That office copier? Don't let somebody walk off with its hard drive.

Interesting article in Ars Technica today: one of those little technical details that actually gets kind of scary when you think about it. The summary is that most modern photocopiers are scanning to a hard drive, then printing from that. Nothing strange there -- except that the image doesn't necessarily get immediately deleted from the hard drive.

I'd be curious about the technical details (and I suspect that they vary a lot from manufacturer to manufacturer), but taking the report at face value, think about this scenario. It's completely routine for people to do things like make a photocopy of their tax returns just before mailing them out; lots of folks do this at the office. (Well, those of us who still file via paper, anyway.) If I was in the identity-theft business, I'd want to create a cover identity as a copier repairman, and just go around "fixing" lots of office copy machines around April 16th. All that yummy identifying data, nicely bundled up to be stolen...

That office copier? Don't let somebody walk off with its hard drive.

Interesting article in Ars Technica today: one of those little technical details that actually gets kind of scary when you think about it. The summary is that most modern photocopiers are scanning to a hard drive, then printing from that. Nothing strange there -- except that the image doesn't necessarily get immediately deleted from the hard drive.

I'd be curious about the technical details (and I suspect that they vary a lot from manufacturer to manufacturer), but taking the report at face value, think about this scenario. It's completely routine for people to do things like make a photocopy of their tax returns just before mailing them out; lots of folks do this at the office. (Well, those of us who still file via paper, anyway.) If I was in the identity-theft business, I'd want to create a cover identity as a copier repairman, and just go around "fixing" lots of office copy machines around April 16th. All that yummy identifying data, nicely bundled up to be stolen...

Keeping up with the Joneses

Microsoft has apparently decided to reassert its position as most-evil-company, against the recent competition from Apple -- according to this report from All About Microsoft, they've launched a broad patent-infringement suit against Salesforce. The particularly evil part is that most of the patents have nothing to do with CRM (which is what they're really competing on); instead, they mostly sound like the sort of insanely-broad and stupid patents that lead me to the opinion that software patents should just be banned. Some listed examples include things like:

“system and method for providing and displaying a web page having an embedded menu”

“method and system for stacking toolbars in a computer display”

“aggregation of system settings into objects”

In other words, they've apparently got patents on a lot of pretty basic everyday concepts, and have decided to use them as competitive weapons. I don't know whether the patents are legitimate or not (I certainly hope not), but regardless, it just drives home how abusive and anti-competitive the whole patent regime is...

Keeping up with the Joneses

Microsoft has apparently decided to reassert its position as most-evil-company, against the recent competition from Apple -- according to this report from All About Microsoft, they've launched a broad patent-infringement suit against Salesforce. The particularly evil part is that most of the patents have nothing to do with CRM (which is what they're really competing on); instead, they mostly sound like the sort of insanely-broad and stupid patents that lead me to the opinion that software patents should just be banned. Some listed examples include things like:

“system and method for providing and displaying a web page having an embedded menu”

“method and system for stacking toolbars in a computer display”

“aggregation of system settings into objects”

In other words, they've apparently got patents on a lot of pretty basic everyday concepts, and have decided to use them as competitive weapons. I don't know whether the patents are legitimate or not (I certainly hope not), but regardless, it just drives home how abusive and anti-competitive the whole patent regime is...