Agreed completely, if they weren't forced to disclose it, they wouldn't. And I know it's been going on for longer than we know about, which just annoys me even further. Good on California, though.
As an aside, what's your take on
this?Saw that earlier. No way to fully guard against brain dead users who write their password down though. Also, I'd like to look at it and see if it can be brute forced. People are really
horrible about picking bad passwords. I have a program to keep track of the dozens of passwords I use regularly. I use the password generator in FireFox to generate good ones. It's the only way to go. I'll be interested in seeing if Bruce Schneier has anything good to say about Seagate's system. 3DES should be pretty strong. I suspect the user will be the weak link with this.
Also, what do you do about backing up your data? Another issue might be if there is anything that ties the drive to the motherboard. That would mean that if you fry the board, you lose your data that would otherwise be recoverable.