“Here in Argentina, people call them "Pen drives" […] In Tanzania it is one syllable – Flash - "do you have your flash?" "I'll put it on my flash". In Germany they prefer to say "USB stick"... and what is the difference between a USB key and a USB webkey? Over at Washingtonpost.com Rob Pegoraro is blogging about Computing Vocabulary: Those USB Flash Things and plenty of his readers comment on how they prefer to call these little USB helpers.
The names people used vary all from USB flash memory to thumb drive, USB key, USB memory, USB stick, USB pen drives, memory sticks and many more terms are mentioned. Let us take a closer look at these names - for they are more than mere wordings, they define different technical concepts and solutions! Understandably enough different names have emerged in different geographical zones. As to our own experience, customers in for example German and Switzerland usually prefer to call them “USB Sticks” or “USB Memory Sticks”, whereas customers in Spain would refer to their USB devices as “memória usb” or “memorias USB”, the French seem to like “USB flash”, and most commonly used by native English speaking customers seem to be the terms “USB flash drive” or “USB flash memory drive”. Technically minded people are more likely to connect the term they use with a functionality of the device or the hardware used. USB flash memory seems to be the technically more exact expression - it does actually describe the type of memory used inside the “USB Stick”, NAND flash memory. NAND flash memory is a nonvolatile solid state memory. Nonvolatile memory can hold and store data also when power is turned off or is not available. We all know that a key is used to open locks, so not surprisingly “key” is also an important term in cryptography and encryption. Key-based encryption is the very center concept of today’s modern data security, both for symmetric and public-key encryption. Thus a USB key (or sometimes also referred to as a USB token) can actually contain the (password protected) key needed to access certain information or log into a system. This is often used in connection with hardware-encryption by e.g banks or companies who need to achieve a high grade of security and user authentication. Once this function requires access to network, e.g as to authenticate connection to a remote SSH or web-server, the device would become, as commonly referred to, a USB webtoken). Various banks hand out such USB webkeys or tokens to their customers in order for them to safely practice secure internet banking. Due to the wide acceptance of the USB standard and common access to internet such devices have a wide area of practical appliances, both for promotional, scientific, corporate surrounding and with a high level of content control, full user logging ability and low-cost implementation of two-factor authentication. Do you trust in the security model of your ATM card? Your ATM card uses a basic form of two-factor authentication. You need the password AND your debit card to cash out that money. With USB keys or webkeys it is possible to make low costs implementations of relative secure two-factor authentication without the costs and expenses of hardware base encryption.
Trackback(0)
 |
TrackBack URI for this entry
Subscribe to this comment's feed