Message-Id: <5.0.2.1.2.20001225230026.020dd050@pop.rahul.net> Date: Mon, 25 Dec 2000 23:20:59 -0800 From: "Christopher D. Reimer" <creimer@rahul.net> Subject: Re: [SLE] Copy protection into harddisks. At 10:46 PM 12/25/2000, Niels Stenhoj wrote:

I think it may be worth taking a look at this:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/2/15620.html

If harddisks with built-in copy protecting protocols are going to set the standard for harddisks, what impact will that have for the open source concept? Will RAID features be possible? Are such harddisk compatible only with a certain Crash OS?

Cheers,

Niels

From what I read, I don't think this will become a widely available feature in the consumer market. More than likely, government and corporate agencies with security-sensitive data may use this "feature" -- No! No! It's a bug! -- to prevent the hard drives and backup media from being useable on non-authorized machines. Since this is a hardware-level encryption scheme, I would not be surprised if an open-source software, perhaps as a kernel option, is developed for the Linux Enterprise distributions. Christopher Reimer creimer's FPS Design & Portfolio http://www.rahul.net/creimer/