What’s this? A video first at The Gadget Monkey!

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Following the documented loss of 131 USB memory sticks from the UK Ministry of Defence since 2004 - as well as over 650 laptops! - there are calls for the devices to be banned from the workplace.

3 of the USB sticks this year alone held information classified as “secret”, with another 19 holding “restricted” data.

Previous information security breaches in British Government departments include:

* November 2007 - Revenue and Customs officials lost the personal details of 25 million people

* June 2008 - A computer was stolen from the office of

* January 2008 - The MoD revealed that one of its laptops - containing the details of 600,000 people - was stolen from a car

The British Governments plans for a National ID Database continue, however, despite continued failings with both internal policies and external contractors providing inaccurate services:

* The recent scandal over unmarked SATS exam papers for 11 year olds
* The ongoing and rarely fully reported embarrassment to the UK that is the National Project for Information Technology/Connecting for Health, an ill-conceived and poorly managed (at every level) attempt to get every UK citizen onto a national health database.

When will they learn?

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USB flash ram devices continue to come down in price and get bigger in capacity.  This is a data security nightmare.

Yet the only computer technology related news items we see talk about the effect of video games and possible legislation to combat this epidemic of children playing games.

My god, what a terrible world! 

Meanwhile data goes missing – we know of 6 high profile incidents in the UK in the past 12 months that involved either laptops or optical discs, yet no one dare mention the effect that USB sticks have on this, because no one knows the true figures.

IT departments in British government agencies aren’t geared to detect who saves what onto what device – an information security nightmare isn’t just a possibility, it is happening now. (more…)

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There’s been a bit of a rumbling over the web in various forms over the price of the Apple MacBook Air. These concerns have been mainly based around a misunderstanding of different engineering techniques and standard in the manufacture of flash ram.

It seems – and obviously if you consider the amount of reading and writing a flash ram HDD substitute would engage in – that there is a considerable difference in price between the ram used in iPods and that used in the MacBook Air.

The price is different of course because the ram is different. There are in fact a number of different standards of flash ram, of which that used in the MacBook Air is one of the most stable, high-end solutions.

However knowing exactly what is going on in the world of flash ram is very useful for informing opinion on the future of media storage…

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Toshiba’s announcement that they would stop the development of HD-DVD discs and players signalled the end of the high definition optical disc format war, and handed victory to the Sony consortium.

However with the issue of Blu-Ray’s reliability with PCs still at large, don’t expect Blu-Ray to become de facto; don’t even expect this particular war to be hugely significant.

The Gadget Monkey tells me that this is just a blip – that the high definition optical disc format war is in fact just a phoney war, a standard to run parallel to standard DVD for only a few years to come.

Such is the slow take-up of High Def television and broadcast across Europe and the USA, despite the Sony propaganda, that the winner of the high def optical disc format war was never going to be winning anything more than a bit of money that was lost out on when DVD became the prevailing format.

Flash Ram is mere months away from being a viable alternative, is smaller, lighter and more versatile. A lot of money has been spent developing 5 inch discs in a world where portable media players continue to sell well with screens that are - at best - 5 inch.

So don’t get too attached to that Blu-Ray player.

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