Who Killed My Hard Drive?

Crashed hard drives can cost a company thousands of dollars in repairs, lost productivity, and lost revenue, according to a recent study by the University of Pepperdine. The study looked at the most frequent causes of drive error and the extent to which a "fatal" error could harm a computer. Hard drive failure was the factor behind 38 percent of data loss incidents--second only to physical theft--and in about 30 percent of these cases, data was lost as a result of drive problems that corrupted the disk and made it unintelligible. Attacks by hackers and human error accounted for about 13 percent and 12 percent of data loss cases, respectively. When the IT cost of a failed drive--approximately $1,150--is coupled with the cost of lost productivity--around $1,750--the total cost of each failed drive comes to roughly $2,900, according to the study. If faced with a failed drive, a company should leave recovery to a professional, since around 15 percent of all non-recoverable data loss incidents in the study were caused by improper recovery attempts. "Non-professional tools and system software often fix errors by overwriting the file system on the drive," the authors say. "Though this may repair the file system, it permanently destroys the data."http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=153090&f_src=darkreading_section_296

Linkoping University Researchers Break 'Unbreakable' Crypto

Researchers at Linkoping University in Sweden have discovered that quantum computing is not 100 percent secure. Quantum computing was considered unbreakable because quantum-mechanical objects cannot be measured or manipulated without being disturbed, and an attempt to copy a quantum-cryptographic key in transit would lead to extra noise that is noticeable and would not yield any usable information. However, Jan-Ake Larsson, associate professor of applied mathematics, and his student Jorgen Cederlof have found that it is theoretically possible for an unauthorized person to extract the key and hide their activities by simultaneously manipulating the quantum-mechanical and regular communication needed for quantum cryptography. "The concern involves authentication, intended to secure that the message arriving is the same as the one that was sent," Larsson says. In an article in the journal IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Larsson and Cederlof also describe a solution that would secure quantum cryptography.http://www.liu.se/en/news-and-events/startpage?newsitem=18074

Swarming Spy Bots That Share Information Being Built for Military Computerworld

BAE Systems is creating microbots inspired by birds and insects for the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. The robots could eventually be used by soldiers to locate nearby enemies, determine their positions and weaponry, and listen in on their conversations. BAE's Aaron Penkacik says the robots will operate as a distributed system, or swarm, to gather information and send it back in a unified stream. For example, a swarm of robots the size of large insects could contain one robot that captures video, another that records sound, and another that detects chemical agents. The robots will share the information and send it back to a command center or soldier in a unified message. BAE scientists recently started designing the system, which is expected to be a five-year project, but Penkacik says soldiers may be able to use basic models of the spy robots earlier than that while engineers continue to refine the machines. Penkacik says the biggest challenge is to make the robots work collaboratively. "We need to work on collaborative behavior with multiple robots so they can do distributed data fusion in an ad hoc network that's moving in real time," he says. "All the information you get from these different sensors is what we're looking at to create knowledge that helps the war fighter stay alive."http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9084638