In case you are wondering, this has nothing to do with the U2 concert being shown on HDNet tonight!
Last month I was in a Best Buy store shopping for a new 1GB USB flash drive. Trying to decide which one to get, I noticed that some of them had a U3 logo. I've never heard of U3 until then! I did some reading on the Internet and discovered that there is a whole new world of flash devices and programs designed for them out there! It's called U3.
What's U3?
In a nutshell, U3 is a new standard for flash drives and for designing programs that allows running software directly from a flash drive without installing anything on your computer. Basically you can carry all your programs, data, settings, and even your entire desktop environment with you on a key-chain! This standard is now embraced by all major flash drive manufacturers, including SanDisk, Memorex, Verbatim, etc.
Remember DOS times?
If you are as old as I am, you may remember good old DOS days, when it was possible to carry your favorite programs on a floppy disk and run programs directly from that disk. No installation programs to run, no DLLs to copy, no registry settings to mess with! Just insert the floppy disk and start the program from it. Well, guess what? Those times are coming back! At a new level: the "floppy disk" size is now measured in GB, not KB...
Two logical drives instead of one!
U3 concepts are pretty simple. First of all, when you connect a U3 token to the USB port of you computer, it is recognized not as one drive, but as two drives: as a traditional removable disk and also as a read-only CD drive that has special U3 Launchpad software on it. Why CD drive? Very simple: Windows has an auto-run feature for CD drives. This allows the Launcher program start immediately, and then, in turn, it can start other U3 programs that you may choose to install on your U3 flash drive.
Programs that run from the flash drive
Second, the programs must be specially designed (or packaged) for U3. Basically they should be able to run from a flash drive directly, save all data on the flash drive, without leaving anything on the host computer and without messing with its registry. The software license should also be bound to the drive, not to any particular computer. On the www.u3.com website you can find tons of free and commercial programs designed for U3, including FireFox browser, Mozilla Thunderbird, McAfee antivirus, to name a few. Checkout that website if you haven't yet and run a quick demo on their front page. Pretty cool!
New security concerns
Well, this is all great and exciting: I do like this new technology and all the convenience it brings. However, I do have one big security concern about this U3 technology (perhaps due to my lack of knowledge, really hope so). It seems to me that U3 makes it easier than ever to spread computer viruses! In the past, when someone connected a flash drive to my PC, it was relatively safe: unless I run any program from the drive, there was no risk to get any infection from that drive. Well, with U3 this is no longer the case: when a flash drive is attached, it now automatically launches some programs installed on it. How do I know that those programs are not infected? From now on, I will think twice before letting anyone stick a flash drive in my PC!
The drive I've been using is a 1GB Memorex. As most U3 drives it comes with bundled U3 software, including Migo (for personalizing computing environment), Thunderbird email client and McAfee Anti-Virus. Except for the above concern, I really like it!
If you've been using a U3 drive too, please share your thoughts and comments!
