The list of cloud breakins grows, with recent news of user accounts being breached in the ubiquitous Apple iCloud. As FierceITSecurity puts it, this is not just about naked celebrity photos (or naked anybody photos). iCloud is used by pretty much anyone who owns an Apple iDevice, often without users knowing or thinking about it. To be sure, many of the photos and videos stored up in the Apple infrastructure are of cats and bad food photography, but the fact that our iPhone/etc backups are stored in the iCloud is something to think about.

One of the judges for our 2014 Photo Contest, Zeb Andrews, has returned from his recent visit to southern Turkey, where he taught photography to Syrian war refugee children. He has been publishing photos and observations from his experience to his flickr site.

I found this image commentary particularly insightful with plenty of food for thought: "You look at the smile in front of you and realize on this small scale you have done this grand thing."

Today, in a unanimous ruling, the US Supreme Court stated that police
officers need a warrant to search cell phones and other devices in
possession of people they arrest. The ruling states that the vast amount
of data contained on today's phones are protected from routine
inspection; one of the points made by the ruling is that we must today
distinguish between a handwritten note, for example, and the large volumes
of data we routinely generate and store on hard drives and data centers in
the cloud.

A recent Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) study (commissioned by McAfee) estimates the annual cost to business from cybercrime at $445 billion. The direct and indirect costs come from loss of intellectual property, theft of financial assets and sensitive data, opportunity costs, costs to secure networks, and recovery from attacks.

Zeb Andrews, a Portland photographer, and one of our judges for the 2014 CRU Photo Contest, is leaving on Thursday for a trip to Turkey. As part of the Zeitouna Project, Zeb is bringing his teaching and photography skills to teach pinhole and sunlight photography to Syrian refugee children. Zeb is one of over 30 international mentors traveling from Ireland, England, Brazil, and the United States to provide instruction and mentorship in the arts and sports to over 800 refugee children in the hopes of inspiring and healing those who have been displaced by war. We wish Zeb well and can't wait to see the results of his generosity!

As we know, before MP3s and the iPod and iTunes changed the way most of us consume music and transformed the music industry, there were CDs. (In my house, there still are--but maybe they're just taking up space.) This article from The Atlantic discusses how the Library of Congress is researching just how data decay occurs on CDs. This is a good reminder of how data, whether it's music, movies, or your business's financial data, needs to be kept on current media--and refreshed occasionally. You might want to check out our booklet on setting up a backup routine for your business (applies to your home media collection, too).

Broken record time: online data vulnerabilities recently reported by Box and Dropbox (two separate companies) in their file-sharing functions: shared links, which are supposed to be sent only to specified recipients, could inadvertently be disclosed to others.

I just got off the phone with past Pulitzer Prize winner and National Geographic photographer Jay Dickman, who was on the road in Dallas, presenting another in his series of digital photography workshops. Jay is a long-time fan of CRU storage devices (back to the days of the devices being sold with the WiebeTech label) and is keen to talk about the importance of backup in a photographer's digital workflow.

He agreed that it's as much or more important than the creative process itself and a lot of care and effort needs to go into ensuring that images are protected and looked after. "I'm sure I've told you this before," he said, "but storing images in a digital format is not an archival solution." What Jay is getting at is that you really need to be conscious of what you want to store, keep it catalogued, and stay on top of your disk drives. Who knows how we'll be storing and accessing these images in the future. (Side note: I was cleaning out a closet in the basement this weekend and found a stash of VCR tapes. While I still happen to have a VCR player, it won't be around forever, and I sure will not be keeping one on hand to view taped episodes of kids shows from twenty years ago.)

Jay is one of several professional photographers we're glad to call one of "ours" as he trusts his work--which in turn, is quite often that of his clients such as National Geographic--to his ToughTech Duo in the field, as well as several CRU RTX devices in his home studio.

The image of the ToughTech Duo was shot for us by Jay, on location in Antarctica.

A good friend of mine, Jeff, is a PC modder. He tricks out PCs, turning creative ideas for the cases into high-performance machines that, at first glance, you wouldn’t recognize as a computer. He periodically enters them into contests at LAN events in Portland, and I’m always amazed at what he creates. You can view the step-by-step process, and his project archive, at his blog. You can see his most recent build here.

Jeff also has a sophisticated home entertainment network, where he has a vast collection of TV shows and movies in HD. Yes, the amount of hard drive space required for that collection is enormous. We’re talking over 20TB.

Yesterday, when we launched our new CRU® DataPort® 41, this reminded me of Jeff and his huge movie collection. This might be a perfect product for him, and people like him, who have lots and lots of data on their system. They could use bare drives to back up their data and increase their storage, instead of continuing to just add more enclosed drives. The DataPort 41 gives you the convenience of four independent drives in a single bay, with the flexibility to use whatever drive you want in there. You can simply swap out the bare drives as needed.

The DataPort 41 holds four removable 2.5-inch hard drives – either SATA or SAS—in a single, standard 5.25-inch computer bay.

Open a drive bay by pushing a button to easily add, remove, or swap a drive or SSD. No need to open the computer case or remove the DataPort 41.

The DataPort 41 is a performance dream as it lets each drive operate at a fast 6Gbps.

There’s more detail on the product page if you’re interested in learning more.

If you haven’t already heard, Target, and its security auditor, Trustwave, have been sued over the data breach that occurred during last year’s Christmas shopping season.