From Megabytes to Terabytes; Backing up my data; Sanity entering Brexit government; Gving up your passwords to devices and social media when visiting the US?
Yesterday's talk at the Quekett was about Citizen Science recovering information from historical journals. Today was my quest to recover information. Working with books, we are used to dealing with text amounting to a couple of megabytes of information. to be clear, that's a couple of million bytes of information, or MB. Add pictures, and the amount of information used increases dramatically. In fact, a full page picture in a book takes up as much memory as the text in the rest of the book.
Using moving pictures takes you into another league. A ninety minute novel text, transformed into a film, uses a thousand times the information. Now we are in the realms of billions of bits of information, or Gigabytes (GB). That film can fill a DVD with a bit of space for interviews, out-takes, at about 4 GB capacity. By the way, the memory stick shown above can store about 4 DVDs of information.
The decade of work, photography and filming stored on my computer now takes up two million million bytes, 2 Terabytes or 2 TB. And there lies the rub. That is a lot of information to lose by a computer failure. A backup, or even two backups, is a sensible precaution.
Last year, everything was hunky-dory, I had a back-up being maintained on a hard drive and a backup of the backup in the cloud. Avarice in the form of a dramatic price rise meant that I had to switch Cloud backup providers. Despite the superfast internet connections, it has taken several months for the cloud backup to complete, indeed, it will still need another week before I'm fully secure.
Today I also had to review the hard drive backup and switch to a new system. Fortunately, that is a lot faster and in a couple of hours I will be able to breathe easy again.
On the Brexit front, I read an interesting article by David Marsh of OMFIF where he claimed that some sanity was beginning to enter Prime Minister May's government. Important changes in attitude are:
- The Prime Minister appears to have won the backing of key UK cabinet eurosceptics for a more lenient approach to EU departure talks.
- Britain has said it would abide by some rules – including free movement of citizens – during a transition period.
- Acceptance that no full trade deal can be concluded until after the UK leaves and conceding that immigration from the EU could continue until after the next British election in 2020.
See https://www.omfif.org/analysis/commentary/2017/april/dashing-hopes-for-bigotry/?utm_source=OMFIFupdate
Commons public administration and constitutional affairs committee (PACAC) released its report 'Lessons learned from the EU Referendum' today. Buried within it were gems such as: The Government should have prepared more re Brexit; Prime Minister Cameron should have stayed on to deal with the mess generated; That the crash during voter online registration close to the deadline for submissions had the hallmarks of a cyberattack - pointing out that Russia and China had the capability. https://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmpubadm/496/49602.htm
Leaving a rather bad taste in the mouth was the news that when visiting the US, UK tourists may get asked to hand in passwords to their electronic devices or social media accounts or be denied entry. This would be under a new “extreme vetting” policy being considered by the Trump administration. It could be a catch 22 situation. If you refuse to hand over your password, you can be denied entry; If you hand over the passwords, you are leaving yourself open to security breaches and cyberattacks, so have to spend additonal time and measures to protect your accounts after crossing into the US.
US citizens have a right to enter the US and can argue against such a policy with less risk. Non US travelers have no rights of access. In January, Susan Hall, head of technology and intellectual property team partner at law firm Clarke Willmott said “I’m aware of at least one conference on cyber security and ethical hacking which switched to Toronto at short notice because of these concerns.”
Quoting from the Guardian article, "One specific action foreign travellers can take before flying is to fill in a US Citizenship and Immigration Services form G-28, which allows a traveller to nominate an attorney to represent them if they are detained. Without the form, it can be difficult for travellers to access legal representation while held at the border." Full article link below.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/09/uk-tourists-to-us-may-get-asked-to-hand-in-passwords-or-be-denied-entry?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard
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