So apparently now, large businesses and government agencies are freaking out over the iPod and the fact that it is, in essence, a portable hard drive. For, where there are portable mass storage devices, there is the threat of information theft. According to the British Royal Air Force:
“With USB devices, if you plug it straight into the computer,
you can bypass passwords and get right on the system,” said RAF Wing Commander Peter D’Ardenne.
Whoa, hold a second here. If memory serves, you need to know the password before you can log into a computer, plug any storage device in, and start dumping data to the device. That’s a basic security feature that even the current base version of Windows has built-in. The only way to bypass this is by your own stupidity: not enabling passwords. But the iPod, in and of itself, has nothing inherent about it that “breaks” passwords. It’s simply a hard drive, and if you can’t trust the people using your computers to bring in a portable hard drive, then can you trust them to even use the computer?
So if anyone with a iPod can walk into the most sensitive parts of the RAF, plug in and start copying files away, I think there’s a more serious problem here. The iPod isn’t the threat: it’s the idiots handling their security.
Why did no one gasp in panic when disk drives were invented? True, the Ipod stores billions of times more data than floppy disks used to when they first arrived in common computer usage. However, the amounts of data being processed were proportionally just as small. The security risk from someone smuggling a wayward floppy disk was just as grave, and yet the panic wasn’t there. Now, someone, somewhere has decided that a cute, chic, pricey music player is a liability.
Now, businesses must deal with that liability. If they ban iPods, they may as well ban PDAs as well.. after all, a well-placed PDA with a 1 or 2GB memory card can do just as much damage as the iPod, only it will be harder to detect because PDAs are common organizational tools in business. That… or they can simply be more careful about how they use passwords!