At 12:25 PM 12/13/1999 -0800, David Honig wrote:
>Has anyone extrapolated from the fact that the more you carry a device with
>you, the less physically subvertible it is? Your home machine may be more
>robust against that attack than your office machine, e.g., if some friendly
>or yourself occupies the house most of the time.
>Office PC < Home PC < PDA < dick-tracy watch < waterproof dick tracy watch
>< implant < network of implants which monitor
>each other (so you'd have to pull all of them at once...)
Yes and no. My laptop is much more likely to get stolen than my home PC
(though less likely to get blackbagged.)
My current PDA is pretty secure, and only communicates by wires,
and my current cellphone is more communicative but only knows my phone list.
But my next PDA will probably do infared, like this wristwatch PDA does,
and the one after that may do Bluetooth or some cellphone protocol,
and they'll probably have mechanisms for downloading firmware upgrades.
So you may be walking down the street or sitting in Starbucks and
some cop or some computer-viking or some industrial data reseller
may "upgrade" your machine by radio or M.I.B. infrared blinkylight widget;
that doesn't even count the e-calendaring services that will add
"Big Sale At Virgin Megastore" or "Happy Hour at Starbucks" to your PDA
as you're walking by.
Infrared's a bit safer - you can keep the PDA in your pocket or carrying
case,
or put black tape over it when you visit the NSA museum (:-),
but Bluetooth is made to work even while it's in your pocket,
and obviously cellphone-related systems need to be on the air,
though they may not support high enough data rates to do drive-by upgrades.
Thanks!
Bill
Bill Stewart, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
