The Ultimate Gift

The Ultimate Gift, a novel written in five days by Jim Stovall, has sold over 4 million copies with no promotion or advertising.

Essentially a fable that teaches the right way to hand down money is to hand down values as well, the book has become a favorite of trust officers, estate planners and other financial advisors who bought it for clients.

Forbes reports that it's now become a film starring James Garner that will be released on March 9.

You're Pulling My Legacy.
Backers of a new film, The Ultimate Gift, hope it will make you laugh, cry and hire a financial planner.

New Security from USB mass storage

RSA podcast speaks with Larry Hamid, CTO, MXI Security, about how their USB portable security devices are used for strong authentication, as a biometric device, to carry digital identities, and more.

MXI Security works with RSA to deliver a portable 3 factor authentication for secure remote access that is technically interoperable with RSA SecurID technology.

New Security from USB mass storage

Portable Security Devices evolved from two origins; flash drives and security tokens. Flash drive vendors starting adding security enhancements, such as biometric authentication and encrypted storage, to their products in an attempt to differentiate themselves in a competitive and price sensitive market. On the other side, security token vendors have recognized the need for more speed, portability and capacity than what is available on a conventional smart card or token. The end result is a type of device that has the security of a smart card with the power and portability of a flash drive. These devices will likely have significant impact to the security industry.

High-end Portable Security Devices can carry and assert digital identities, provide powerful cryptographic services, strong authentication, secure storage, and have management interfaces that allow them to be easily deployed in an enterprise environment. A single device can satisfy multiple security needs of an enterprise, including public key cryptography for e-mail signing and file encryption, digital identities for network logins and single sign on, portable authentication for remote access, as well as secure storage of confidential information.

Drowning in Data

In 1990, a typical gigabyte of storage cost about $20,000.  Today it's down to less than $1.

Which is a good thing since the Days of officially drowning in data is almost upon us.

Tech analyst calculates that 161 exabytes were generated in 2006, that's about 161 billion GB, and that amount is expected to rise fast.

What is 161 exabytes?
161 Exabytes of digital data was generated in 2006, says researcher IDC. That's about 168 million terabytes, or roughly the equivalent of:
36 billion digital movies
43 trillion digital songs
1 million digital copies of every book in the Library of Congress
Source: IDC, UC Berkeley, USA TODAY research

Per person
About 213 gigabytes of information was generated for each person in North America in 2006.
Source: IDC, CIA World Factbook, USA TODAY research

How long will it last?
Expected shelf life of storage devices:
Low-end hard drive: 5 years
CD/DVD: 20 years
Source: IDC
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Print photographs from the 1800s are still viewable today. But floppy disks from the 1980s are very difficult to read.

As digital technology continues to evolve, there's a risk that "your great-grandkids won't be able to see your wedding pictures," Kay says.

To preserve data, businesses and consumers will probably have to periodically copy it from obsolete storage drives onto newer ones, he says.

And backups will become increasingly important. Consumers often store their digital music and photos on a single PC, EMC's Lewis says. But as that data collection grows, "People are going to have to start realizing that they have thousands of dollars tied up in digital information," he says.