ipod's new tune, not our favorite song!

[Daniel ~]

Written by Daniel
Thursday, 14 September 2006
No Data Secure With iPods in the Workplace

By Tony Glover
The Business
09/13/06 4:00 AM PT
Tech news world
The problem for company security chiefs is that a user can copy a crucial file to an iPod and delete its entry from the device's list of recorded files without wiping the actual file from the iPod's hard drive. An inspection of the device would only reveal music, but once it were taken from the building, the stolen file could easily be accessed by reading it straight from the device's hard drive.....

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[Favu]

Only just caught up with this, however, isn't the same true for flash-based devices? And other .mp3 players?

[keithwalton]

I dont think so, most other modern mp3 and flash based devices act as a removable hard drive and windows can see all the contents on there.
From the sounds of it the ipod works differently in that you dont get direct accsses to the hard drive but instead the playlist on the device.

Flash media is more secure for businesses than earlier magnetic based storage devices. As with the older drives you could delete a file on the drive but like the ipod only its entry in the file allocation table would be deleted leaving the file intact on the drive you just had to find it again.

There are many data recovery tools for doing this some for just recovering deleted files others for rescueing failed hardware.

Flash memory or at least in my experience works slightly differently. when you delete a file, its gone never to be seen again! I have had images deleted on a digital camera by mistake before and I could not get them back.

Recovery programs would see the file had existed there once but all that was left was a bunch of zero's.

Back to the issue at hand, if a company is that worried about loosing data then dont let workers connect devices to there computers. Its the way f1 teams work.

Last time i worked for an f1 team, only e-mails from there own addy were permitted and each one were checked by a computer for contents and unless you had the clearence they were manually checked.
Internet accsses was controlled by them, you could only goto websites they had approved as safe.

And the computers themselves did not have any external plug in ports themselves, no floppy drives either.

If you wanted to transfer a file it was all over ethernet. Oh they ran a custom version of unix as well which would only run software approved by them.

[Favu]

Originally Posted by keithwalton

I dont think so, most other modern mp3 and flash based devices act as a removable hard drive and windows can see all the contents on there.
From the sounds of it the ipod works differently in that you dont get direct accsses to the hard drive but instead the playlist on the device.

Flash media is more secure for businesses than earlier magnetic based storage devices. As with the older drives you could delete a file on the drive but like the ipod only its entry in the file allocation table would be deleted leaving the file intact on the drive you just had to find it again.

There are many data recovery tools for doing this some for just recovering deleted files others for rescueing failed hardware.

Flash memory or at least in my experience works slightly differently. when you delete a file, its gone never to be seen again! I have had images deleted on a digital camera by mistake before and I could not get them back.

Not so, especially with flash memory - AIUI flash memory just marks the space as empty, but doesnt delete the data - so "deleted" data can be pulled of quite easily, so long as that area of the memory hasn't been written to.

Also, the article says that "inspection of the device" shows no file, which I take to mean scrolling through the songlist, and, if the iPod can't be connected directly, as it were, how do they get the file they are stealing on/off the thing?

All in all I reckon they are just using the iPod as a scapegoat - IMO most other music players and memory sticks can be used to the same end.