Lets face it, USB sticks are an everyday tool for doing business. That’s why I was surprised to hear the ban on USB flash drives at the Pentagon back in November of 08. However, I can see the security concerns they would have with the power a USB stick can behold.
Today, we found out the ban will be lifted from the DoD in the coming months.
Robert Cary the CIO for the Navy states. “In the future, we expect that a government-owned and procured USB flash media that is uniquely and electronically identifiable for use in support of mission-essential functions on DoD networks will be permitted for use by authorized individuals,” Cary said in his blog. “The bottom line is, the days of using personally owned flash media or using flash media collected at conferences or trade shows are long gone. What we connect to our home PCs is very different from what is and will be allowed to occur on DON [Department of Navy] networks.”This policy is more in line with what I’d expect from the military and devices like the Encryptakey I would think become a staple at locations like the Pentagon. Source:Â DarkReading. Continue Reading
2010 will be a fun year of USB reporting and blogging with USB 3.0 just starting to break with new products. Today we have the first USB 3.0 WebCam from Point Grey. The webcam has the bandwidth and capability to push a full 1080p video stream without compression.
Since USB host controllers are not yet available, Point Grey has teamed with Fresco Logic to include a USB 3.0 PCI interface card.
EverythingUSB brings up a good point with these new USB 3.0 devices, they will actually become cheaper than their slower, 2.0 predecessors. The reason being: less logic and hardware is required inside the device to do processing such as compression and decompression, USB 3.0 now simply push the data through the pipe.
The Point Grey Webcamera is slatted to display at the IDF 2009 conference in San Fransicso in a couple weeks.
Point Grey USB webcam product page [here].
Continue Reading
“Aside from a rack mount LCD console, which can be expensive, server administrators and technicians would typically have to use a server room ‘crash cart’, which is a cart comprised of a keyboard, mouse, and monitor. Although a typical ‘crash cart’ is somewhat mobile, it lacks the portability of our Laptop KVM Adapter, which provides identical but more convenient controlâ€.The NOTECONS01 USB 2.0 Laptop KVM Adapter offers immediate BIOS-level access to the connected computer from the laptop control point, as well as the ability to handle full configuration of the attached PC, server, or other headless machines such as ATMs, kiosks and VLTs.
