Apple 'Safe Deposit Box' Patent Revealed Ahead of Mac OS X Lion

LOL

It's a good thing you found this, the "iPad 3 has retina display" thread was making this site look amateurish... and there are lots of comments left by users to back that claim up.

Back to this story however, it's about time Apple brings this function in, I remember looking for this in panther.

Anyways, nice find as this will almost assuredly be introduced during the keynote.

Very cool. Could see myself using it alongside Time Machine.

I like the idea of a virtual safebox, but my main concern is that if it backs up to a cloud what are the chances your files can be compromised if Apple's cloud is hacked?

Essentially it's a cloud encrypted disk image. Wonderful.... one more place for users to use "password1234" to "secure" their personal data.

John Gruber did hint about Lion's "Dropbox killer" back in the Fall.

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/10/20/blanc-cloud

One of the "new" features of Lion is the "Launchpad".

Those of us old enough will realize that Apple had something very similar a loooong time ago in System 7 that they killed with Mac OS 8: The Launcher



Please tell me I'm not the only one who remembers that

Finally, a place to store the porn!

Dare I assume 2 things with this.

Anything, and I mean anything no matter how illegal could be stored here and no-one other than you could ever access it via some secret back door?

There would be some major insurance/compensation in place in case Apple's system ever lost your data?

anubis said:

One of the "new" features of Lion is the "Launchpad".

Those of us old enough will realize that Apple had something very similar a loooong time ago in System 7 that they killed with Mac OS 8: The Launcher

Please tell me I'm not the only one who remembers that

Click to expand...

LOL - yes! I posted a picture of the launcher on a thread a while ago too. I didn't like it. I tried it and quickly gave it up.

another patented Apple patent on junk that has already been developed and employed. Way to go that extra mile and be innovative, Apple.


Apple - "We used to be innovated until we focused our time on selling iStuff as there is more money to be made."

At this time, Lion doesn't sound very exciting... Well I'm sure this has time to change until this summer, but even Snow Leopard didn't gain any features during that one year after its announcement...

...

they have needed at least the ability to password protect individual files for a long time. The work around of creating a protected dmg was a huge pain if we are talking very large file sizes that you want to modify on a regular basis

Sounds awesome.

The integration is going to be tighter than ever.

All they need is an insurance option that automatically decrypts the files and emails them to a list of users in the event of your death. You would use a non government key escrow system with the key in a different country to make it much harder for legal action to open the files while you are alive.

I don't think the US government could block the release ahead of time due to prior restraint. I can just picture the court order, "Do not release these files of unknown name and content to a list of unknown people."

newdeal said:

they have needed at least the ability to password protect individual files for a long time. The work around of creating a protected dmg was a huge pain if we are talking very large file sizes that you want to modify on a regular basis

Click to expand...

256 bit elliptic curve encryption. I don't think that will be breakable anytime in the next few hundred years. Go with 512 and you can add a few million to that number.


Edit: Sorry, I misread your post. You were talking about the ability to encrypt individual files vs an encrypted volume. I would never use this option as it would provide too many clues to content by file size.

If this does come true though how much space would we get? Also would it be a selling point of MobileMe?
May be what Apples new data farm is for I suppose.

Merthyrboy said:

If this does come true though how much space would we get? Also would it be a selling point of MobileMe?

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If you are taking about storing legal documents, 1MB would be plenty for any person. I would think 100 meg would work well. People or corporations that need more could pay for an upgrade.

baryon said:

At this time, Lion doesn't sound very exciting... Well I'm sure this has time to change until this summer, but even Snow Leopard didn't gain any features during that one year after its announcement...

Click to expand...

The best feature of Snow Leopard was it's lack of features. They put all the effort of a major release into stability and reliably upgrades. I would like to see more companies get away from feature creep and move to quality creep.

Not sure if you would really want important documents like that to go into the cloud...

RalfTheDog said:

If you are taking about storing legal documents, 1MB would be plenty for any person. I would think 100 meg would work well. People or corporations that need more could pay for an upgrade.

Click to expand...

With 100meg would be able to get some powerpoints stored as well. Seems quite a handy feature to have.

baryon said:

At this time, Lion doesn't sound very exciting... Well I'm sure this has time to change until this summer, but even Snow Leopard didn't gain any features during that one year after its announcement...

Click to expand...

Snow Leopard wasn't supposed to have new features. It did end up getting a new version of Expose though.

Jobs said Lion had "tons of new user features" at the Mac Special Event in October. Sounds like this release will be more in line with 10.5 Leopard.

vincenz said:

Not sure if you would really want important documents like that to go into the cloud...

Click to expand...

I see no problem with keeping backups of important documents on the cloud. Just use very good encryption. Encrypt the file using TrueCrypt or PGP, then put Apples Encryption on top of that.

anubis said:

One of the "new" features of Lion is the "Launchpad".

Those of us old enough will realize that Apple had something very similar a loooong time ago in System 7 that they killed with Mac OS 8: The Launcher

Please tell me I'm not the only one who remembers that

Click to expand...

You're not the only one. I had this back on my AIO Performa 577 and also my Performa 636CD, but I dont think I actually ever used it. I think it was later on (OS 8?) that I started using FinderPop on my TurboMouse (trackball), one right click and all my regular apps were there to be selected.

Maby it will be included when u buy a time machine, or even mobile me because they do simmilar things (if the files are stored outside the comp and they are) and personally it looks Like it's basically backing it up.

It's perfect for my iTunes library, important docs, naughy pics, etc...

LOL

Could it replace 1Password for us, end-users?