Crissa wrote:Jovian, you add nothing to this conversation. You didn't bother to actually digest the article and the technology involved in it, nor did you accept any of their marketing.
I can pretty much guarantee that I understand the article and the technology it describes better than you do. Seriously. I work in IT for a living; I used to be the network admin for a school with dozens of teacher/administrative computers and hundreds of student computers... all of which were accessible to me via the network. The world didn't explode.
Crissa wrote:You're arguing in circles, choosing not to address any of my comments, aside from picking at semantics.
I have been; you just haven't liked my responses. But we'll go through it one more time if you like.
Crissa wrote:It's not like you've actually attacked my basic argument which is 'network accessible computers are less secure',
But the benefits are worth it. Network accessible computers are hardly a new technology, and they're widely used precisely because the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. You cannot honestly say otherwise if you have any knowledge whatsoever of the IT industry.
Crissa wrote:'proprietary technology is less secure',
Than what, open source stuff? Open source is nice for the individual as long as they have the knowledge and the free time to fiddle with it and get what they want, but for a large organization that relies on the technology to function, proprietary software is nearly a must because of the built-in support. If you're using open-source software and you can't get it to work, you're SOL. If you're using proprietary technology and you can't get it to work, you can call up the company and they'll help you
make it work. This is a large part of the reason why even large companies with in-house IT staff buy Dell computers loaded with Microsoft software even though it'd be
fantastically cheaper to order computer parts to be assembled and loaded with open-source software by IT staff. Because the hidden costs (repair, maintenance, and support) are vast and a good way of dealing with that is to buy it from someone else and make them do it.
tl;dr -- proprietary technology is cheaper than the alternative and still gets the job done, so that's what people use.
Crissa wrote:and lastly, 'this technology messes with users who think their data is safe when their computer is off.'
Computers aren't "safe" when their computers are off even without this technology -- there are network commands to turn them back on, at which point you can do whatever you want with them. The only difference between the technology described in the article you linked and other, previously-existing technology is that this new thing doesn't actually have to power the computer completely on in order to access its hard drive. It's no greater a threat to security than other already widely-used technology is.