
Loading ...Update: PIN your data key
A couple days back, I wrote about a USB data key from Corsair that’s secured by a personal identification number (PIN). I promised then to turn it over to our IT squad to see if they could extract data from the key without using the pin.
Well, they’ve had at ‘er for three days now, disassembling it, poking and probing, and it seems to be watertight (though not literally, like the Survivor USB key). It seems the key draws power from a battery within, not from the USB port on a computer, and it’s soldered in. They’ve concluded they can’t get at it without destroying the key. So chalk one up for Corsair.
Add to: del.icio.us | Digg IT | Furl | Google | magnolia | StumbleIT | Wink | Yahoo! Technorati
(Rate This Article) Loading ...Shocking news: Voice to text that works
If you’ve been to a trade show over the last five or six years, you must have seen the demos of software that promises to convert your spoken words into characters in a word processing program. With a little bit of “training” on a single voice, these programs were often capable of rendering prose that, while both surreal and erratically spelled, bore not a passing resemblance to what you said.
So Rogers Wireless’s announcement of a voice-mail-to-text-message service powered by SpinVox left me, shall we say, sceptical. If software that is actually trained to a voice is erratic, how can you expect a machine to recognize and transcribe any old stranger’s voice that leaves you a voice mail? Read the rest of this entry »
Add to: del.icio.us | Digg IT | Furl | Google | magnolia | StumbleIT | Wink | Yahoo! Technorati
(Rate This Article) Loading ...PIN your data key
Every once in a while here at Cool Tools Central, an oddly shaped package arrives, completely unsolicited. After listening very carefully to ensure it isn’t ticking, we open it it. It’s like Christmas every day, but without the socks.
Our latest little surprise came from the people at Corsair, who take USB memory keys and do things to the design that make you go, “I wish I’d thought of that.” A few weeks back, Corsair sent us the Survivor, a USB key housed in an aircraft-grade aluminium tube that gave us hours of entertainment trying to disprove its claims of indestructability.
The new package contained the Flash Padlock, an ingenious idea that protects your data with a PIN number. And if it’s half as secure as the FedEx package it came in, which took two strong men, a pair of scissors and about 15 minutes to open, then it’s, well, pretty secure.
