LaCie Rugged Safe Hard Drive Does Multiple Encryption

By Geoff Duncan Published May 26, 2010

Image used with permission by copyright holder

For some folks, keeping data away from prying eyes isn’t just a consummation devoutly to be wish’d, it’s an outright business necessity, particularly for folks who work with confidential data under NDA or who don’t want their personal or financial information wandering the Internet if a hard drive should be stolen. Peripheral and accessory maker La Cie is looking to address that market with its Rugged Safe external hard drive: in addition to yet another fetching design from Neil Poulton, the unit features biometric authentication that can enable up to 10 users to access the drive, plus data protection via 128-bit AES hardware encryption: your information is never written to disk in unencrypted form.

“The LaCie Rugged Safe was developed to enable professional or private users to protect their valuable data and intellectual property from theft and unauthorized access,” said LaCie Business Unit manager Erwan Girard, in a statement. “We’ve synthesized a range of technologies to ensure this device is the safest and most mobile storage solution—a real vault for your data.”

Image used with permission by copyright holder

The Rugged Safe external hard drive is bus powered (no external power brick) features USB 2.0 and FireWire 800 interfaces and can be used with Windows XP/Vista/7 as well as Mac OS X 10.5 or newer. It features a shockproof design to cope with the bumps and jolts of the road, but also features biometric authentication using a fingerprint scanner: once configured, users just have to swipe their finger over the scanner to get access to data on the drive. The system supports up to 10 authenticated users. And the authentication is plug-and-play: users don’t need to install software on a host computer to access data. On the disk itself, the unit uses 128-bit AES encryption to protect data, so even if someone swipes the drive, disassembles it, and tries to read your secrets off the platters…all they’d get is gobbledegook.

Recommended Videos

The Rugged Safe external hard drives are available now through LaCie’s online store, with a 500 GB version going for $189.99 and a 1 TB version going for $299.

Former Contributor

Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…

Computing

AI is finding Apple security flaws faster than Apple can sort through them

Apple has limited how many bug reports researchers can keep open as AI tools produce both genuine Mac vulnerabilities and a flood of questionable submissions

Lighting, Architecture, Building

Apple has capped the number of security reports researchers can keep open at once after AI bug hunting put its review process under pressure, according to the Financial Times.

Some submissions describe hallucinated or purely theoretical risks. Others uncover vulnerabilities serious enough to require patches. Bynario told the FT that it found more than 50 possible macOS flaws in three weeks, including a privilege-escalation chain that could give an attacker full control of a Mac.

Computing

Anthropic is paying $1.5 billion over pirated books, but it can still legally cut up purchased ones

The settlement addressed unauthorized ebook downloads, not the destructive scanning of lawfully bought physical copies, a distinction now alarming booksellers

Book, Publication, Indoors

A federal judge has approved Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement over nearly half a million pirated books. The same litigation also protected a more physical method of feeding its AI systems. Anthropic bought print books, removed their bindings, scanned every page and destroyed the originals.

The legal divide came down to acquisition. The settlement covers books downloaded from LibGen and PiLiMi, while the court treated Anthropic’s one-for-one conversion of purchased books into private digital files as fair use. Training AI models on lawfully acquired material was also considered transformative.

Computing

Google Earth’s AI misadventure lasted only a day. It was a tale of dangerous ignorance.

Nuclear reactors, tanks, and historical destruction on a life-like satellite map? Yeah, that's bad.

Nano Banana AI image generator representation.

Technology behemoths are clearly not reading the room, or they are just moving faster than they should when it comes to AI deployment. Google has already stuffed its Gemini AI in every corner of its software stack, from Android to daily productivity tools like Gmail that are used by hundreds of millions of users every day. AI is everywhere. Not all of it is bad, mind you. But in a few places, it just feels forced.

In its latest AI-fication experiment, the company targeted Google Earth. The idea was to let the audience use its Nano Banana 2 AI image generator and make images that can be placed on the map view. On paper, it's a cool idea. What would the Colosseum of Rome look like in your urban neighborhood? Yeah, fun stuff like that.