Google OS: the end of the hard drive? - CNN

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With a strong focus on speed, the Chrome OS promises nearly instant boot times of about 7 seconds for users to login to their computers.

"We want Google Chrome OS to be blazingly fast ... to boot up like a TV,"

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I thought this was a pretty cool article but I think that it will be a challenge to convince users to buy it since you must buy a netbook specifically made for the Operating System.

I'm not entirely sure how they plan on storing everything on the internet. Does that mean that your computer is almost useless when you are not in range of a wireless network?

SOURCE: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/11/20/google.os/index.html

Hard Drives will be around a lot longer.

Mainly because right now...the read / write time of files online vs on your HD are dramatically different. Now maybe one day, when the internet is re-invented, and everyone is hooked into cloud storage via Fiber and what not, you might see the end of the hard drive..but right now..no way jose..

must be heaven to work inside those datacenters

Hopefully Google isn't stupid enough to actually SAY that "This is the end of the HD" since they are going to need a LOT of them to store all the crap from users who no longer need them. That might make HDs shoot up in price which means in turn Google is going to be paying more for them. And considering everyone will know they were the reason for the drops in sales, they're probably going to be paying a little extra for each one now.

I want all of my information stored by google. They have always had the absolute best privacy policies!

Wait... what?

Yea I was gonna bring that up too, but figured anyone trusting Google with pictures of themselves in very open positions probably wouldn't care who it got sold to. Or the docs they save with a new recipe and how Google would probably have some little small text law about how they have the right to use anything they hold for you lol.

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Originally Posted by gore

Yea I was gonna bring that up too, but figured anyone trusting Google with pictures of themselves in very open positions probably wouldn't care who it got sold to. Or the docs they save with a new recipe and how Google would probably have some little small text law about how they have the right to use anything they hold for you lol.

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i just hope they are more careful with how they store user passwords on the operating system than ms in its too easy to get into a windows machine locked myself out of my xp box and was back in 2 minutes flat with password reset to no password

everyone step back an take a deep breath, don't march over the cliff like a bunch of lemmings.

Are you really going to trust anyone or anything with your life's work?

I am in week 10 of a 13 week course, Assessment for Prior Learning, I am trying to round up my AS degree issued in 1984 to at least senior status in a bachelor's program. To do this, I am writing a portfolio. That portfolio is on 2 different computers and 2 thumb drives ( I am anal about version control). There is no way I would trust that document to a "cloud", I've put too much work into it. I don't even trust it to one physical location!

There will always be a need/desire to store files locally.

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Originally Posted by JPnyc

There will always be a need/desire to store files locally.

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i agree ,what if the person cant get to a wifi signal or there internet gets cut off, they don't have access to there data then the computer is about as good as a paperweight

I wonder how Chrome handles USB drives? My guess is Chrome users
will use them for storage as often as not. I don't have the sense from
what I read Google has altogether resolved the issue of local apps. I
suspect users will have options in the end to install some local productivity
apps.

The "cloud" is here whether we like it or not. I know one admin at the
local library who backs up everything to web storage as he frequently
'flips' OS's on his laptop. He turned me onto Linux Mint as a matter of
fact. I've got a lot of users primed to dump Windows for a number of
reasons (viruses and more viruses).

The "cloud" has obvious issues to me though. One: bandwidth. While
it is true the world is being wired fiber-optically, I see sites EVERY week
that soak up every packet. Ha!, I used to think DSL was the end all.
Two: security. How much of your chit do you want sitting on someone
else's server, subject to data mining (or who knows what)?

It'll be interesting, that's for sure.

I just had a strange urge to post this message.... probably belongs in another thread. Why trust a public cloud tagged with a privacy statement?

Before 9/11.... America was a American Dream ( people were alseep and could care less about reality). After 911, America was quoted as the "sleeping giant". Where am I getting at this. You are awake and noticed everything you do in public is monitored. huh? The patriot act -- new privacy laws. And yes...the "cloud" was there.

Today is 11/25/2009: 500, 000 text messages from mobile devices have been posted on the Internet. Even big brother didn't know they were easily monitored.

How the holy heck after years of finger pointing that some hacker get access to all that confidential information? we were told communications were knocked off. Someone got into all that chit not caring about your privacy and laws.

http://911.wikileaks.org/

I'm pissed because this is only the beginning. Google, Dropbox, and any other service that offer you a free "Cloud" are more interested in giving stock holders, like me, a bone or 2 of quick money.

Some of you guys are Professionals in the IT field. When you replace harddrives in a server, do you actually erase it securely? Do you give "broken" harddrive back to your vendor? Do you lie to your customers and put their Harddrives in another unit to save time and money?

If you answered yes...... you know not post all your crap to this " Cloud" or datacenters. These vendors think you are too dumb to know about datacenters so they "make" the media use the term "cloud". Cloud could mean that datacenter is on the border of a rouge state.

This google crap is for the sheeps. Honestly, I'm a wolf and take advantage of a sheep if I have 2. Military once told me if I was on a sinking Carrier, my job was to destroy all the servers. so don't tell me I'm fvcking crazy!

Like I said, it hit me that I had to post this.

Linen,

I will be replacing 3 computers in my home network in January, building new ones. The old drives are IDE and not much use to me. Once the data is safely copied off of them, they will go to the target range. A couple of rounds of 9mm from 50 yds will make the data irretrievable. From there they'll go to a recycling center that states that hds are melted.

Sledgehammers, drills work well too.

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Originally Posted by fourdc

Linen,

I will be replacing 3 computers in my home network in January, building new ones. The old drives are IDE and not much use to me. Once the data is safely copied off of them, they will go to the target range. A couple of rounds of 9mm from 50 yds will make the data irretrievable. From there they'll go to a recycling center that states that hds are melted.

Sledgehammers, drills work well too.

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Nice. I forgot all those hard working souls working customer service for a Corp. So overworked, on a break they will leave their stations with the computer still logged into the "meat" of things.

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Originally Posted by fourdc

Linen,

I will be replacing 3 computers in my home network in January, building new ones. The old drives are IDE and not much use to me. Once the data is safely copied off of them, they will go to the target range. A couple of rounds of 9mm from 50 yds will make the data irretrievable. From there they'll go to a recycling center that states that hds are melted.

Sledgehammers, drills work well too.

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They can still take Data off a gunshot. A few years ago, a Magazine did an experiment to see how good Data recovery was at the time, so a guy who was helping out, had gone camping, and decided while he was out, he could do some things to drives and see what happened.

He used a 9mm bullet and shot the HD, and took another drive and through the thing nit he fire pit. The next day after the fire was burned out, he collected that drive and the gun wounded drive, and sent them in. They were able to recover almost everything even though one was almost in pieces from burning and another WAS in pieces from a shot.

I'm not saying you should do more, because it would be silly, you aren't a CEO or high target as far as I know, but it is interesting none the less how good recovery actually is here.

I have so far only ONCE had a drive go on me where I had to replace it. My Mom's computer had a bad drive and when I pulled it out, I used a bass amp and and something else on it, then physically destroyed it.

Are they crazy? Wanting to store all our information? WHat happens if you want to work offline? Is there no local storage capacity whatsoever?

Unless you melt, pulverise or dissolve then some data will be recoverable.

If you overwrite the data then they will not be recoverable using ordinary software.

This becomes more true the more the drive has been used as there are so many more layers of overwritten data.

I don't know of anyone who claims to be able to recover overwritten data though ;)

At some point the restoration attempt could cross the line into data creation. Unless the restoration tool/vendor is 100% trusted can the restored data be trusted? Would it be admissable in a court of law? If the explanation of the technology for restoration goes over the heads of the jurors would it be worth even being brought to court?

Google is a popular search engine. What would happen if one of google's spiders finds an identity theft page full of credit cards. The identity site has been raided and shutdown; however the cache and history of the site is still search able to the public. Google innocently grabbed all those credit cards for public viewing. All this stuff is automated. Those credit cards numbers are forever lost inside the cloud.

Is google guilty of identity theft? Try to explain that one to a jury. It's like explaining a torrent portal is a merely a searchable tool not a pirate hangout. The real criminals moved onto something better.

DDDDC,

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At some point the restoration attempt could cross the line into data creation.

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It frequently does, unless you can get a 100% recovery. Either you manually or electronically reconstruct the missing bits.

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Would it be admissible in a court of law?

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Not here (UK)...............evidence has to be real and existent, not based on suspicion, innuendo or whatever. It's the same as any other evidence.............if it has been destroyed it has gone.

This would be like Jurassic Park where they filled in the missing bits of dinosaur DNA with that of a sexually ambidextrous frog.

There's a lot of tech that could be used but the legal eagles don't want to overwhelm the jurors, a lot of times what you can't understand you just turn off.

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This would be like Jurassic Park where they filled in the missing bits of dinosaur DNA with that of a sexually ambidextrous frog.

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Sh*t we've been rumbled............the Yanks have gotten the formula for the last two prime ministers we have had!:shocked:

:lildevil::lildevil:

DDDDC,

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There's a lot of tech that could be used but the legal eagles don't want to overwhelm the jurors, a lot of times what you can't understand you just turn off.

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That is exactly the same over here!

We have legislation called the "Misuse of Computers Act" (1990) ..........getting on for 20 years old and in all that time there have been less than 200 prosecutions (sorry, I have no stats on the success rate:()

Courts like to go for "old fashioned" crimes like fraud and theft because it is a lot easier (and less expensive!) for them?

Our lot tend to use the computer evidence as a lead to more traditional stuff.

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Originally Posted by romanticcowboy

i agree ,what if the person cant get to a wifi signal or there internet gets cut off, they don't have access to there data then the computer is about as good as a paperweight

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as far as a wifi signal goes, i guess google would bank on the fact that in the near future wifi would be everywhere. i think there was some thing floating around about taking old cell phone towers and using them for a wifi.

Now security is a whole different story. Even Google cant account for the disgruntled employee:drink:

Storing Your Data on the Internet: Ignorant and Silly

This article on OSNews follows up on the recent Microsoft/Danger data loss issue and considers more widely the issue of storing your data on the internet. In the Microsoft/Danger disaster, it turned out to be not as bad as everyone (including the involved parties themselves) had thought; Microsoft was still able to recover the lost data, meaning that users still got their stuff back. Still, I'm sure Sidekick owners were less than pleased.

I will never store anything of interest on line. Photo bucket, Facebook, Antionline, Google. No where.

As to destroying data! I'm lucky in that where I work we have a machine shop. Big saws that will cut through anything.

This I promise.

Take all the drives from a RIAD 5+ configuration and cut them in half. You will never retrieve the data. And I mean NEVER!

Dino:

Sawing a drive in half could still get read from. The magazine article I was talking about, one guy literally blasted a Drive with a 12 Gauge. I mean they had PARTICLES of Drives they had to put back together because of the way it was blasted.

They somehow managed to put the drive back together again enough to read almost all the data from it.

Here is the thing:

These things cost a LOT of money. If I was going to get rid of a Hard Drive that had data on it I didn't want read, I'd probably just format the thing, or if it had failed, physically destroy it which is what I've done before.

But there is one thing that makes a huge number of posts in this thread not even matter:

Who here has data on your home hard drive that is so valuable that someone would pay the thousands of dollars to have it read from again? I know I don't have much here someone would spend that kind of money on just to see my collection of movies and stuff.

Now at your jobs, you may very well have drives that need to be destroyed because of personal data and things competitors would like to see. I can understand that competitors would like to have access to data, and some govt employees should probably be careful too, but seriously, the type of Data restoration I'm talking about costs a LOT of money. You'd have to have some pretty damned expensive data on a drive for someone to first go through the process of stealing the disk itself, and then spending thousands and thousands of dollars to get data from it after it's been destroyed.

I don't think there are to many people who are going to be willing to go though all that just to read from a disk drive unless they worked for a high end company who had very good secrets. So the risk of this happening is so low that for most of us, simply getting rid of the drive and burning it or shooting it would be WAY more than enough.

There is only ONE Hard drive in my 10 years of computing I've ever had to get rid of. My Mom's Computer had a bad disk in it. The thing was failing. I had never gotten to dissect a drive before, so when I took it out, I played with it. I pried it open to see exactly what was inside, and messed around. Then I ended up turning it into a piece of artwork. I thought it was cool.

Now, had I been at a job where a disk had sensitive data on it, I'd have simply taken it apart, and melted the plates inside into liquid. That's about it.

Because no matter how good people at putting these things back together, and no matter how many pieces were made when a shot gun blasted the thing into shreds... They still managed to put it back together somehow and grab the Data from it.

But I don't know anyone who can take a disk that's been melted into a liquid form with pop cans added in and been able to read from it.

Melting the plates with Copper or Cans made of aluminum and making that into a ball of melted disk, isn't going to get read from.

But again, you have to look at the risks. The Hacking Exposed books have sections where it says "OK, this type of thing would lead to a root compromise so we'll give it a 10 there, but it's so hard to do and rarely ever is it used, so it only gets a 1 for those, so all around, it's going to have a rating of a 5 when it comes to risk". That's kind of what I mean. Even though the implications of someone stealing a disk with sensitive data on it would probably have a 10 for impact, the chances of it happening are so low, it's not worth worrying about unless you work in a high end target.

What about shooting HDD's into outer space? Anybody tired that yet?

Rocket space must be getting cheaper now. A few HDD's mixed in with all the space junk orbiting
Earth would be hard to find. And if they did find it, it's likely to be orbiting at 18,000 m.p.h. That would
be a trick snagging a 1/2 pound HDD moving that fast.

;)

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Originally Posted by brokencrow

What about shooting HDD's into outer space? Anybody tired that yet?

Rocket space must be getting cheaper now. A few HDD's mixed in with all the space junk orbiting
Earth would be hard to find. And if they did find it, it's likely to be orbiting at 18,000 m.p.h. That would
be a trick snagging a 1/2 pound HDD moving that fast.

;)

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Meh. Shoot it into the sun.

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Originally Posted by fourdc

Linen,

I will be replacing 3 computers in my home network in January, building new ones. The old drives are IDE and not much use to me. Once the data is safely copied off of them, they will go to the target range. A couple of rounds of 9mm from 50 yds will make the data irretrievable. From there they'll go to a recycling center that states that hds are melted.

Sledgehammers, drills work well too.

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i had an old maxtor ide hd i pounded with a 20 pound sledgehammer ,i later took it out of curiosity to my brother he needed a hd to get online, this was back in 2003 that hd still ran till last year when it died and i was able to do data recovery even after using killdisk and reformat it and retreived alot of my old data