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Hey! I Can't Save That File!

Big brother locks your hard drive

ITinfo Sponsor

The file was not found on your file system. This means that it has either not been created or the path you have specified in $trrandom_file is incorrect.

Copy Protected Hard Drives

According to a news article in The Register today the next generation of hard disks is likely to come with copyright protection countermeasures built in.

Committees of the standards body NCTIS, are discussing modifying the ATA hard drive specification to require the same copy protection standards required of some removable media into industry-standard hard drives. Drives would be marked with a unique identifier at the time of manufacturing.

For downloaders of copyright-protected music, the games over. In my eyes, that's not too bad; however, I envision other problems for corporate users that wouldn't often affect law-breaking Napster users. What if legally-licensed software has been installed on serialized hard drive and the drive fails. The software won't be easily installed on a new, replacement drive. We had this problem with one of the products we used for a few years. It was a major pain to upgrade servers that used disk-specific software. We finally gave up on the software and purchased specific hardware that performed the same function without being tied to a PC.

The Register's article on this subject goes into all the gory details of how the technology would work, and it's interesting reading if you're of a technical bent. I'll leave you to follow the associate hyperlink, if you'd like to know how the innards will work.

In the mean time, I think you should consider contacting the manufacturers of your favorite hard drive and letting them know your opinion. On which ever side of the opinion-fence you fall, this will be a contentious debate in 2001.

Call for Comments

References

Previous issues are on our website at http://itrain.org/itinfo/.

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http://itrain.org/itinfo/2000/it001226.html
updated December 26, 2000