The Floppy Lives
Ever since SyJets and Zips started pumping megabytes of data to removable disks, the floppy's market position has seemed a little precarious. No longer. Sony and Fujifilm have developed the HiFD floppy system, which reads and writes to a new breed of 200-Mbyte, 3.5-inch disks and is backward-compatible with current-generation floppies.
Release: spring '98. Sony/Fujifilm: (800) 352-7669, on the Wb at www.fujifilm.com.
Cookie Crumbler
When you register at a Web site, you often cough up a lot more than your username and password. Cookies suck information from your hard drive. And lists of email addresses are often bought and sold, exposing site members to spam purveyors.
These intrusions have gotten so bad that Net-savvy surfers make up fake identities every time they log on to a new site. Now, Lucent's Personalized Web Assistant (lpwa.com:8000/) does the deception for you.
When a site asks for username, password, or email address, enter Backslash-U, Backslash-P, or Backslash-@, and an LPWA proxy submits aliases for all of your personal data. The software stores neither your real nor your computed identities, and it erases all of the personal information your browser sends to a Web site by default. Because Lucent's product automatically generates the fake identities, you need remember only one universal password.
What's more, the software conceals aliases with cryptography, so snoopers can't learn information about you. And email sent to an LPWA-generated address is forwarded by a remailer to your real account. Thus, if spammers snag one of your alias addresses, you can terminate it on the fly.
Release: winter '98. Lucent: +1 (908) 582-3000.
Mini Capture
As any Comdex attendee can attest, swapping business cards can be a wallet-busting annoyance. DynaFirm thinks it has the answer. The company's new product, CardJet, is a portable business-card reader that scans up to 200 cards at a time and dumps the data directly into a PalmPilot.
Release: March. DynaFirm: +1 (505) 661-6044.
This article originally appeared in the February issue of Wired magazine.
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