Neowin.net

Thanks to Bob D for the heads up ;)

The European Parliament has [as was expected] voted in favour of controversial data retention regulations.

The vote reverses the Parliament's previous opposition to granting wide ranging surveillance powers to police and security services. And it has been slammed by civil liberties group zas a move to Big Brother surveillance on Europeans. The amendments to the EU Communications Data Protection Directive, put forward by the EPP/conservative group and backed by the PSE/socialist group, were agreed, in spite of a fierce opposition from left-leaning groups in the European Parliament.

Ilka Schroeder MEP, shadow rapporteur of the United European Left Group, in voting in the measures Western democrats has surpassed the "surveillance achievements of Eastern Germany's former Stasi".

"From today on, the fundamental right to privacy is fundamentally questioned for everyone using electronic means of communication - no matter whether they are telephone, Internet or fax," said Schroeder.

"The unlimited retention of communication data, as it is laid down in Article 15.1 of the directive voted today, paves the way for unlimited access to all kinds of personal communication. Data retention means: communication data will no longer be intercepted exclusively at the time the communication takes place, but may be analysed years later retrospectively," she added.

News source: The Register
View: MEPs vote for Big Brother

With iBoot, each PC continues to use its own processor and other hardware, avoiding competition with other machines for shared processing power on a mainframe. iBoot machines are simply assigned storage space on a specific remote disk or shared space on a larger remote drive, allowing people to maintain their own data. The PC's user continues to access or store files as if nothing has changed.

"It's your regular PC. You just have a disk that is physically distant from your PC," Meth said. "The disk looks like it's local."

Companies with typical office environments could use iBoot to save on software upgrades by updating the software on the centrally located drives, instead of fiddling with each PC individually, Meth said. Meanwhile, larger companies, or possibly universities, with call centers could create networks of computer terminals that are pre-programmed to run off of a specific disk that contains selected applications and data.

The technology can be retrofitted to existing PCs for the price of an iSCSI adaptor. Its main components are the adaptor and a software update.

And because the iSCSI standard is backed by several large companies, including Cisco, Hewlett-Packard and IBM, and because it uses the most common computer-networking standard, Internet Protocol, many believe it will eventually become cheaper than current high-speed networking hardware and standards, including the Fibre Channel standard, which uses fiber optic cables.

As a result, adding iBoot wouldn't cost much more than adding a new Ethernet card to a PC.

This, IBM says, along with improvements in computer network performance and the rise of network attached storage, make it a good bet that iBoot will get beyond the research stage and see the light of day.

Over time, iBoot could also influence the design of corporate PCs at IBM.

Manufacturers like IBM could potentially build diskless PCs and diskless severs. By removing the drive, Big Blue could fit more blade servers into a single rack, increasing the computing power in the rack. The company could also potentially create lower-cost, more easily managed PCs.

While it would likely aim at medium-sized businesses to start, IBM sees potential for iBoot in notebooks and consumer PCs.

Eventually, manufacturers could build notebooks with small hard drives used mainly to store temporary files while a user is working remotely, Meth said. Then that user could connect to a disk via a network, once he or she has access to one, in order to update files.

Similarly, consumers might have a small local drive for storage of some data and then connect to a remote storage provider that charged a fee to host their data.

This would reverse some of the trends seen in high-end consumer PCs, which typically come with 80GB to 120GB hard drives to accommodate storing lots of digital photos and music as well as video. With faster networks and technologies like iBoot, consumers could store such data remotely.

IBM would not say if it is working to offer the technology as a standalone product or in future PCs. But iSCSI cards will hit the market shortly.