This post is primarily for my friend NightOwl from the High Rad Board, but of course, everyone is free
and welcome to join in. It's here because it's largely Off Topic for the High Rad board, and I wouldn't want to be criticised for OT discussions!
NightOwl,
I think it was you who accused (criticised?) me of (for) being a paranoid conspiracy theorist, which I accepted as a compliment.
Now I have some more weight to add to the debate.
"
El Pescador" challenged me to read
"The Lexus and the Olive Tree" by Thomas Friedman (revised edition 2000). Yesterday I took up his challange and started reading.
I thought this would interest / challenge you. According to Mr Friedman (p11), Andy Grove (the Chairman of intel), took up an insight originally offered by Joseph Schumpeter (a former Austrian Minister of Finance and Harvard Business School professor), and wrote a book by the same title:
"Only the Paranoid Survive"
http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/bios/grove/paranoid.htmAlso available on Amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385483821and elsewhere...
Of course I haven't had time to read that book as well, but I already understand the sentiment. In the Brave New World of Globalization, only those who are looking over their shoulders to see what "the other guys are doing" will keep up, because, driven by the Silicon Revolution, the pace of change in the world is accelerating... New Technologies rapidly replace old, obsolete ones. If you're selling an obsolete technology, very quickly no one will want to know.
Here's to Paranoia!
Now to conspiracy:
Every organisation (with any sense) keeps its best ideas secret until it can develop (conspiratorially, among its employees) and release, valuable products exploiting those ideas (and even then, it will do what it can to keep the best ideas secret, within the product).
The world today runs on secrets (but then, it always did...) Why else do we spend so much time thinking and talking about security algorithms - MD5, DES, PGP, etc...
A famous? monkey / chimpanzee? experiment showed that even apes could understand and demonstrate the value of secrecy, thus:
A bunch of bananas was suspended from the ceiling of a cage. A few crates were placed around the walls of the cage. The subject ape (a chimp?) was introduced to the cage, and spied the bananas, which s/he could not reach from the floor. After a while looking and thinking, the chimp? figured it could stack the crates to reach the bananas, and began to do so. At that point some other chimps were released into the cage. As soon as the chimp saw the other chimps coming, it immediately took all the crates down and pretended it was "just minding its own business", ignoring the bananas hanging from the ceiling.
I don't know what happened next (End of the Experiment?), but only a paranoid chimp would think "Huh, that chimp's up to something! What's that chimp doing with those crates?" and realise what s/he had figured out.
One way to "uncover" those ideas, so that one can trade on or leapfrog them, is to be able to interpolate, or read between the lines; another to extrapolate, imagine the logical extensions of what little you do already know...
In either case, it's about filling in what's missing, building on something you know, to uncover or discover something you can't quite be sure of.
That's what I was doing in my analysis of Norton Ghost and its crap documentation.
You see, the truth about the "fingerprint" / "DiskID" argument must be that Symantec have introduced this whole concept of fingerprinting / diskID'ing, for one fundamental purpose:
Licensing Control.
[Those interested please see the post entitled:
"Ghost 2003 build 793 Broken options (NOPtions)"
in the High Radiation board for the FULL argument.
http://radified.com/cgi-bin/YaBB/YaBB.cgi?board=Full_Rad_Board;action=display;nu... ]
They have tried to make it sound like its something else, there to "Enhance" the product by giving you some (maybe useful) information about when the disk was cloned, but really, it's there to enable them to convict people for breaches of their EULA. There is no genuine good reason to MARK a source Hard Disk before creating a Backup Image of it. (If Ghost really needed to be able to re-identify the disk at some point, there are plenty of other ways, including the Hardware Serial Number, the Volume Serial Number, and others...)
Does PKZIP / WinZIP mark (modify) your files as its own before it archives or backs them up? Does MS Backup? Does any other backup program? At best, they create separate, independent catalogs of what's to be (or been) backed up, not MARK the files or disks. In some / many cases, (no doubt) they LOCK the disks or files, but that's entirely different. That doesn't CHANGE the Data being backed up, just takes temporary control of it, as appropriate.
But Symantec has, for reasons of its own, tried to hide this fact behind misinformation, falsely referring to the process as "Identifying" when it's really "Marking".
In my opinion, by doing so, they seriously damaged their credibility and the value of their product, but hey, that's their business.
And, of course, it's also about paranoia. They think (rightly) that people will breach their Licence Agreements, and they want to be able to do something about it. Pity they don't just make that clear and state that if you need to clone to multiple machines, you need to buy a different licence.
I say: Let the Truth Prevail.
IMO: Because it insists on WRITING to ALL your Hard Drives (even ones it's possibly never going to Image) before it does ANYTHING, Symantec Norton Ghost SUX!
But Hey, Symantec, no doubt, will survive!
And thank God that we are not all paranoid conspiracy theorists!
Bb