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A FEDERAL JUDGE in Colorado has ordered a woman to decrypt the hard drive in her laptop so the files can be used as evidence against her.

The laptop was seized by FBI agents under a warrant in May 2010 whilst investigating financial fraud. However, the files were encrypted by PGP Desktop so the authorities demanded her decryption password under the All Writs Act.

Ramona Fricosu refused to hand over her password, claiming the demand violated the Fifth Amendment protection against compelled self-incrimination.

However, US District Court Judge Robert Blackman said, “I find and conclude that the Fifth Amendment is not implicated by requiring production of the unencrypted contents of the Toshiba Satellite M305 laptop computer.”

A similar legal doctrine has been around in the UK for a number of years but this is relatively new across the pond and is likely to appear more frequently in the future. µ

JAPANESE HARDWARE MAKER Sony has announced its Micro Vault Mach Superspeed USB 3.0 flash drive.

The shiny aluminium cased USB drive will offer read and write speeds of up to 120MB/s and 90MB/s, according to Sony. The drives will be available in 8GB, 16GB, 32GB and 64GB capacities this month.

Sony said, “Brand-new Micro Vault Mach is the first family of flash memory drives from Sony with Superspeed USB 3.0 technology for blazing performance that won’t slow you down.”

Of course Sony’s Mach USB 3.0 flash drives will be backwards compatible with USB 2.0. They will support both Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. A retractable connector design keeps the connector from getting damaged and makes the device smaller, while an LED indicates drive activity.

Additional File Rescue and X-Pict Story software can be downloaded. The first does what you’d expect, recovering files deleted by mistake, and the latter enables presentation of photos stored on the drive. µ

HARD DISK DRIVE MAKER Western Digital has said it expects the damage from recent flooding in Thailand to cost it at least 5m as it starts to bring the first of its factories in the region back online.

Western Digital has been hit hard by the devastating floods in Thailand, which have left a number of the firm’s manufacturing facilities under water. As the company revised is financial outlook, it said the Bang Pa-in plant has started churning out hard drives again this week.

While Western Digital will turn the lights back on in its Bang Pa-in plant, head slider production is not expected to restart before March 2012. In the meantime Western Digital will bring online a new head slider manufacturing plant in Malaysia.

John Coyne, president and CEO of Western Digital said, “Much work remains to be done but we couldn’t be more pleased with the effort and results thus far, including tremendous support from our supply partners and strategic customers.”

Western Digital said it expects to rake in at least .8bn for its second quarter fiscal year 2012 with gross margins near 23 per cent. The firm also said it expects to complete its purchase of Hitachi’s Global Storage Technologies division by March 2012.

While Western Digital has restarted production in Thailand, the firm also said it expects hard disk drive demand to outstrip supply well into 2012. However with production restarting, it is likely that hard drive prices will start to come back down. µ

HARD DISK DRIVE (HDD) prices have more than doubled in the six weeks between 1 October and 14 November after the floods in Thailand.

According to data from price comparison web site Idealo.co.uk, average selling prices increased by 151 per cent during the time period. In monetary terms, this was an increase from £43.29 to £109.78 and it equated to a price increase of 5.4 per cent per day.

Dating back to May 2011, prices for the most popular hard drives remained “extremely consistent”, Idealo said, with the average lowest price coming in at around £44.

However, beginning in late October and peaking in early November, the web site said there has been a dramatic increase in the prices offered by online stores on Idealo’s British, French, German and Italian comparison portals.

International Data Corporation (IDC) recently reported that as of early November, half of Thailand’s production capacity was directly impacted by the flooding. Thailand accounted for 40 to 45 per cent of worldwide HDD production in the first half of 2011. µ

AN ATTEMPT by Redmond software giant Microsoft to lure developers with the promise of bacon has run into problems.

Microsoft’s bacon-related recruitment drive for Kinect for Windows developers saw it sponsoring a food cart near Amazon’s headquarters in South Lake Union, but according to the Seattle Times, the stunt finished early when the cart owner discovered that it was about people, and not gaming.

The recruiting stunt was set to continue its tour to neighbourhoods housing Google and Adobe offices, but this has now been cancelled.

The Seattle Times says that Dante Rivera, owner of Dante’s Inferno Dogs – the bacon cart in question – thought that the event was designed to raise awareness of motion gaming toy Kinect, rather than the opportunity to work at a software company.

“It’s a great campaign – very unique, very interesting,” he said. “But I thought it was a promo event for Kinect. I wasn’t aware it was a recruiting promotion. Just due to conflict of interest, I thought it would it would be best for me to step aside.”

“I sell hot dogs. That’s what I do. So I thought it was best to keep everybody happy,” he added as he explained that no firm had complained about his presence. “I’m in business to make friends,” he said. And hot dogs, of course. µ

STORAGE VENDOR Seagate has launched its Goflex Cinema, a multimedia storage hub for the home.

The Goflex Cinema is designed to plug straight into a device such as a TV to create a digital media centre. The drive comes in 1TB, 2TB and 3TB capacities to suit varying demands.

Seagate said, “This new high-capacity drive is designed to transform the television into a digital media center. The drive comes equipped with all of the port connections and support for popular file formats that make it easy to start enjoying movies, music and photos away from the computer environment.”

The drive supports playback of files such as MKV, H.264, WMV and MP4 and supports full HD 1080p. Seagate has included HMDI and composite connections for video and composite or s/pdif optical for audio. It also has full size USB and microUSB ports.

Content such as photos can be transferred onto the Goflex directly, from a digital camera for example. Seagate includes a remote control for the drive and an on-screen user interface allows users to browse files and control playback easily.

If the standard capacities aren’t enough for your needs then the drive can be upgraded with a higher capacity Goflex Desk drive, said Seagate.

Seagate has told us that the device does not function as a digital video recorder (DVR) when plugged into a TV.

Based on prices at Amazon the cheapest model costs around £131, with prices going up to £165 and £191 for the 2TB and 3TB versions, respectively. µ

Product Seagate Goflex Satellite
Website Seagate
Specifications500GB, USB 3.0, 802.11 b/g/n, WPA security, supports Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP and Mac OS X 10.5.8 or later, 267g, five hours continuous streaming, 25 hours standby time, 120x90x22mm, 267g
Price £180

SMARTPHONES AND TABLETS are able to replicate most of the multimedia functionality associated with laptop and desktop computers, but one of their key limitations at present is on-board storage.

Step forward storage maker Seagate, which aims to allow users to share content using portable devices, negating the need to splash out on that 64GB Ipad or 32GB Android tablet.

The Goflex Satellite is an external 500GB hard disk drive that allows users to stream content to three devices simultaneously over WiFi. With dimensions of 120x90x22mm and a weight of 267g, the device is portable enough to carry around all day.

One of the things we like about the Goflex Satellite is its ease of use. Users can simply load movies, photos, music onto the hard drive, hit the switch to activate the WiFi and share content. The drive works on both PCs and Macs, with the latter requiring a quick manual driver install. The device comes with a USB 3.0 connection, facilitating high-speed data transfers for those who have the latest laptop or desktop.

Best of all, the Goflex works on pretty much any device that has a WiFi connection and web browser. The hard drive can also be used with a dedicated Apple IOS or Android app. However, once connected to the Goflex, it is not possible to use WiFi bridging, so if users need to connect to another hotspot to use the internet they will have to disconnect.

During our tests, we primarily used the web browser to view content and manage settings. When sharing content with friends or colleagues, the browser is the quickest and easiest way to view content. It doesn’t require users to download anything – handy if there is no nearby internet connectivity.

Once you are connected to the Goflex WiFi, simply type in any URL and the page redirects to the Goflex web interface.

We were able to stream content directly to an Ipad 2, a Blackberry Playbook, an Acer Iconia Tab, a Motorola Xoom, an HTC Flyer, a Google Nexus S and an HTC Desire S. Even when streaming video content to three devices simultaneously for prolonged periods of time, playback was smooth and the connection did not drop or stutter.

Given the rise in prevalence of USB 3.0-enabled computer systems and maturation of the USB 3.0 flash drive market, we provide here benchmarks and real-world performance tests of USB 3.0 portable storage devices. How much faster are USB 3.0 flash drives compared to their USB 2.0 predecessors? Are they worth the cost premium? Does using a USB 3.0 flash drive in a USB 2.0 port yield better results than native use of a USB 2.0 flash drive? Do USB 2.0 flash drives benefit from being plugged into USB 3.0 ports? To find out the answers to these questions, read on!

THE LATEST OVERPRICED CREATION from Apple’s Mac Mini line has gone under the scalple showing just how much over the odds fanbois are willing to pay for a shiny logo and some angular industrial design.

Apple’s Mac Mini is supposed to represent a low-cost Macintosh computer and years ago it was not a bad bit of kit for the price. However the latest version, which came out earlier this week, costs upwards of £529 and Apple thinks a £849 version can be used as a server. But after the chaps at Ifixit took the latest Mac Mini apart we were left to wonder whether you could even stuff £529 worth of tenners into an empty Mac Mini.

Being fair to Apple, its design department has been very clever in slimming down the Mac Mini further. No smoke and mirrors here, oh no, just remove the built in DVD writer and watch the fanbois fawn over ‘cleaner lines’, creating an opportunity for Apple to flog the same USB drive it offers Macbook Air customers for £66.

After taking the lid off Apple’s ‘mid 2011′ Mac Mini, the Ifixit boys found out that there is enough space for a second hard drive, though Apple doesn’t provide the connections required to hook one up to the motherboard. However Apple kindly offers fanbois the option to make use of this space by opting to have a 750GB SATA drive and a 256GB SSD for only £600, doubling the cost of a Mac Mini. At that sort of price the space inside the Mac Mini is priced higher per square inch than most of London’s Zone 1.

On the whole Apple has done a very good job of packaging the pint size money hole, and it should be commended that it can fit a 2.7GHz dual-core Intel Core i7 chip into such a small space.

What users can easily do, as is evident from Ifixit’s teardown, is upgrade RAM and the hard drive easily, which is probably more than what most fanbois would ever dare to do. That said, after spending so much to buy a Mac Mini, most fanbois won’t have the cash left over to upgrade anyway. µ

STORAGE VENDOR Western Digital (WD) has announced it is shipping its Scorpio Blue 1TB capacity hard drive for notebooks.

The 2.5in hard drive is super slim at just 9.5mm thick. The drive offers total storage capacity of 1TB by using two disk platters of 500GB each.

Matt Rutledge, VP and GM of Client Storage at WD said, “With the release of the 1 TB WD Scorpio Blue notebook drive in a 9.5 mm package, WD is able to offer the greatest storage capacity available for use in portable computing environments,”

The drive uses a 3Gbits/s SATA interface, spins at 5400RPM and has an 8MB cache. WD claims it is one of the quietest drives on the market and is both reliable and shock tolerant, making it perfect for notebooks and other portable devices.

Power consumption is low at 1.4W when the drive is reading or writing, which drops down to 0.18W when it is idle or in sleep mode. As well as being thin the drive is pretty light at just 110g.

WD said that the Scorpio Blue drive has “data-protection features that actively watch over valuable data”. It also has Advanced Format technology that WD claims optimises it for Windows 7, Windows Vista, Mac OS X Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard.

The WD Scorpio Blue hard drive is shipping now through various distributors and resellers with a guide price of 9. µ