thumbs

The world is full of feed readers. Portable FeedReader's claim to fame is its portability, obviously, but there's more to like than just being able to cram it on your USB drive with room to spare.

The program offers a standard RSS feed-reading interface with three vertical panes. One lists the feeds, the second shows the titles of the selected feeds stories, and the third serves as a viewer. Although the panes' width can be changed by clicking and dragging, the viewer pane is a bit narrow to comfortably read a typical Web page story. Portable FeedReader offers … Read more

USB thumb drives are convenient, popular and often free--and they're spreading viruses like sailors on shore leave.*

The US-CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) issued a warning on Thursday that malicious code is increasingly propagating via USB flash drive devices.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Defense has temporarily banned the use of thumb drives, CDs, and other removable storage devices because of the spread of the Agent.bzt virus, a variant of the SillyFDC worm, according to Wired.

We've seen this before with portable external storage devices. Floppy disks were the culprit in the early 1990s, followed by CDs. The fact that USB thumb drives are being used by so many people makes them an attractive target for virus writers.

"The bad guys are intentionally developing new flavors of malware designed to propagate through USB devices," said Gunter Ollmann, chief security strategist for IBM's ISS security division. "They are today's floppy drives."

But USB drives are even handier. Their small size makes them easy to slip into a pocket or carry on a lanyard around your neck. A common swag item in the tech industry, they also are mainstream consumer storage devices. They literally litter my desk drawers.

There are a couple of ways USB thumb drives can be used to spread viruses and other malicious software.

… Read more

USB drives are simple to carry, but easy to misplace and that can be risky with sensitive information. Rohos Mini Drive is a freeware app that safeguards personal documents by creating a password-protected partition on your flash drive. The download actually installs two programs. One, Rohos Mini Drive, is the partition manager that self-installs as a portable app on the drive when you create the partition. The second, Rohos Disk Browser, is a portable file manager, which can be useful when the encrypted partition can't be read by the host computer.

Operating Rohos Mini Drive is fairly straightforward. Plug … Read more

Super Talent Technology is out with a new family of high-capacity USB drives that offer up to 64GB of space.

For now, the new drives are possibly the largest in the community of little drives. And they have style too.

Dubbed Luxio, the drives are housed in a sleek .8 inch by 3 inch by .4 inch UV-coated ABS/PC case with chrome-plated zinc trim. They come in black, silver, and wood grain colors and in three storage sizes: 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB.

All models in the Luxio family come with advanced AES-256 hardware encryption as a standard feature that … Read more

USB thumb drives are going the Swiss Army way in their all-in-one multiple offerings, and this latest gives Victorinox a run for its tools. Who'd have thought a TrekStor can not only store digital files (up to 16GB), but also pop that beer bottle cap off anytime you fancy a tipple?

Bottoms up to a very nice combination for press launches or office retreats: data and drinking. What's more, this makes for a pretty nifty keychain add-on, with its solid brushed-aluminum finish and snazzy bottle opener at the end. TrekStor has slated this product for October at $12-$… Read more

Super Talent Technology, a manufacturer of Flash storage and DRAM memory modules, on Wednesday announced the Pico D, the newest member of world's smallest USB thumbdrives.

Though tiny in size, measuring only 1.4-inch in length and weighing less than 0.2 ounces, the new Pico D series are shock- and water-resistant.

According to STT, these drives can transfer data at speeds up to 30 megabytes per second. Like the Cosair Flash Voyager Mini, the Pico D achieves the miniature size by using chip-on-board technology. However, the Pico D series offers storage capacity up to 8GB, twice that of … Read more

I've accidentally left my thumdrives in the pocket and let them go through the laundry treatment multiple times. Some times they survived, other times I had to buy a new one. Either way, I had to deal with this familiar lingering bad feeling after finding the little device inside the dryer. It's like "Gosh, I couldn't believe it happened, again!" And yet, I just can't guarantee that it won't. This is why I've been very happy with Cosair's Flash Voyager series that features a water resistance and shockproof housing.

And today, … Read more

Information security, or lack of, may have been actor Edison Chen's downfall when his bedroom antics hit the Internet circuit. But for companies dealing in data security tools, it's been one satisfying ride (pun intended) since it's exposed a vulnerable issue that strikes fear into the hearts of PC users, not to mention Edison's lower extremities.

In the worst-case scenario, failure to secure your personal or critical information on your computer can result in serious fallout not only for yourself, but involved parties, as we've witnessed in a very public way. While companies know it'… Read more

As any CrackBerry addict will tell you, it's all in the thumbs. And that basic rule of dexterity applies to game controllers too, which is why the creation of something like the "FPS Freek" was probably inevitable.

KontrolFreek's latest accessory snaps onto the thumbsticks of a controller to improve accuracy and provide a crucial competitive edge. This nuance is particularly important in muscle control while taking aim at targets, according to Gizmodo, which sites research indicating that "the first 20 percent of the range of motion is the hardest because of spring resistance." (The … Read more