Today, LapLink have announced their new PC Lock software.  This takes the task of encrypting your files and data to the next logical level and adds some interesting features.

According to research conducted by Ponemon Institute, Gartner and Intel, over 1,700 laptops are stolen every day and someone’s identity is stolen every 2 seconds. Files on a PC that are not encrypted are at constant danger of theft, increasing the user’s risk of identity theft, privacy invasion and significant financial loss.

It uses “a sophisticated EKE ‘Encrypted Key Encryption’ approach with military-grade 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)” to secure your data but in addition to the software on your PC which encrypts and decrypts files on the fly, there’s a cloud management console too.

With this unique console, users can modify preferences, change settings, reset passwords, lock the data on a missing or stolen PC and remotely delete sensitive data. The Web Management Console is accessible from any web-enabled device, including smartphones, allowing management from virtually anywhere, even if the user is on the go; no need to rely on live customer support as with other products.

This is a very interesting approach meaning that you still have control of your data, and can securely erase it, if you lose your laptop or if your PC is stolen.  You will also be able to rest safe in the knowledge that the thief won’t have had access to the data in the interim because the files aren’t unlocked by your Windows log-in.

Files and folders on a PC remain protected even if the PC is lost or stolen. Users can trigger a remote wipe of their encrypted data from the Web Management Console, preventing access of stolen files. Even if the thief pulls the hard drive from the PC and never accesses the Internet, the data remains encrypted and inaccessible. PC Lock is also compatible with other security software, so it can provide an extra layer of protection and complement existing safeguards a user may already have in place or add in the future.

The main encryption software is run from a wizard which takes you through the process of encrypting your files and configuring the PC’s data.  The encryption takes place in the background and you won’t notice any degradation in performance on a standard home or business PC, as you shouldn’t these days.

Then for those of you in business, maybe a small business where you need to protect sensitive customer and user data how about these cherries on the cake?

Behavior Monitoring
PC Lock automatically takes steps to protect your encrypted data when it senses an unauthorized user. If someone repeatedly fails to login, PC Lock detects successive failures and will automatically take steps to protect encrypted data. These steps include destroying essential elements of the decryption key rendering access to the data impossible.

Protects against “Cold Boot Attacks”
The “Cold Boot” phenomenon occurs because other encryption software leaves encryption keys in RAM even when a PC is password protected by a screen saver, sleeping or hibernating. PC Lock deletes keys and overwrites them with random data during transitions to other power states ensuring they cannot be recovered in a cold boot situation.

Protects against Hackers
The PC Lock password is separate and different than the Windows password. So, even if a hacker is able to login to your Windows user account, they will also have to know your PC Lock password to unlock your data, which if they fail at guessing a set number of times (determined by the user in the Web Management Console) then PC Lock will trigger the key deletion to protect your data.

I like this approach as I’ve always been uneasy about EFS having lost data to it about 10 years ago.  The thought of having encryption that’s tied to your Windows log-in on a specific computer is a bit dangerous so I’ll certainly be giving LapLink PC Lock a try.  The additional peace of mind of having the web console with remote wipe access is an extra bonus.

LapLink has been around for decades now and made it’s name with hardware crossover serial cables that allowed you to easily transfer files from one computer to another (this was in the days before modern networks).  Now to celebrate the company’s 28th anniversary they’re giving away PC Lock completely free for 24 hours (Monday 16th May 2011).  After that it will be available at a discounted rate of $14.95 for a period before returning to the full retail price of $29.99.

If you value your data and keep personal files on your home or work PC or on your laptop or tablet then you should grab PC Lock while its free, you can get it here at www.laplink.com/pclock.  We all keep personal files on our computers and the thought of being able to log into a cloud management console on my smartphone and remotely wipe a device makes this not just a bargain, but potentially the software we must all have on our computers.

The address book software will automatically recognize possible duplicate contact information and display a dialog to the user that proposes a few ways how to deal with the data including options to skip or edit.

Important features offered by Open Contacts include:

• Unlimited data fields to store any contact info. Along with predefined fields, you may add unlimited data fields grouped by section.
• Manage relationships between individuals, organizations and departments.
• Comprehensive Categories. You may click on a category to view contacts of the category, or right click to list contacts of subcategories recursively.
• Search through any data field, and search birthday of people.
• Interact with Windows applications of telephony, Skype, emailing or Web/File browsing etc.
• Map service with Google Maps. You may use either single line address or multi-line address. Yahoo Maps and Microsoft Live Maps are also supported through custom action plug-in programs.
• Print contact info and labels on papers of different sizes.
• Import from MS Outlook, Outlook Express (WAB), Eudora, Netscape/Mozilla Thunderbird, XML (xCard), CSV, LDIF, Vista and vCard.
• Export to indented text, CSV, Excel, vCard, XML (xCard), HTML, hCard and XFN (XHTML Friends Network).
• Portable. You may bring your address book database and the program in an external device such as a USB flash disk, and run the program on any Windows PC.
• LAN supports for multiple users in Local Area Network, using true Client/Server architecture.

Quite a few can be very interesting for users in specific work situations. The only real downside to this excellent address book software program is the rather outdated user interface that feels slow in certain situations. Open Contacts is available as a free download from the developer’s homepage.

Opera Unite is modularized and comes with so called services that can be installed to extend the functionality. This may remind many users of Firefox add-ons but it is actually a completely different technology that requires more than just clicking on an install link. Currently seven services are offered, they are:

• Media Player – Accessing the music collection from anywhere on the Internet.
• File Sharing – A way of sharing files directly between users.
• Fridge – A note leaving application that other people can use to leave notes on a computer system.
• Web Server – Hosting a web server from the local computer system.
• Photo Sharing – Share photos without uploading them first.
• The Lounge – A chat interface hosted on a computer system.

The Opera team has created a user guide to get users started with Opera Unite. Opera Unite is available as a separate preview release which can be downloaded for all supported operating systems from the Opera Labs website. The download will actually replace the current version of Opera 10 if the user decides to install it in the same installation directory.

Opera Unite is then available in the left panel after installation. Starting the actual home server requires an Opera account. A homeaddress is assigned to every user signing up for Opera Unite in the from “http://computername.username.operaunite.com/” with the user selecting the computer name. The username will be the Opera username.

Once that has been setup the service that has been selected by the user gets setup. Setup of the file sharing module for example requires the selection of a directory on the local computer that will be used for that purpose. Each service that has been activated can then be accessed from the created homepage if the user accessing it has sufficient rights to do so.

The file sharing page on the server is for example protected by a password by default which can be changed in the root home directory. It offers three different access rights which make it possible to allow public access (everyone can access them), private access (only the root user can access the files) or password protected access.

Verdict:

Opera Unite offers something that web browsers do not offer out of the box. The usefulness of the service on the other hand depends largely on the user’s system configuration. If the user runs an home server then it might not be needed to run Opera Unite as well. Users who prefer to access everything from one program might find Opera Unite helpful especially if the developers and users begin to add new modules to the service. Not really a reinvention of the Internet but a nice service nevertheless.

The blog lists the major changes of the core update mentioning in the end that about 1.1 million data values have been affected by the search engine update. Most of the changes listed in the blog post add new searches or information to the search engine. This includes for example the updates to some European countries like Slovakia, regions (like Wales), country borders (India, China..) but also more interesting comparisons (USA deficit vs. UK), combined time series plots of different quantities (population Germany gdp) and additional ways of searching for information and data entries.

There is obviously still a fundamental different between the information that are provided by Wolfram Alpha and classic search engines like Google Search, Bing or Yahoo Search. The developers are however on a good way to fill a gap that most users were probably not aware of until they discovered that they could use Wolfram Alpha in a certain way to compute information that would take lots of manual work otherwise.

Still, the search engine is limited and it sometimes depends on the phrase if it understands the search query.

Although it might look like a universal solution to finding a better way to handle digital data, this technology is probably supposed to be only used for permanent archiving of data, not rewriting (I’ve never found a single mention of rewritable discs on Mempile’s homepage) which rather limits it’s practical use. Also, when storing such a vast amount of data on a single medium, you could soon regret it if the disc got scratched or damaged in some other way. However, it’s still a great deal to have a medium with 1 TB capacity, even if not rewritable. Besides, in the future, when the technology develops even more, the capacity of TeraDiscs should eventually reach up to 5 TB.

This invention appears to be a nice breakthrough in 3D data storage technology but I’m still convinced that it’s only a necessary part of transition which I’m waiting for. I mean who wants to use discs that get easily damaged when not handled properly…

In my opinion, datacubes are to replace discs as we know them in the near future for the purpose of storing digital data 3-dimensionally. Does it sound too much like sci-fi ? Just like internet at the beginning of 19th century ?