Follow that car

According to a recent survey, Black Cab passengers in London have left more than 60,000 devices ranging from mobile phones, MP3 players, USB memory sticks, and even laptops in cabs in the past six months.

Quite a shocking statistic, particularly as many of those devices carry personal information and it would be extremely easy for a identity thief to extract the information. But what can be done to guard against such losses when we are all forced to carry around a plethora of devices such as mobile phones, laptops and USB memory sticks and flash cards?

After each one of the data slip ups mentioned earlier, a word was bandied about quite frequently – encryption.

Ciphers

Encryption works by scrambling the information stored on a device so that it can only be decrypted using a specific password. These days encryption is so advanced that unless the thief/discoverer has a couple of supercomputers lying around their home, they aren’t going to be able to access your encrypted information.

Encryption isn’t just reserved for spies and military types there are plenty of free, military grade encryption utilities out there that are simple enough for anyone to use.

For those who use USB memory sticks or even SD memory cards or microSD memory cards, I would even go as far as saying encryption is a necessity.

Misplaced information

People often underestimate the dangers of carrying around USB memory sticks (also known as Pen Drives) and flash cards, as this expert points out:

“If it gets into the wrong hands of a criminal, hacker or opportunist, losing your mobile device can have serious implications, so our advice is always encrypt it and password protect it to stop it ever being accessed by anyone other than yourself.”
BBC News | Michael Callahan – Credant Technologies

One of the easiest ways of encrypting your information is to use a piece of software like TrueCrypt. This free and open source software allows you to encrypt an entire hard drive, USB memory sticks or flash cards.

Simply download and install the software, insert your USB flash memory stick or flash memory card and open the software. When presented with a choice of what drives to encrypt, just select your chosen USB memory stick or flash memory card and then the type of encryption, ranging from the standard US NSA quality encryption to even tougher encryption.

The software has a Traveller Mode, which, once set up, allows you to then use the device in another PC. It also works on-the-fly so you can use the USB stick or memory as normal, the software will encrypt/decrypt as necessary.

The software is amazingly easy to use, a step by step tutorial can be found here. All this of course begs the question, if it were that easy, why doesn’t (or didn’t) the Government use encryption?

Tip of the tongue

There are downsides to using encryption. With most applications if you forget the password you can simply click the ‘Forgot Password’ link or reset it. If you encrypt a USB memory drive or flash card and forget the password, well, then you have just lost all the information on that drive, permanently. There is no way to get the information back without the password.

It isn’t the end of the world though, you can also re-format the drive or delete the container, and start again, this time using a password that is memorable. Avoid using something that seems memorable at the time, but when needed you can’t for the life of you recall it.

This could be where a site such as Password Chart comes in handy, it allows the creation of completely random and seemingly meaningless passwords from memorable words. For instance using Horizon and Memory we are able to create the password – jD_6jD4c8@n^P

Apart from the inconvenience of losing access to your own information, and feeling like a bit of an idiot for forgetting your own password, there is another reason why you may not want to forget your encryption password.

The long arm of the law

Since 1st October 2007 it became an offence to fail to hand over encryption passwords to the police, if they request them. Being unable to remember the password is not classed as a plausible defence.

Of course the average person is unlikely to have their USB memory stick or Flash memory card confiscated by the police, but the two year prison sentence mean that it is worth bearing in mind.

Better safe…

Most people will probably assume that they do not need to use encryption, or even that it is too much hassle. But like using car alarms and house alarms, a minor inconvenience can quickly become part of an everyday routine.

Your information and privacy are extremely important, once they are out there in the hands of criminals and hackers, there is no way to get that information back again. The safest bet is to make sure that the information that falls into their hands is unusable, and the only way to do that is encryption.

Perhaps the most common ways that on-line shoppers are exploited is in regards to faulty or returned goods.

The Restocking Fee

One of the most common tactics by unscrupulous traders is the infamous restocking fee. This is where, when a customer decides to return an item for some reason other than it being faulty, as per the Distance Selling Regulations, they are charged a restocking fee or an administration charge, typically 10% of the item cost, some companies even charge as much 20-25%!

This can add up, as many companies also expect their customers to bear the costs of returning unwanted items. Take for example our 8GB SD card, priced at £11.49 (£13.50 incl VAT) plus £1.50 delivery means that it would cost £15 to have it delivered to your door.

Now if a customer were to decide to return this item to us it would cost them just £1.50 and they’d get back their full £15. If we were one of these unscrupulous traders, it would cost somewhere between £3-£5.

One of our major competitors charges a restocking fee of 10%. An 8GB card from them is about £21, plus £1.99 postage. Simply returning the item to them, as customers are entitled to do by law, would set a customer back almost £5.

Such fees are an easy way of making money for on-line retailers, a restocking fee either discourages customers from returning goods, as they would then be out of pocket and have nothing to show for it, or at worst for the retailer, it is money for old rope.

The Law

I have used the word unscrupulous here, but such actions are in fact illegal. This extract from the Distance Selling Regulations explains:

If you want the consumer to return the goods and to pay for that return, you must make it clear in the contract and as part of the required written information – see paragraph 3.10. If the consumer then fails to return the goods, or sends them at your expense, you can charge them the direct cost to you of the return, even if you have already refunded the consumer’s money. You are not allowed to make any further charges, such as a restocking charge or an administration charge.

The law is unambiguous on this, it is illegal for companies to charge consumers (it’s a different matter for businesses) a restocking or administration fee. The question then of course is why do they do it?

Unfortunately it is a simple answer of – because they can.

Terms and Conditions

Most companies place this sort of information in their terms and conditions, and unfortunately few consumers take the time to read them, and who can blame them? It is only after a customer has paid and when they want to return an item, that they find out about such things. By this time the restocking or administration charge will come straight out of any refund.

The only recourse a customer has at this point is Trading Standards and the Small Claims court. Naturally with the law on the side of the customer it is a sure fire certainty that the customer will win.

Unfortunately it is not as clear cut as that, most people won’t bother going through all the hassle of taking a company to court to claim money back and unfortunately the minimum amount that you can claim through the small claims court is £15. Few items will have a restocking fee that large, so this means that basically such companies can get away with it.

The only real option a consumer has is to avoid such companies in the first place. Always read the Returns information or FAQs before buying from a company on-line. At the first mention of any such fees, direct your browser elsewhere.

Faulty Goods

Another shady tactic used by on-line retailers is with faulty goods, where they ask the consumer to take the matter up with the manufacturer, usually after the customer has had the goods for a certain period, normally 28-30 days.

Unfortunately there is no way to avoid this pre-sale, other than to read reviews about the company before hand and see what others have had to say about their service. This is part of the reason that Horizon Flash Memory has joined the Comodo UserTrust scheme.

Once again this palming off of the customer onto the manufacturer contravenes the law, this time the Sale of Goods Act, which clearly states that your contract is with the company that you handed your money over to, not the manufacturer. This is true of any retailer, whether the item was purchased on-line or on the high street.

The reason that some companies use this tactic is once again money; this time they are trying to keep hold of the money taken from the customer. If a product is faulty, they will either have to repair it, replace it or give the customer a refund. By deflecting this onto the manufacturer, the retailer gets to keep all of the money. The manufacturer is under no obligation to give the customer his money back, and may even charge to repair the goods.

Again the only options are Trading Standards and the Courts, but as more money is likely to be involved than claiming back the restocking fee, the Small Claims court is probably the best option. The court would likely order the retailer to fulfil its obligations under the Sale of Goods Act and also refund the customer his court costs.

Once Bitten, Twice Shy

The most important thing to remember in all of this is that once a retailer has ripped you off in this manner, never to shop there again. The internet offers an abundance of choice, which means that there are plenty of honest and trustworthy traders, such as Horizon Flash Memory and many others where a customer can spend his money.

Also take advantage of review sites, not just for when things go wrong but also when you are happy with a service, this will help show that good customer service can be rewarding.

Technorati Tags: SD cards, Online Shopping, Retailers, Horizon Flash Memory, 8GB SD, SD, DSR, Scam, Watchdog

“We’re not thinking about fighting Sony, but about how many people we can get to play games. The thing we’re thinking about most is not portable systems, consoles, and so forth, but that we want to get new people playing games.”

I don’t think even he could have foreseen just how popular it would become and just what a difference the Nintendo Wii would make to the gaming world.

The machine is unbelievably popular, and as he noted, not just in the traditional market. We now see Nintendo Wii’s in the homes of the traditional gamers parents, their grandparents and even in nursing homes. Something that was inconceivable before the Wii came along.

Secure Digital Cards

The Wii isn’t much compared to the other next generation consoles, in fact it barely measures up specification wise to the XBox, let alone the XBox 360. It is also lacking in the storage department, only having 512MB of storage (the Xbox had about 10GB), but it does allow owners to add pictures and files from their own SD cards.

A smart move by Nintendo, the Xbox 360 uses it’s own propriety memory cards, but the SD card has become the de facto standard for flash memory cards in recent years, with most people having several cards from digital cameras, PDAs, mobile phones and now even sat-navs, lying around the home. Not to mention the fact that they can also use the newer miniSD and microSD cards as well with an adaptor. SD cards are a very cheap form of storage, allowing users to more than double the storage capacity of their Wii for less than £3.

Secure Digital High Capacity Cards

Sadly, despite coming to market several months after SDHC, the Nintendo Wii does not support SDHC cards and this has caused some issues for those looking to expand their Nintendo Wii’s storage capacity.

SDHC itself is something of a murky area, many manufacturers and retailers do not do enough to make customers aware of what SDHC is, why it is different from standard SD, or even that it is different.

SDHC is a completely different standard to standard SD and is not backwards compatible. There is more information on SDHC on the Horizon Web Blog – The Mystery Behind SDHC. But in a nutshell, unless your camera, mobile phone, sat-nav or PDA specifically says that it supports SDHC cards, it more than likely does not.

So although those new 4GB, 8GB and even 16GB and 32GB SD cards may seem like an excellent way of perhaps recording more video or taking thousands of photographs, rather than just hundreds, unfortunately for most people, particulary those with devices a year or two old, it just isn’t possible.

If you’re in any doubt as to whether your device is SDHC compatible, feel free to contact us at Horizon Flash Memory, or even comment here with the make and model of your device and we’d be happy to let you know.

Conflicting Advice

Nintendo Wii owners, like most people it seems, have difficulty finding out whether their device is SDHC compatible and then which cards to purchase. A simple search for ‘Nintendo Wii compatible SD cards‘, turns up all sorts of conflicting advice.

Even the Nintendo Wii website itself makes no mention of SDHC cards, simply stating that the Wii is only compatible with SD cards of 2GB or less.

At Horizon Flash Memory, we can give simple clear advice on this issue, SDHC cards are not compatible with the Nintendo Wii, no cards more than 2GB in capacity will work. Needless to say all of our SD cards of 2GB or less are 100% compatible with the Nintendo Wii – and this is guaranteed.

Cheap As Chips

There is an upside however to not being able to use the newer, higher capacity SD cards. As the capacities get higher and higher the prices at the bottom end of the capacity scale get cheaper and cheaper.

If you shop around you can find lower capacity SD cards at unbelievably low prices. Strangely, there are also places that sell 512MB SD cards for between £8-£10 each! So as always it is important to shop around to get the best deals.

And while our 1GB and 2GB SD cards are not quite as cheap as chips, at £2.99 and £4.49 respectively, they are both cheaper than cod and chips, and offer fantastic value.

Technorati Tags: Horizon Flash Memory, Nintendo, Wii, Nintendo Wii, SD cards, SDHC, Secure Digital Cards, microSD, Flash Memory, Memory Cards, Xbox