Plugged In: The Fight to Be Your Web Home

Portal Madness

Illustration: Gordon StuderThe Buzz: Remember when AOL, Lycos, MSN, Yahoo, and a bunch of other companies tried to turn their sites into the one destination you'd need to get started on the Web? The portal ethos is back in a big way, and these days it's about more than just content--the big names are offering applications as well. AOL took a left turn a few months ago when it decided to offer its security suite and many other formerly paid applications for free. Microsoft is launching piles of online apps under its Live brand. And Google has been on quite the spending spree: YouTube. JotSpot. Writely. They're all now part of Google, and we're left waiting to see how Yahoo might respond. What's going on here?

Bottom Line: Craziness, if you ask me. The whole portal approach was about persuading users to stick around longer. But the technology that's making Web 2.0 great today is all about interoperability and portability--popping into and out of sites quickly and efficiently. Bit of a disconnect there, don't you think?

DRM Explosion

The Buzz: Need another reason not to buy (or rent) compressed digital music online? Look no further than the recent mini-explosion of incompatible digital rights management schemes tied to new players. SanDisk players pushed by Best Buy use Real's new Rhapsody DNA technology. Microsoft's Zune packs a proprietary DRM--a departure from the firm's own PlaysForSure system (which the rest of the non-Apple market still uses). And of course, Apple continues to keep the FairPlay DRM exclusive to its iPods.

Bottom Line: Here's the real reason the CD isn't dead: If you want to keep all of your digital music portable, you have to burn lots of discs so that you can re-rip DRM-free versions of your downloaded tunes.

Auto-Encryption

The Buzz: Encryption remains one of the safest ways to secure critical data. Unfortunately, very few people (myself included) actually use it. Seagate and Hitachi plan to change that this year with lines of notebook drives that encrypt your data for you by using built-in hardware, which means there should be no performance hit. Seagate's Momentus 5400 FDE.2 drives employ a technology called DriveTrust to encrypt the entire disk without any user interaction beyond maintaining a password. In the second half of 2007, Hitachi has plans to release a 250GB, full-disk-encrypting, hybrid laptop drive.

Bottom Line: Awesome idea. Now if this thing could back itself up, swap itself for a bigger drive when I fill it, and take itself down to the recycling center when I'm done with it, I'd be all set.

You can contact PC World Senior Editor Eric Dahl at eric_dahl@pcworld.com.