Oh! Gizmo

By Andrew Liszewski

I guess I lucked out at university since I didn’t have to share a dorm room with anyone, but if you get to school in September and happen to find yourself hilariously mismatched with a sketchy roommate, you can at least ensure your expensive new laptop (or other slim gear) will be safe. The DormVault, available from ThinkGeek for $79.99, is a rugged steel laptop case that’s designed to go nowhere. Instead, you’re supposed to use it to lock up your laptop, up to 17-inches in size, and thanks to an included set of bolts and mounting brackets it can be permanently attached to a large piece of furniture (like a bed) that isn’t going to get pinched while you’re at class. At the least it looks more secure than those useless braided steel security cables.

[ DormVault Laptop Safe ] VIA [ Coolest Gadgets ]

By Andrew Liszewski

I’m not a fan of storing my credit card info with any of the online stores I frequent, though I can see the convenience of doing so. At this point I’ve just got my card number and other details memorized (expiration date etc.) but the QwicKey seems like a decent alternative for those who don’t trust their memory. It’s a USB card swiper that can be used to autofill credit card forms with just a swipe of your card. Convenient! But it also comes with custom software and it’s own security card that can be used to store and protect everything from login and password info to personal data for automatically filling out other types of contact forms and even bookmarked sites.

The card reader itself sells for just $49.95 but that includes a 1-year subscription to the company’s online service which gives you secure access to all of your data no matter what computer you’re using. After that the yearly fee is $29.95 plus another $29.95 for any additional users/profiles you want to add. And you were worried about some hacker robbing you.

[ QwicKey ] VIA [ The Red Ferret Journal ]

By Andrew Liszewski

Can’t fall asleep without knowing your cold steel is just an arm’s reach away? Well the BedBunker should put your mind at rest. It’s basically a 1,300 lb strongbox made of 10 gauge steel designed to replace the box spring under a twin, queen or king size mattress. It’s fireproof up to 1533 degrees based on their testing, which should make it ideal for protecting important documents, jewelry and other valuables, but the company has instead positioned it as an effective way to protect your vast collection of firearms, up to 32 rifles or 70 hand guns. Yeah, apparently there’s a demographic of people who have 70 hand guns but can’t think of a way to protect them…

Prices range from $2,200 for the twin sized BedBunker, up to $4,000 for the king sized double safe.

[ BedBunker ] VIA [ Uncrate ]

By Chris Scott Barr

After the movie Home Alone came out, I’m pretty sure that every kid at the time (myself included) wanted to setup all kinds of booby-traps for their room, fort or whatever. Well we’re all grown-up now, and we can actually afford cool things like that. Take for instance this anti-burglar doormat.

Basically what you’ve got is a doormat that is really freaking sticky. You’re supposed to leave this on the inside of your door after you leave your home or business. If someone tries to break in, they’ll step on the mat and get stuck. Sure, they’ll eventually free themselves, but the idea is that they’ll get frustrated and leave. Of course on the other hand that might just make them angry and want to tear up the place a bit, in addition to robbing you. These will be released in Japan sometime this fall. There’s no word on a release for any other locations.

[ Rakuten ] VIA [ CrunchGear ]

By Andrew Liszewski

A couple of years ago General Motors added a new feature to its OnStar system that allowed law enforcement to remotely slow a stolen vehicle in order to prevent a dangerous high-speed car chase. And yesterday OnStar expanded its Stolen Vehicle Assistance toolset even further with the addition of another new feature called Remote Ignition Block which pretty much does just that.

An OnStar ‘Advisor’ can send a signal to a subscriber’s stolen vehicle which will prevent the vehicle from restarting once the ignition is turned off. Now the feature doesn’t guarantee your ride will get recovered or even prevent it from being stolen in the first place, but like the Stolen Vehicle Slowdown option it can be used to prevent a high speed pursuit and hinder a thief from making a clean getaway with your vehicle. Remote Ignition Block will be available on select GM 2009 and 2010 models in both the U.S. and Canada.

[ OnStar Stolen Vehicle Assistance ]

By Evan Ackerman

While sheer paranoia isn’t the best thing to have dictating your gadget purchases, there are some instances where paying a small premium for that extra level of comfort and security might make sense. Freecom’s Hard Drive Secure is a run of the mill external HD, except that you can’t access the data on it without swiping an encrypted RFID card the size of a credit card past the drive. Swipe the card again and the drive locks itself. It’s not too terribly expensive at $120 for a 500 gig drive, although $410 for a 2TB drive it just a little crazy.

What Freecom doesn’t make clear is just how the encryption on the drive works… It sort of sounds like while the encrypted keycard locks and unlocks the drive, the data on the drive itself is not actually encrypted. This sort of system might keep your porn stash safe from your kid brother, but anyone with a mediocre amount of computer experience (which your kid brother probably has) will just remove the drive from the case and access it directly. Even having the locking system on the drive itself won’t thwart someone who is casually determined. And irrespective of the encryption on the drive, having to swipe your card a second time to lock the thing is just stupid. It should be set up so that if the RFID card leaves, the drive locks itself. And of course, I won’t even get started on the security flaws in RFID.

So yeah, there are some instances where paying a small premium for an extra level of comfort and security might make sense, but this is probably not one of them.

[ Bit-Tech ] VIA [ Ubergizmo ]

By David Ponce

It’s kind of hard for flash drive manufacturers to stand out these days. They’ll try anything. So when they’re not making them out to look like a spoonful of cereal or kitten ears, they sometimes give them higher capacity or make them really freaking small. The IronKey S200’s claim to an undisclosed chunk of your wallet is security. It’s the only flash drive on the market to meet FIPS 140-2, Level 3 validation for cryptographic modules mandated by government agencies. That means it’s really, really secure so it should at least make you feel like your porn your sensitive documents are safe from prying eyes.

It comes in 16GB capacity and is compatible with Windows XP, 2000 and Vista as well as Mac OS X and Linux. There’s no word on price or availability yet.

[ Product Page ] VIA [ Electronista ]

By Chris Scott Barr

Are you one of the paranoid people out there that’s deathly afraid of someone recovering data off an old CD or hard drive? Sure, if you store sensitive financial records, you aren’t really going to want to just chuck it out without so much as a format. However, you probably won’t need to go so far as to purchase a special tool for destroying all of the data. If you’re bound and determined to obtain such a device, then let me introduce you to the Erase-o-Matic.

This little sucker is going to get rid of your data for good. Rather than physically destroying the media, it uses powerful magnetic waves to do the dirty work. All you have to do is slide your disc, tape or any other magnetic media through the device and toss it in the trash. Since it uses Rare-Earth Magnets, it doesn’t have any need for electricity, which is great, I guess.  So how much will this thing set you back? Just $400. Now you might think that is a rather high price, but you’re wrong. It’s bigger brother (which is needed if you want to destroy your computer’s hard drive) has the really high price, which is $1,500.

[ Erase-o-Matic ] VIA [ RedFerret ]

By Andrew Liszewski

This Manual Hard Drive Destroyer kind of reminds me of those hand-cranked quarter stamping machines you see all over touristy towns like Las Vegas. But this contraption doesn’t leave your hard drives imprinted with an image of the Luxor. Oh no. Once you’ve inserted your drive, using one of the drive height adapters as needed, you simply turn the handle 8 full rotations and the hard drive will be bent in half ‘approximately’ 90 degrees. And that mangling will pretty much guarantee the platters won’t be able to spin any more, preventing unwanted users from accessing its data.

Now I’m not 100% sure if the data is completely destroyed via this method, as there has to be some government agency with the ability to read even a bent drive, but in a pinch it could at least buy you some time before an incriminating file is recovered.

[ The Model MHDD - Manual Hard Drive Destroyer ] VIA [ The Red Ferret Journal ]